Mr. Speaker, it is always a joy to the listen to the parliamentary secretary. It is like Aesop's Fables most of the time.
If he is asking if New Democrats have failed farmers, we actually listen to farmers. It was the government over there that did not listen to farmers. Nearly all farmers were saying over and over again that there needed to be amendments to this bill. What did the government do? It came back with a couple of tiny lines in the area that farmers wanted changes, under what it has now termed “farmers' privilege”. The government came back with a tiny clarification that did not meet what farmers had been asking for.
If anybody has failed farmers, it is the government. That is who has failed farmers. Ultimately what could happen, and what I think what will probably happen, is that the royalty system is going to change in this country as soon as this becomes law. When seed companies move in, they will decide if they are going to have end-point royalties, graduated ones, cascading ones, or whether they are going to be at the beginning, and farmers are going to be the poorer for it at the end of the day. Oddly enough, a Conservative government that says it believes in and preaches competition is more than likely going to take competition out of the system, and the only ones who will be affected are farmers.
Farmers are affected by competition and a lack thereof, and when there is a lack of competition in the seed business, it is the farmers who will pay. The government will have failed those farmers. Conservatives should hang their heads in shame. That is what they ought to do.