Mr. Speaker, I did not expect to be speaking to the issue of pork in Manitoba, but I cannot help myself in responding to the hon. parliamentary secretary. The history there is fascinating. We should learn the lessons.
It was Pierre Trudeau who killed the Crow rate, which made it harder for prairie farmers to ship out their grain. That led to a glut of grain on the Prairies, which meant asking, “What do we do with all of this grain?” They put it in mega hog barns, with thousands of sows in the same barn, and fed them the grain, because if they could not ship the grain out, they could ship the hogs out.
Where did they go? They are not local food security for Manitoba. Only 10% are consumed in Canada. Most are shipped out. Millions of live pigs are shipped to the United States, bringing us back to the same argument we are making here. They are not processed in Canada. Live pigs are sent to Iowa, where they are fattened up, fed lots of drugs and slaughtered. Meanwhile, the hog barns have so contaminated Lake Winnipeg that it is dying.