Jake Hoeppner

[Canadian Wheat Board Act, June 10th, 1998]

Deloitte & Touche legs eggs and we know what happened to what lays golden eggs. Who killed it? Who killed the goose?

Deloitte & Touche is a tremendous firm. Nobody said that Deloitte & Touche was not doing its job, but it can only audit what it is given to audit. I would like to ask the hon. member why, if Deloitte & Touche has done such a tremendous job, the trading activities under the commodity exchanges were not listed in that report? Why are they not in the report? For years the Canadian Wheat Board has denied that it uses commodity exchanges. I can show all sorts of records. There is no gambling or speculating. That is too bad.

All of a sudden we hear testimony before the Senate hearings saying that it is the biggest player on the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. It plays as much as we can. It will not allow farmers to do it. Why is that not recorded in its accounts?

I wrote the commissioner a letter asking for the annual statement of the trading activities of the wheat board. I also asked the minister for it. I have not received it yet. I would like to see it. There are all kinds of speculation that things are not quite on the level. The problem is that the suspicion is there and farmers will not deal with suspicion any more. They want facts and guarantees because they are not making enough money from wheat board grains.

I have another little story about the last couple of months. Farmers have been thrown in jail for exporting grain without export permits. Suddenly last winter I got complaints left and right that the Canadian grain companies were buying and milling wheat as off board feed wheat and that it was disappearing. I said that I could not do anything, that I needed facts, figures and documents. One farmer came forward with documents in black and white. There was a dollar a bushel premium for off board feed wheat compared with ordinary off board feed wheat.

I said that was illegal. That was not just breaking the wheat board act but the Canadian Grain Commission Act. It cannot distort grains. It has to pay the price at which it is graded. I said “Now I have something”. Then I got a phone call from a farmer who said “Jake, please don't use the information”. I asked him why. I told him that we could tackle the problem. He said “I don't know what my neighbours are going to do to me. They will burn me out”.

I took it to the assistant commissioner of the RCMP whom I had contracted as a consultant and asked what I should do with it. I told him the guy did not want to give me the information to use and asked what I should do. He said that I had information to start a criminal prosecution and then they would have to look at it.

What should I do? This is what grain companies are doing and what farmers are being thrown in jail for. That is something. That is the problem we have in our economy today. It is wrong if you do it and right if I do it. That is why the country is in such terrible shape.

White collar crime in organizations is unbelievable as are the tax dollars we lose in government. Nobody is willing to do something about it. We are all covering our own butts so we do not have to do something about it.

That system has to change or we will go the same route as the former Soviet Union and the other countries that have done it. Let us look at what has happened in the Philippines, Indonesia and other countries where white collar has taken over the economy.

If we want that in our country we can sit quiet, do nothing and let things be. That is not why I was sent to the House. I was sent to the House to keep the laws and to make sure they were enforced.

When I see things going on today in the business world it astounds me that we are still running as a country because that is not the basis on which the country was built. The country was built on honesty, integrity and hard work. Today it is a matter of how we do business and in what fashion we can rip off the next guy for the most dollars. That is not my idea of a true economy. I will fight tooth and nail to get rid of it because my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have to pay for it some day. I do not want to be held accountable for it.

If that is not a warning I do not know what else I can do to warn the House. I have done what I thought was right. When I get a phone call in the middle of the night telling me I will be dead in half an hour, I get fed up. The RCMP cannot touch it.

What is going on? I am not fooling when I say I will get to the bottom of it one way or another. Those type of phone calls are not made by drunks. Those type of phone calls are made by people who want to intimidate and destroy. I ain't going to leave this place on that basis. They will have to put a bullet in me before I will leave. I hope they take that seriously because I am finished yet. I hope the minister understands that.

Thank you and God bless during the holidays.

[Canadian Wheat Board Act, June 10th, 1998]

If the member does not want to believe it, he can talk to every farmer from the Ontario-Manitoba border to British Columbia. They will tell him that they will need more funds. They cannot make ends meet. If we do not do something to increase the prices of grain or the income of farmers, the government will have a catastrophe on its hands like it has never seen before. Why not let them market their grain if they can get a better price?

I am astounded that as politicians we cannot listen to people when they tell us what is wrong. We have been across western Canada twice listening to the farmers. The Senate has been across western Canada. The farmers want a choice. I can guarantee the House that if it were a voluntary wheat board and there was trust in the wheat board it would market more wheat board grains than it would probably market special crops grains. It has been proven in other areas. They do not have accountability or trust. They do not want to listen to what farmers tell them.

If the wheat board did the job like it is claiming to do, it should have absolutely no objection to the auditor general looking at the books.

If there is nothing to hide why are we fighting tooth and nail to allow the auditor general to audit the books? To me there is something wrong. If Revenue Canada does not trust me it can audit my books. Since I started criticizing the wheat board and demanding accountability I have not had a five year audit but an audit every year. Is that not strange? All my life I was never audited until I started objecting to the practices of the Canadian Wheat Board. Tell me what is the problem.

If Revenue Canada found out that I had violated the law I would expect it to prosecute. Is that why the wheat board is hesitant to allow anybody to look into its books? If it is honest and if its books are in order it should have no problem with them being audited.

[Canadian Wheat Board Act, June 10th, 1998]

Whatever that means. I was prepared and I have sunk thousands of dollars into it to get the truth out of that court case. We are still battling over trying to get it before a judge so he can decide what the facts are. It is to be appealed again, and the minister knows it. That stubborn farmer from western Canada does not give up so easy. He wants the truth. Farmers want the truth.

I heard the member for Malpeque say that the farmers were playing into the hands of the major grain companies, those bad rascals, those wolves or whatever they are. I have grown special crops since 1957. I do not know for what reason but these terrible grain companies, these terrible special crops industries. have always made me more money than wheat board grains. If I had not grown the special crops I would have been bankrupt in the first 10 years. If these terrible grain companies are that miserable toward farmers, why are they getting more instead of less acres every year? Why are they selling a bigger portion of western Canadian farmers' products than they ever have before?

If we look at the price of canola today when we grew record acres last year, it is still close to $9 a bushel. What would people on the other side do if we did not have special crops? They would be sending out subsidies to no end if they wanted to keep the farmers on the land. They should realize that.

I just talked to the minister a few minutes ago to see whether he received the phone call I received yesterday. About 10 o'clock when I was waiting to debate in the House the phone rang and it was a gentleman from the States. According to the wheat board minister the call was probably from Pennsylvania.

The caller needed three truckloads of organic white, hard wheat. He said he had to have it because that wheat was not available in Montana or Washington. When it comes into production it is not the quality of wheat that we grow in Saskatchewan and Alberta. He could not get it because the producer would not go to the wheat board for an export permit because it wants an extra 70 cents to $1 a bushel to put in the pool, and it does absolutely nothing with it. He is fed up with this malarkey. The wheat board will not buy it, move it or market it, but it wants a $1 a bushel for saying it is the wheat board. Does that make any sense? It does not make sense at all.

We are taking money out of the western economy, money that could be coming in.

[Canadian Wheat Board Act, June 10th, 1998]

The court case has been settled. The appeal board had ruled that the Canadian Wheat Board had no mandate to sell grain for the best price. The only mandate it had was to orderly market my grain.

[Canadian Wheat Board Act, June 10th, 1998]

I am wrong. What was the difference? That was the way the press reported it. The motion to support the wheat board never got on the floor for debate because it would be too divisive in western Canada.

After the election we saw what happened. I was surprised this evening when the member for Malpeque started speaking. He made the comment that the government had held extensive hearings. I thought that tonight we were finally going to hear something good from the member for Malpeque. I thought we would get kernels of truth and facts, but that is where it stopped. The next thing he talked about was maximizing the profits. That kernel of truth turned into ergots. Does anyone know what this is? We call it smut in the grain industry. That is the way the speech went from top to bottom. The kernel of truth turned into smut.

I will tell the House exactly why. It was the maximization of profits. I do not have to tell the gentlemen on the other side that when we held hearings I wanted the chief commissioner of the Canadian Wheat Board to explain to us what his mandate was. I was shut down. I was told I was out of order.

[Canadian Wheat Board Act, June 10th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I am astounded at the amount of publicity I am getting here tonight. There is a demand for me to speak. I thought I had said everything the other day but I will oblige them and make a few remarks on the amendments.

I hope the press is incorrect on some of the rumours that I have been reading lately. I know we have no western Canadian wheat farmers on the Liberal benches but we still have the wheat board minister at least from the west. I hear rumours now that he is to be moved to a different portfolio. I surely to God hope they will not do that because we will miss him on the flight back to Ottawa. We like to meet and greet each other sometimes even when we are on conflicting sides.

I want to make clear, and I want to be corrected on it if I am wrong, the position of the Liberals on the Canadian Wheat Board. Just before the last election in Manitoba they organized a committee to save the wheat board. I attended this meeting and later a rally was held in front of the wheat board buildings. I saw at least five Liberal MPs standing on the platform and saying they were the protectors of the Canadian Wheat Board and that they would save single desk selling.

When the Liberal convention was held just prior to the election the workshops brought out different resolutions to put on the floor. One was brought forward by the former MP from Dauphin—Swan River, Marlene Cowling, a very well respected lady in the agriculture community. She proposed a resolution that they support very strongly the maintenance of single desk selling in the wheat board.

Another resolution was brought forward on behalf of agriculture that stated we should legalize the growing of hemp. There was only one resolution allowed on the floor for debate. Which one did the Liberal government supported? It was the one for legalizing the growing of hemp. Where did its commitment to the Canadian Wheat Board evaporate to? Am I wrong? Is that what happened?

[Royal Canadian Mounted Police, June 9th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, RCMP agent John McKay was murdered earlier this year on a road near his home in Erickson, Manitoba after he had reported several death threats to the RCMP.

The solicitor general might be interested to know that Mr. McKay was contracted for $250,000 to act as a paid RCMP agent. While Mr. McKay signed an agreement in 1995 stipulating he would not be relocated or receive protective measures, the RCMP and the justice system had an obvious interest in protecting Mr. McKay.

I urge the solicitor general to investigate what appears to be gross negligence and to determine why a paid agent would be given the option of waiving protection in the first place, as well as to determine why the RCMP did not provide protection.

It is of utmost importance that the solicitor general initiate an immediate public judicial inquiry into this serious matter.

[Canadian Wheat Board Act, June 8th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I always enjoy the zealous comments of the hon. member for Malpeque. I consider him a real promoter of the Canadian Wheat Board. I would call him the Canadian Wheat Board's Stompin' Tom Connors because he believes in that thing. He would stomp everybody to death if they did not believe it. He has a strong view on this. I am wondering why because he has never sold a bushel to the board. The only reason I can think of that he would support the board is because he has purchased a lot of cheap feed grains from it for his dairy cows. I can see why he loves the wheat board.

The other question I would like to ask him is regarding the tremendous work he was talking about that the advisory board members have done. I am not going to argue against that because I do not think we can really judge it by the figures we see in the annual report.

Let us assume they did a tremendous job. Why would that not hold true also for the directors? If the advisory board members did such a good job, why not elect all 15 directors instead of appointing five? Is the member saying that western farmers only have 10 people in their constituency that could sit on the board, who have enough smarts to run the board, that they are short by five and that they have to pick them from somewhere out of a political system? To me that does not make sense.

As we know before the Senate hearings the Canadian Wheat Board finally admitted that it was one of the biggest players on the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. I have never seen that reported in any of their audits. I wrote the wheat board commissioner Mr. Hehn to see if I could have an annual audit of the trading activities to see whether it made me any money or lost some. I also requested that from the minister. It is very slow in coming. I do not know for what reason. Perhaps the first audit still has not been printed. Perhaps it has not been reported in the previous audits.

I would like the member to respond to that, to see why these trading activities do not show up in any other annual audits.

[Canadian Wheat Board Act, June 8th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to listen to the member for Brandon—Souris.

I was kind of surprised though that he was attacking the Reform Party because we are not the government. The other thing that the Reform has done for the hon. member for Brandon—Souris is to isolate him from the bad Liberals. We are all around him to the east, to the north, to the west and the Americans protect him from the south. So he is in pretty good shape. I thought once in a while he would give us a little bit of credit to keep him away from the hostile enemy.

I do not know whether I heard him right about the inclusion and exclusion clause. This House will decide whether grains will be added or deleted. That is good. I thought it would be up to farmers to decide that. I do not know whether he made a slip of the tongue or not.

I did not think that was Conservative policy so I would like to help him along. I would not want his constituents to hear that he was siding with the Liberals because that could spell trouble. I was wondering whether that was a slip and whether he had something nice to say about the Reform Party.

[Canadian Wheat Board Act, June 8th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I enjoyed the speech of my colleague from the NDP. I would like to ask him a couple of questions. One is whether he would favour putting something in the preamble which would give the board the mandate to work in the interests of farmers rather than the corporation.

I must compliment the member, first of all, on his statement that foreign buyers are buying our grain because of its quality. I have heard so often from the member for Malpeque that it was the wheat board that got the premiums for our grain and I have always maintained that it was the quality of the grain. It was the farmers who were producing the grain that brought in the extra money.

What I would like the member to address is the latest poll in Saskatchewan. As we know, those farmers have always been more or less very strong supporters of the Canadian Wheat Board, but the Liberal MLA in the Yorkton—Melville area did a poll in his constituency and he found that 62% of his farmers would now vote for a dual marketing system. It was really surprising.

I wonder what the member would say about this drastic change. It used to be the philosophy that farmers could not grow grain without the Canadian Wheat Board.