Mr. Speaker, the closure of the Chinese market to Canadian canola seed has been a major blow to Saskatchewan's economy.
I am proud to have been the only member of the House to have risen in March to ask the government a question specifically about canola. On March 22, I asked what actions the government was taking to reopen the Chinese market and to support our canola farmers until this was rectified.
On the point of supporting our canola farmers, I would note that the Saskatchewan government has since called on the federal government to expand the advance payment program to provide loans of up to a million dollars, interest-free, while this crisis persists.
At the international trade committee meeting last Tuesday, I asked the Minister of Agriculture whether the federal government was prepared to make that enhancement to the advance payment program. Her response was essentially that the government had a working group that would meet to consider options this past Thursday.
That meeting has come and gone, and we still do not have a clear idea of what the federal government plans to do to support our farmers during this crisis. Farmers need to make decisions about what to plant and how to manage their operations. Of course, those decisions would be informed by information about what the government planned to do, whether it would be to increase the loan amounts available under the advance payment program, whether it would be to change or, hopefully, eliminate the interest due on those loans or whether the response would be through some other program.
The second part of my question had to do with reopening the Chinese market. On this point, there has been a bit of debate between the opposition pushing for the government to escalate things to a higher diplomatic level and the government trying to deal with it as more of a technical issue, without escalating it into a bigger diplomatic fight.
Without weighing in to that bigger diplomatic question, we did hear some optimistic things at the trade committee. One of them was that China would have a great deal of difficulty replacing the quantity and quality of canola that it received from Canada from other suppliers. That suggests to me that there is a good possibility of getting the Chinese market reopened.
The second reason for optimism is that Canada can try to develop some alternative markets for canola. We would be hard-pressed to really replace the Chinese market, but I would like to reiterate the call for the government to do everything that it can do to open other markets.
A final optimistic note is that while canola seed has been excluded from the Chinese market, exports of canola oil really have not been affected. It is a sealed product. It is really not subject to the same sort of phytosanitary objections.
There are many reasons to expand Canada's canola processing capacity, mostly to add to our economy and to create jobs in that processing sector. However, this latest trade dispute with China really underscores another reason to continue investing in canola processing. The finished product, the oil, is much less vulnerable to these diplomatically motivated phytosanitary types of concerns.
I am wondering if the government will take action on these fronts.