Jake Hoeppner

[Western Grain Transportation Act, February 13th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, the Western Grain Transportation Act was instituted in 1984. This loophole has been there for 12 years and the government knew about it. Why did it have to wait this long?

I would suggest that special interest groups had a lot to do with it because the railways were milking the system, the grain companies were milking the system, and the cow has gone dry. We have a debt problem and finally we are starting to realize it.

I would like to ask the hon. member why the government did not realize this faster when the problem was there 10 years ago.

[Western Grain Transportation Act, February 13th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I know the hon. member for Brandon-Souris is good with figures. He was in the teaching profession for a long time. The data I have are from the Grain Transportation Agency. I seem to be getting data that are no good. I hope these are good.

They point out that a rail car going to Vancouver travels at a rate of 5.05 miles per hour and one going to Thunder Bay travels at 3.62 miles per hour.

I wonder if he thinks this was excessive speed for these rail cars or whether somehow the Liberals could speed up that whole transportation system a bit.

[Western Grain Transportation Act, February 13th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the hon. member for Brandon-Souris whether he is not a little concerned about Thunder Bay since wheat going to Thunder Bay is not declared an export subsidy. How is he going to keep wheat from Brandon-Souris going to Thunder Bay? I am sure the Mexicans are going to refuse it if there is a subsidy on it. Could the hon. member answer that question?

[Western Grain Transportation Act, February 13th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the hon. member for Souris-Moose Mountain. I know he supports the government quite fully and he is a good Liberal. I congratulate him and pat him on the back for that.

We had a trade agreement signed by the agriculture minister with a peace clause in it that we would not be harassed by the Americans any more. I see now they are starting to use the end user certificate against us. This is a real detriment to farmers.

What could the member do to influence the agriculture minister to get a little tougher on some deals that he has made to make the Americans, the Japanese, the Mexicans or whomever live up to the agreements that were signed?

[Western Grain Transportation Act, February 13th, 1995]

Maybe it is time they got restless. Maybe it is time for them to get a few ants in their pants and start moving on some of these issues. When I hear that it takes a whole year to draw up a bill like this, I have a feeling we will be all dead before it is implemented.

Maybe I have said enough. I do not want to wake the hon. members up too much because they might not be able to sleep very well tonight. We would like to see them back here tomorrow morning and go at them again.

It is real pleasure to address these people. We know they try their best. There is not much they can accomplish in a year so we will give them another year or two.

[Western Grain Transportation Act, February 13th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to read another statement by Mr. Hehn, chief commissioner of the wheat board. When I asked him about the backtracking he said: "It is not a wheat board issue". The chairman of the agriculture committee said: "Thank you". Mr. Hehn replied: "Our job is to maximize returns for farmers and if the backtracking option is there, we

are going to use it". He does not care a hoot how long it ties up cars or how inefficient it makes the system as long as he can move a bushel of wheat that is worth $3. Forget about the canola that is worth $8, $9 or $10. That is efficiency. That is the kind of efficiency this Liberal government is promoting.

It is time for somebody to take the bull by the horns and do something. There is a lot of bull on that side. We hear a lot of it. We are not short of that.

[Western Grain Transportation Act, February 13th, 1995]

I do not know what the freight rate is. But I can tell the member what the handling charges are. If I ship a bushel of grain from my point to Seattle, compared to my point to Vancouver I will save $16.50 per tonne. If 20 million tonnes are shipped out of Canada that is $320 million that came out of the pockets of farmers, just in the elevator system. That is without the transportation system.

Someone tell me why farmers need subsidies. It is because somebody is pulling it out of their pocket faster than they can put it back in. That is not going to last forever.

[Western Grain Transportation Act, February 13th, 1995]

With Mexico? I would like to see it. We have a trade deficit. Mexico has its trade surplus. I am afraid that the Liberals are completely lost in the dust and they have even lost the field. They are somewhere in the neighbour's. When they cannot take Statistics Canada figures and read them that shows what is happening. Something is wrong.

I will give the hon. minister a minute to look at that and see whether my eyes are that bad or whether I am that old that I cannot see what a surplus or a deficit is. While he is looking at that, I would like to talk about another item, the Churchill issue.

This is what Mr. Allen said about a boatload of grain to Mexico. Tell me whether we are giving it a bad deal or not. We had a 25-tonne vessel going to Mexico in November 1994. The Mexicans bought number three red wheat. We loaded 9,000 tonnes of number one red, 5,000 tonnes of number two red and the balance, which was less than half the cargo, was number three red which they bought. I would sure like to throw a trade action against the partner that gives me number one wheat instead of number three.

Where does the trading sense of this government come in? It amazes me that these things go on and we sit idly and say everything is good in this country, we are only $540 billion in debt, so why not a few hundred billion more?

I look at Bill C-66 and look at three little clauses that took a lawyer a whole year to draw up, that has cost us $50 billion in backtracking costs, delayed cars for I do not know how many days. We are behind in canola shipments months and we are still doing a great job? Why do we not pat each other on the back?

I went up to Churchill last July. I wanted to see how efficiently the agriculture department was running everything. I was there the last day in July. There was a ship coming in that wanted to load 40,000 tonnes of grain and there were 4,000 tonnes in that whole terminal, five million bushels. That is performance?

We have ships sitting for three weeks waiting to pick up grain out of Churchill, of all places, where nobody wants to buy grain from. That is performance and I am supposed to be quiet here and sit silently by and let these things go on and pat hon. members across the way on the back?

I am sorry, hon. members, I was elected to start things moving in this House. I hope I can accomplish that. I hear giggles and I hear screams. They must be listening so I must be accomplishing something. We will have to paint these ships a faded red so that they will start getting a little more action into their process and loaded a little faster.

I went over to Robert's Bank when I was in Vancouver and I saw a 150,000 tonne coal ship loaded within a day. Then I saw what the consequences were. That company paid the terminal $5,000 to load that ship within the three-day limit. We wait 27 days to load a ship with grain. We have a tremendous system going for us. I cannot comprehend the amount of stress, disappointment and disillusionment in the farm community with this kind of system.

For 10 years now the WGTA has held the railway system and the grain companies hostage so that the system cannot be revamped. The Minister of Transport said the United States railway system is 64 per cent more efficient as far as labour is concerned. Are we doing a tremendous job in Canada? When are we going to face the facts? When are we going to take charge of these problems and do something?

[Western Grain Transportation Act, February 13th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, through you I will say to the minister that I will probably throw some junk, some garbage or maybe dockage, whatever you call it in the farm industry, because I was really surprised at some of the comments that I heard here today when I see how well we have done in this transportation system with this backtracking issue.

I would like to read what Mr. Ted Allen said to the standing committee on agriculture on our grain handling system on November 29, 1994: "We measure performance in this country against our transportation constraints. We say how much better we are doing because we had an abysmal year, so we do quite a bit better than in a really poor year. We never measure our performance against what the opportunity was and how close to maximizing the opportunity we came, which every other marketer I know of does".

Why have we not taken the opportunities when the subcommittee on transportation a year ago said to stop the backtracking, it is costing us millions and millions of dollars? Every member on that subcommittee said now. Every member on the agriculture committee said now. This is a violation of the Western Grain Transportation Act. This was a loophole that the grain companies and the railways found. We could not stop it.

It has cost us $15 million since last July 31 for this backtracking. Not only the backtracking has been the cost but the car allocation. We have failed to meet commitments again and again.

I will read another comment that Mr. Allen made. This was last year in November: "Yesterday I was talking to an elevator manager from Hargrave, Manitoba, who happened to be in my office. He was telling me that he has 25 orders for cars that he was supposed to have received a long time ago. The other day he finally got three of them". That is performance. I cannot imagine how much better we can get if that is the way we are running our railway system.

When I looked at the log book today from Vancouver for last October, November and December and saw that a ship sat there for 27 days waiting for grain to be loaded, I think we have room for improvement. It does not seem to me that if we made 40 per cent improvement in the last six, seven or eight months why these ships are waiting that long. We want to congratulate each other when we do make improvements but let us not overdo it. We could become very complacent in this House.

The other thing I would like to address is the Mexican issue. I was not aware that there was a trade action against us until we were briefed by the agriculture people the other day on Bill C-66.

I asked why we are stopping backtracking to Mexico. Are we shipping grain to Mexico? I thought this was a backtracking bill. They said: "There could be a few loads going in that direction. We will have to find out. We do not know". That is how knowledgeable the people were who briefed us on this.

After a few phone calls I finally found out that Mexico had a trade sanction against us for shipping subsidized wheat to it; not just to us, also to the Americans.

If the members will read the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement they will start to realize that the Americans promised not to dump EEP wheat into our markets, of which Mexico is one. That is where the problem started. That is why there was a trade sanction against us.

If this government is trying to tell us that Mexico can take action against us with a trade sanction, I want to ask under what kind of clout or under what kind of conditions it can do that.

Mexico has a trade surplus of almost $3 billion with Canada. Where in the heavens can a trading partner tell me that I am not trading fairly when I import four times as much as it takes from us?

Statistics Canada says that out of a $37 billion trade surplus that we have with the U.S. we dwindle that down by $20 billion with other countries like Australia and New Zealand which bring in boneless beef by the thousands of pounds. Our farmers are going bankrupt.

Is this the way our government is trading? Is this how we get trade actions against us? It sure seems like good business to me. No wonder we are going bankrupt.

The trade surplus it has with us is $2.77 billion in total products. It could be other than agriculture. These are Statistics Canada figures that I am using. If they are not correct maybe we can get rid of Statistics Canada.

It is time Reform starts throwing a few of these figures around. When I see Australia with a trade surplus of $181 million wanting to bring in more boneless beef, and I see New Zealand with a $126 million trade surplus wanting to bring in more beef, where do we finally go with our beef? Where do we finally get the jobs that we were promised in that nice little red book? We have to start milling our wheat, we have to start milling our pasta, we have to start doing something.

As a farmer I know that if I continually buy more than I sell I am going to have a big problem. This is what has happened to this country. It is not just interest rates. If we take $20 billion trade deficits and borrow that at 8 per cent, just figure that out.

[Western Grain Transportation Act, February 13th, 1995]

I will sure throw some junk at you if nothing else, hon. minister. I will take some time.