Dale Johnston

[International Transfer of Offenders Act, February 24th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, Conservative members here tonight will vote no on this motion.

[Agriculture, February 18th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, since BSE was detected in one Alberta cow nearly a year ago, life for everyone connected with the cattle industry has been turned upside down in Canada.

While the government has been bogged down with scandals, tax paying cattle producers are struggling to stave off bankruptcy. This crisis is having a devastating effect in communities across the country.

In my constituency the loss of revenue from cattle sales has dealt a crippling blow to local businesses. Sales of farm machinery are off by 50% or more, and retail outlets, from grocery stores to record shops, are reeling from staggering losses of revenue.

After 87 years, the Ponoka Co-op was forced to close its doors two weeks ago and lay off its 40 employees.

The players across the way may have changed, but it is the same old approach. Why would they ignore a $30 billion industry that provides nearly a quarter of a million jobs in this country.

If the government continues to neglect the people whose livelihoods are dependent upon agriculture, it will do so at its peril.

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, February 17th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservative caucus will vote no on this motion.

[Radiocommunication Act, February 17th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservative members present here today will vote no to this motion.

[Petitions, February 17th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I also have a petition from the rural route mail cariers which calls upon the Government of Canada to repeal section 13.5 of the Canada Post Corporation Act, the part that forbids rural route mail cariers from having collective bargaining rights.

[Petitions, February 17th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I have a petition with in excess of 500 signatures, all from Albertans and mostly from my riding. The petitioners call upon Parliament to pass legislation to recognize the institution of marriage in federal law as being a lifelong union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others.

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, February 16th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, it is actually a very good point. I know that the Prime Minister has said he feels that the western alienation is real. Unlike the previous prime minister, who did not think it really existed, this Prime Minister at least has acknowledged that the western alienation is a problem. He has said he will do something about it, but I think he got off to a very bad start by neglecting to be upfront and proactive about agriculture.

As my colleague from Peterborough said, the opening of that 49th parallel to get the cattle flowing back and forth, particularly live cattle going south, is of utmost importance.

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, February 16th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I certainly do recognize the amount of cattle that there are in Ontario. At the heyday of our cattle producing in Alberta, we shipped a lot of feeder cattle by train to Ontario feeders, but I did preface my remarks by saying that I would be speaking specifically about my riding.

I want to answer my colleague's question directly. What do I think is necessary? I think we need to convince the Americans that any restrictions they place on us will be restrictions that they are really placing on themselves. We need to convince them that we have to look at the continental market. The 49th parallel, for the purposes of cattle, should be erased. We need the slaughterhouses in the United States.

From the time we start to put the shovel in the ground to the time we actually get the coolers running might be a year and a half. By the time we build a slaughterhouse in a year and a half, I certainly hope that the border would be open. By that time we would be shipping live animals to be killed in the United States, where they really need the beef. The price of beef has gone through the roof in the supermarkets in the United States. If the Americans could take our beef, it would put a little pressure on their retail price and give the consumers a break. The slaughterhouses need to be investigated, I think, to see whether or not they are coming up with a decent markup or are actually guilty of gouging the producers.

The primary thing we need to do is build a good rapport with the United States government and convince it that America needs our beef as much as we need that border open.

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, February 16th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, when we speak to the Speech from the Throne, traditionally we like to talk about our constituencies and how the Speech from the Throne, which is the government's plan for the future, will affect our constituencies.

Over the weekend I was acclaimed as the candidate for the Conservative Party in my riding of Wetaskiwin, and I would like to thank my board of directors and the candidate nomination committee for all the work they have done. I look forward to representing them for another term.

My constituency of Wetaskiwin has a lot of petrochemical industry. There is every aspect of it, including exploration, a seismograph, drilling, production, the refinery and the shipment. We even have some substantial value added product whereby different products are made out of ethane and those products are shipped all over the world. Some of the largest ethane producers in the world are situated in my riding. This augments the work in our constituency and adds to employment and so forth.

The backbone of our community has been and always will be agriculture. Even after the petrochemical industry has been replaced by some other technology, agriculture will remain the backbone of our community.

My constituency is situated between Edmonton and Red Deer and is ideally suited for agricultural production, but not for agricultural export, and that is too bad. All of this is extremely important to me because agriculture drives the economy in my constituency, yet it has not even rated a mention in the throne speech. I find that appalling and absolutely unpardonable.

Producers in my area have suffered through three years of drought and have had a tremendously difficult time making ends meet. Their natural gas, chemical, fertilizer and fuel costs have increased. Their input costs are going up all the time. The price they get for their product has been going down ever since the discovery last May of one cow in Alberta with BSE. The largest problem in western Canada today did not rate a mention in the Speech from the Throne. I cannot understand that.

Probably it is just as well because we have heard that tradition is a very important thing in the Liberal Party. The Liberals bring in a Speech from the Throne and then follow through with or carry out only 23% of their promises or directions. It is probably just as well that western Canadians did not get their hopes up thinking that maybe the government would do something for them because actually it would do nothing for them.

For months people have been coming to my constituency office asking for the culled cattle slaughter forms. I do not have any idea where those forms are. We keep contacting the department, but those forms are not available to us.

In October I wrote to the then minister of agriculture and the then minister of finance about our situation. As a result of the drought and because of a lack of feed, people started to sell off their breeding stock for whatever they could get rather then starve their animals. They had about four or five years worth of income. They sold their breeding stock, their calve and their yearlings all at once. As a result, they had a large chunk of income that they would have to declare in one year and probably pay out half of it in income tax.

In the first year, government said it would defer part of that payment. Part of that could be deferred into next year's income. In October of this year, I think it was, I wrote to the Minister of Agriculture and the Minister of Finance to ask if they would extend that deferral so that producers could lessen their hit from Revenue Canada, because now their herds are gone and eventually they are going to have to buy them back. If they paid out all that tax money, they simply would not have the revenue, the wherewithal, to buy back the herd when the rains did come again.

Do you know, Mr. Speaker, when the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Finance announced that the program would be extended? It was on December 19, when there were five more business days in the year. They waited until everyone had made decisions, decisions that they did not have to make. They bought cattle to try to defray some of their taxes.

None of that was necessary. None of that was necessary, because this government has placed a low priority on the agricultural sector. I cannot imagine anybody in western Canada involved in the agricultural business seriously considering supporting the Liberal Party in the future.

The government does not have a plan to deal with the cull cows. To start with, the government said we had to have a slaughter ticket in order to pick up the subsidy on the cull cows. Because there was no program available, because the cull cows were worth only $40 a head or something, the producers asked, “What are our options?” Their option was to turn those cull cows back out with the bull and hope they were impregnated; then maybe they could get a calf out of them and by that time maybe the border would be open. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Now that has exacerbated the problem. We are going to have more calves born this year from cows that should have been knocked on the head and made into hamburger. It is going to make a bad problem even worse.

It was not addressed. I pointed out the problem to the Minister of Agriculture. I pointed it out to the Minister of Finance. I asked them if they could make a decision on this. They dragged their feet. At the last possible minute, after it was too late, when every producer had already made decisions that were irreversible, then and only then did they decide yes, by golly, farmers could roll some of that income into 2004.

There is more bad news. As if things are not bad enough, cattle receipts for the third quarter of 2003 fell by nearly 75% over the same period in 2002. What are those people supposed to do? Are they supposed to live on 25% of their income? In the early part of last year before we made the discovery of BSE in that Alberta cow, Alberta producers had strong export sales: nearly $160 million worth of cattle per month went out of Alberta into export markets.

This is a $30 billion industry that provides nearly a quarter of a million jobs in this country and yet the Prime Minister and the finance minister continue to ignore this industry. I cannot understand that. I think they ignore it at their peril.

Last week, the federal agriculture department warned that Alberta farmers could expect a 57% decline in their 2003 income compared with that of previous years. Both of the previous years were drought years and yet we are expected to suffer another 57% decline in our receipts.

This has a large spinoff in our community. When I was a kid, one of my first jobs was delivering groceries and stocking shelves in a Co-op store in Ponoka. That Co-op store has been in business for 87 years. Two weeks ago, it closed its doors forever. That gives us an idea of what the agricultural industry is going through in my area.

This is a devastating problem. So far we have not seen any movement on the part of the government to address it.

I appreciate this opportunity.

[Final Offer Arbitration in Respect of West Coast Ports Operations Act, February 16th, 2004]

Madam Speaker, I listened to my colleagues talk about the bill. It is too bad they did not read it through and listen to what I and my colleague from Kootenay--Boundary--Okanagan had to say about it.

The fact of the matter is the bill is very specific to the west coast ports, and in my opinion it is something that would expedite the settlement of disputes. It is a dispute settlement mechanism, just like collective bargaining is. When used to its utmost and finality, the final offer selection actually causes both parties to put their final offer on the table, which may in some cases even overlap. They may discover that they can arrive at a settlement, and the job of the arbitrator is very simple. The arbitrator simply looks at it and awards both positions.

It has been alleged that this creates winners and losers. I do not think so. A strike situation is far more likely to create a win or lose situation than final offer selection. As well, a lockout is a traumatic thing for all people involved. Not only does it lock the workers out and they have to go on minimal pay and worry about how they will make their payments and so forth, but it also shuts down the industry's ability to do business. Besides all of that, the person who is left out of this whole equation, or seems to be forgotten in the debate today, is the western Canadian farmer.

I disagree with my friend from Palliser who says that this would be a very low priority for western Canadian farmers. A lot of areas of the prairies did not dry out. Large areas in central Alberta and Saskatchewan certainly dried out, but other areas had pretty reasonable crops, the Peace River country being one of them. Southern Alberta had half decent crops as well. Now it is necessary to get that grain to market

Cattle prices are also affecting the movement of grain. It is not profitable to feed cattle now, so farmers and feedlot owners are finding different methods to feed cattle other than giving them barley. Barley is a little more expensive so we would like to see it shipped to the west coast ports.

With what I have heard today, I am afraid that the House will vote against the bill, and in my opinion that is a vote against the western Canadian grain farmer. At a time when they already have all kinds of problems with the weather and with their markets, they do not need any more interference by the House of Commons.

I think we are passing up a great opportunity to put in place another bargaining tool that is going to reach an amicable settlement without the need for stopping the work or services.

I am pleased to present the bill to the House today and I would urge all members to consider supporting it. Even though I have heard from all parties that they do not intend to support this, I do hope, since this is a free vote, that there will be individuals in the parties who will support it.