Mr. Speaker, I am looking at page 98 in the budget book which is supposed to be the place where there is something comprehensive on agriculture.
I just cannot understand it. How can this parliamentary secretary, this member for the rural riding of Macleod, this former farm leader, stand in his place and support this budget that does not have one new dime in it for farmers who are in tragedy in this country?
We are losing the hog producing industry. The industry is going down the tubes and production is being replaced by American production. There is nothing in this budget for hog producers.
There is nothing in this budget for the potato producers in Prince Edward Island and Manitoba who had their processing contracts cut.
There is a wee bit of money in here for beef farmers, but it is not the proposal that the beef processing industry and the producers asked for which would be a per head payment to deal with the uncompetitive position we are in as the result of SRM removal.
Worse yet, the money that is announced in this budget to deal with that problem in a half-mannered way comes from AgriFlexibility. So that money that is going to go to the SRM removal, to the processing plant, actually comes out of current funding for Agriculture Canada through AgriFlexibility and in fact is goring other farmers in the process.
My question is simple. Does the government just not care about farmers in this country? Will the parliamentary secretary now admit that there is absolutely nothing—