Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege and an honour to get up to speak today as the member for the riding of Prince Albert. When I look at the things we would like to accomplish as a members of Parliament and what our constituents want us to accomplish, I can see that this bill is one that does both. The change to the Canadian Wheat Board is one that both I and my constituents want to see happen.
We have heard a lot of talk today about the Canadian Wheat Board and what is going on. The Liberal members would have us believe that the Canadian Wheat Board would be totally disbanded, everyone would be thrown out of work, and the Wheat Board would not exist. That is not true.
What is happening is that the Wheat Board is being transitioned to a functioning entity that farmers want. Farmers who want to participate in it will be able to and will have the option to participate in it; farmers who do not want to will have that option also. It is the same right and privilege that farmers right across Canada have, and farmers in the designated area will now also have the same right and privilege.
This has been a very divisive debate for the last 40 years. There have not been any new arguments brought to the table in the last three weeks or six months or year that would change a member's mind or change a constituent's or farmer's mind on where they sit on this debate. Everyone has their ideology when it comes to this debate. Everyone has their reason for believing what they believe.
It is interesting that when we look back at the history of this file, we see a report from the Canadian Wheat Board, paid for by the Canadian Wheat Board, saying that it extracts premium. Then we can also go back and see a report by the George Morris Centre saying that there is no premium. Those types of arguments have been going on and on in the Prairies for probably the last 40 years.
However, one argument that cannot be fought against is freedom. We cannot fight against the right to our property. We cannot tell people that we are going to take what is theirs and make it ours. That is improper. That is not right.
People can argue all sorts of reasons on why they want collective marketing. They can argue all sorts of reasons on why they want the CWB. Those options are there, but it is farmers' hard work that creates that crop. It is their hard work that will make that wheat and barley grow, and they should be able to receive the rewards for their hard work.
I do not want to forget to mention, Mr. Speaker, that I will be sharing my time with the member for Portage—Lisgar.
Through this last summer, the CWB knew exactly what was going on. It knew the transition was going to happen. It had all the tools in front of it to go forward and it decided not to. The board, instead of working with farmers, the government, accredited exporters, and their customers, decided to do the opposite: to become a bunch of political agents and work for the NDP and the Liberal Party. It decided to do that with farmers' money. It took farmers' money without asking and started a campaign. It was not so much for what it believed in--it is just its own ideology that it believes in--and it did not represent farmers.
The CWB could have gone out this summer and sold wheat and barley over the next four or five years, but instead it did a plebiscite. It identified voters, people who would support the CWB. Why did it not go and ask those farmers to sign up acres? Why did it not go to them to say that if they supported the single desk and the concept of pooling their product with the Canadian Wheat Board, it was still able to do that. It could actually have moved forward, taken the farmers' acres and marketed them on their behalf at pooled prices. The Canadian Wheat Board could have set up a program to do that, but it did not.
It is interesting that when I talk to different accredited exporters who have been through the House of Commons, there is concern on their side too. They are looking for an entity to work with to source grain on the Prairies. Again, they are familiar with the Canadian Wheat Board and familiar with the staff there. The directors just had to give the staff the green light to go ahead. Did they do that? No, they engaged in a political debate. They engaged in their own self-preservation, their own ideology.
Actually, that is why they needed to be removed and a transition board needed to come forward. It was not only to protect the employees of the Canadian Wheat Board, who are good, hard-working people, but also to protect the farmers who wanted to use this chance of pooling and wanted to use this entity to market their wheat.
It is going to be interesting as we look forward to this new CWB and what it can become. There are no shackles on it. It can actually do what it wants to do. The farmers who support it can actually lead that organization to where they want it to go. If they want to handle pulses and can find a market where they can tie pulses into some wheat and barley, they can do that. If they want to handle canola, they can do that. If they want to handle oats, or wheat and barley out of Ontario or Quebec, they can do that. They have the ability to take the organization where they feel it needs to go.
That is something that farmers have never had with the Canadian Wheat Board. That is something that has never been represented in the way the CWB operates and runs.
Many times in the Prairies we have seen value-added entities come up. A good example was the Weyburn Inland Terminal's pasta plant. Here was a group of farmers who wanted to build a pasta plant. They got together, raised the funds and found the market for the pasta. They had everything to rock and roll and were ready to go, but the CWB stepped in and said no.
The CWB is not there for itself; it is there for farmers. That is its main goal. It is a tool to be used by farmers. However, in this situation the CWB refused to adapt their tool to allow farmers to use it properly. Instead of farmers being able to appreciate the CWB, work with the board and figure out a way around it so that the pasta plant could go forward, the CWB said no.
That has been a problem in how the CWB has operated in past history. It was never there necessarily to work for farmers, but to protect its own single desk ideology. It never worked with guys who wanted to proceed with niche markets or other opportunities. The CWB would say that would do buy-back options and would look at other options for farmers to buy back the product, but it always made it either a hurdle or impossible.
There is another interesting thing about the buy-backs. A few farmers who went through the process talked to me about it. They found their own market and did the buy-back. On the buy-back form they actually had to name who they were selling their wheat to. They would put, in good faith, the name of the company they were selling their wheat to across the line or overseas; the next week, they would get a phone call from their customers telling them that the CWB had gone in and undercut them.
One wonders how hard the organization was actively searching for markets for farmers' grain, or whether the CWB was just a little comfortable in how it went about doing it.
The changes in the legislation that I think would be positive for the Prairies and for farmers as a whole are that they would have a variety of options in marketing a product.
We heard people complain a lot on the level of railway service. If we want competition for the railways, the best competition is value-added. The best competition is not to use the railways, but to process the grain there and then and create a product that does not necessarily have to go in a hopper car. That is the best way to get competition for the railways, and that would happen on the Prairies. That was not allowed to happen, and could not happen, on the Prairies in the past. However, now we can look across the line at the malt plant or at the Alix malt plant in Alberta that is going through an expansion.
I look forward to those types of opportunities coming forward to our producers, as well as the opportunity for the barley growers who want to ship four or five containers of barley to Indonesia. In today's day and age, it is not a big deal. It is not the 1940s or 1930s, when we had telecommunication and travel issues. People hop on planes daily now. They talk across the waters all the time. People watch the Chicago grain markets daily. It is not the big issue that it was in the past.
I will sum up with some of the things that I have seen happen around here.
I am very optimistic for the future of wheat and barley farmers. I am very optimistic for farmers in general, and for their future. I am more optimistic now, I have to say, then I have ever been in my farming or political career.
We would not have got here without the help of a lot of great individuals. A lot of people fought in the trenches on this file. A lot of farmers put their own blood, sweat and tears into this file. There are farmers who went to jail to have the right to sell their own product. My hat goes off to those farmers, and I thank them. They kept the torch alive and they did not do it for themselves, but for their kids and the whole industry. They actually had the ambition and drive to think that they could do better.
Again, I take my hat off to these guys and thank them for being there and doing that job. The guys who went to jail made an ultimate sacrifice in giving up their time with their wives and families and going through the court system. I remember driving down to Lethbridge to watch one of the court proceedings and talking to a few of the guys. My buddy, Rick Strankman, took me down there. He said: “Hoback, you've got to see these guys. They're pure, and pure through”.
They were not doing it because they were greedy. They were not doing it for any reason other than they thought it was the best thing for the market, for farmers and for their families, and they should have the right to market their grain as they see fit.
That is what we are going to do here today. We are going to create a new entity, and how this entity moves forward will be decided by farmers. It will go through a transition board and then a transition period to rediscover itself. At the end of the day, the whole farm sector will be the stronger for it, and at the end of the day, a lot of constituents will say that this debate on whether to have a single desk is finally over.
Again, I would like to thank the minister and my colleagues. I encourage the members of the opposition to work with us as we move forward in agriculture in western Canada.