Allan Kerpan

[Supply, April 28th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I am obviously well aware of the national committee on the safety net programs. I do applaud the government. I do believe there are some very fine people on that committee.

However, by the same token and having said that, I also believe we have to take it one step further. We have to have full consultation with every farmer in this country. That has been the problem in the past. We have had a select group. They have been good people but they cannot always get the feeling of what each individual grassroots farmer wants. We have to have the process and take it right to the end. That is the way we will find success in the program.

[Supply, April 28th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I open with the question that I hear most in my riding of Moose Jaw-Lake Centre. Farmers ask me why they have not heard anything about agriculture from Ottawa through the newspapers or on television. I have to be honest and tell them we are not talking about agriculture in Ottawa. Sometimes it is very

difficult for me, being a farmer, to admit that we are not talking or spending very much time on agriculture. That is the question I hear most often in my riding.

I want to talk about two subjects today, safety nets and the farm debt problem.

First, in many cases over the past years we have seen safety nets that have been ill conceived, open to abuse, and poorly planned. I do not believe there is a farmer in this country who wants federal or provincial government agriculture subsidies. All farmers want is a reasonable chance to make some sort of decent living in this country. I do not care which part of Canada they come from.

We have been in the situation over the past number of years where we have been looking at world trade problems, weather related problems and various other problems. That has shifted the focus in many areas so governments have been trying to give financial aid to farmers in poorly planned ways.

We have had safety net programs for many years. We have had GRIP, crop insurance, FSAM, the grain stabilization program, and any number of ad hoc programs, as many as we all care to remember.

We have spent billions of taxpayers' dollars on agriculture subsidies, and yet I still see farmers in Saskatchewan, and I know this is true right across this country, who are losing their farms. I ask myself how we justify spending billions upon billions of dollars and whether there is any effect or any good reason to pour dollars into farm subsidies when there is no reasonable chance of hope for success.

In most cases the programs we have seen are open to abuse. They encourage very poor farming practices. They lack continuity. As I mentioned before, we have jumped in and out of all sorts of different farm programs on almost a yearly basis.

That is generally the problem I see with those kinds of programs. In all cases they are bureaucratic programs, developed by bureaucrats for bureaucrats. They have done very little talking to farmers, listening and hearing what farmers are saying across this country. That is something we need to change. That is the area we need to move to.

As I have said many, many times, farmers are the people who know what programs will work and what programs will not work. They know what is the best way to market their grain. In many cases they know the best way to transport their grain.

I am not being particularly critical of this government. It has been governments of all stripes in the past. We have seen it from all governments.

I generally like the idea of the whole farm concept of some sort of farm insurance. The concept is realistic. The question I have is, what process will be used to develop this program? Will it be bureaucrats again, as we have seen so many times in the past, or will it be consultation with farmers? If it is consultation with farmers in the grassroots area, I am all for that.

I just returned from a meeting of the standing committee on agriculture this morning and we had a group of people in from the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities. They did a provincial summary in Saskatchewan last year listing some of the problems they see with the GRIP and the NISA program.

I will quote the report: "Declining support levels, premiums are too high, not bankable, lack of producer consultation, payment processes too long".

When they talk about NISA they say it is too complicated, the forms are too lengthy, it is poorly administered. They do not trust government with their money; it does not cover all agriculture income and is not suitable for young farmers.

Those are some of the comments the farmers in Saskatchewan are making to groups in Saskatchewan, the problems they have with farm safety net programs.

The second area I want to spend a couple of minutes on is the farm debt problem. In Saskatchewan we have over $5 billion in farm debt. That is Saskatchewan only. In the rural municipality of Craik which is very close to mine, over 50 per cent of the farmers have gone through the farm debt review process. In other words, they have been in serious financial difficulty.

The largest municipal taxpayer in Saskatchewan is the Farm Credit Corporation and the second highest taxpayers are the chartered banks. That gives an indication, a bit of background to the kinds of problems and how serious the debt problem is in this country.

A few years ago we were all witness and subject to many different farm rallies, most of which were held in western Canada, because of the farm debt crisis. We have not seen many of those in the past year or 18 months.

People will say that perhaps the farm debt crisis is over, perhaps it is no longer a problem. We see that cattle prices have gone up. We see that prices for special grains have gone up. Perhaps the crisis is over. I do not believe that.

I believe that the debt crisis is still there and it is still as big as it was before. I think the difference now is that farmers in this country have come to realize if they are going to solve the problems of debt, the problems of marketing and so on and so forth, they will have to do it themselves.

Farmers have to take the initiative to help solve their problems. They are no longer looking for government support the

way they did five or perhaps ten years ago. They realize the way to solutions is to open up the process and let them handle their own problems.

I believe farmers have decided they will take matters into their own hands. That is why we see things such as the huge influx of new crops in our country, specialty crops, crops that we would not have believed we would grow five or ten years ago. We are now growing them. We see a great increase in the cattle industry. We see value added industry. In my own riding we have a good number of various value added industries that are going to be successful because they are farmer owned, they are farmer controlled and they do not depend on government subsidy.

We see a huge increase in off farm jobs, off farm income. A recent survey in Saskatchewan said that as high as 50 per cent of the farmers in Saskatchewan have off farm income. I often humorously say as a farmer that my wife teaches school to support my farming habit. It is a fact of life out there. It is just the way it is. I think that is good. People are starting to realize they have to take matters into their own hands.

I want to spend just a minute talking about the Farm Credit Corporation. It has a new lend-lease program, initiated this year. The comments I have received from my riding, the initial comments, are that it is a good program. Some of the negative comments might be that the term of six years is probably too short and should be increased to 10 years.

The other comment I get about the Farm Credit Corporation which I want to finish with is that it has been very difficult, very bureaucratic to deal with in its history. Many farmers in my area have turned back their land or voluntarily transferred it back to the Farm Credit Corporation over the past few years and it has been very difficult negotiating, coming to terms.

In conclusion, I would like to say that farmers are now preparing for their spring seeding. Right across this country they are busy. They are on their tractors. They are listening to the radio. I think more than anything else they would like to hear on their radios as they are working this spring that there are some specifics, that somebody will stand up and say this is the program, these are the details. That is what they want to hear.

I believe that agri-policy must be developed by farmers for farmers. There is no other way in this country that we can solve some of the problems we face in our industry other than by full consultations with farmers.

[Foreign Affairs, April 21st, 1994]

Madam Speaker, I rise in the House tonight to speak on this very important issue. Certainly most of us in the House tonight would be doing more pleasant duties; I had no idea when I was elected some six short months ago that we would be here tonight as members of Parliament in the House making such a serious decision on such a serious issue.

Back in January I made my maiden speech on the topic of our role in Bosnia for two reasons. The first one was my personal history which goes back to that part of the world. My heritage is from that area and certainly I have concern for what is going on there.

Second, the important thing that we have not talked about very much in these debates is the history of the area. The history of this area will tell us that for the past 500 years we have had these types of flare-ups. We have had wars. We have had people murdering or massacring each other. There have been no good guys and there have been no bad guys in this particular area. It has been a fact of life that this has been a very volatile area of the world.

I had hoped when I gave that maiden speech back in January that there would not be a need for the type of debate that we hold tonight. Unfortunately that has not been the fact.

My concern tonight really is twofold. First and foremost I am very concerned for the safety of our Canadian people there. We as Canadians have a priority and we must protect. We must not allow some of the things that have gone on in that area to happen to our Canadian troops. Safety has to be a top priority.

Second, my concern is for the innocent victims, the innocent people. We have seen thousands of people who have been victims of this war.

I do not believe that we can ask the United Nations to keep peace in a part of the world where there simply is no peace to keep. I am not a supporter of violence. In fact I hate violence and I hate what it does to innocent people. We have drawn lines in the sand in this part of the world for some two years now. We keep backing up and keep drawing new lines in the sand. I believe we are at a point where we can no longer draw lines in the sand.

Threats and ultimatums simply have not worked. I believe that we must take a firmer stand, but I say this with mixed emotions. As I mentioned before I have relatives in this part of the world and I am obviously very concerned for their safety.

I do not believe we have any other option at this point in time. As a world community I believe that we have the obligation to protect innocent people wherever they are. Thousands of lives have been lost already and tens of thousands more are in immediate direct jeopardy.

About 20 minutes ago I received a letter from one of my constituents that I would like to quote at this time. She states: "As a wife of a peacekeeper who served in Croatia, I know what it is like to worry that my husband may not make it back to me. My husband served as a peacekeeper proudly for both his country and the United Nations. Every patrol he went out on he never knew if it would be his last one. I believe that the Serbians must be forced by whatever means to respect the safe zones established by the United Nations. However, for the sake of our soldiers let us be very clear in what we are doing. This is no longer peacekeeping. The soldiers who now operate under the United Nations umbrella must be given a new, clear enforceable mandate or alternatively, they should be pulled out altogether and NATO should step in.

Dennis just told me a few minutes ago that he would be glad and have no problems throwing his combats on and going back. As his wife, and mother of his child, all I ask is that if you send him or his colleagues over, make his mandate clear and give him the resources and backing to make it back again".

As I mentioned before it is with mixed emotions that I stand in the House tonight. I support the idea of air strikes, not because I want to see punishment inflicted on anyone but because I want to see this horrific war stopped and stopped now.

I believe that the only option we have and the one we must choose is to pull back all Canadians to safe areas and then proceed with any and all efforts required to stop this bloodshed. Then and only then can we talk about peacekeeping and then and only then can our peacekeepers do the job for which we have become known throughout the world.

[Gun Control, April 20th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, last week in my constituency we held two townhall meetings to discuss gun control.

The message that I received from the people attending these two meetings was loud and clear: do not handcuff together what are two separate issues, gun control and criminal justice reform; do not attempt to control the criminal abuse of firearms by punishing the innocent, legitimate gun owners in the country.

This message has been supported by over 300 phone calls and faxes to our "let the people speak" lines here in Ottawa. These come from all across the country. The people of Moose Jaw-Lake Centre say we need to get tough with violence and violent criminals. We need to do it now, but let us leave law-abiding citizens alone.

[Decorum In The House, March 9th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to congratulate my colleagues in their efforts to maintain a true sense of decorum in this House.

I recently encountered many Canadians who were saddened and angry over remarks attributed to certain members in the House, one of whom alleged that some of us do not like Indians and then apologized. Television cameras recorded yet another member of the House calling other members racists.

My constituents have told me they are disappointed when members of the House malign each other. They are distressed that their House of Commons is in danger of being brought into disrepute by any member hurling abusive language about so freely.

[Unemployment, March 7th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, the promise of the Premier of Quebec and the projections of the Minister of Finance do not add up.

Could the minister tell the House whose numbers can be relied on in this case, those of the Minister of Finance or the Premier of Quebec?

[Unemployment, March 7th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Human Resources Development.

Recently the minister told the House the Premier of Quebec could reduce unemployment by 1 per cent because of actions taken by the federal government. The budget predicts national unemployment to remain around 11 per cent.

Can the minister explain how the national unemployment rate can remain unchanged if in Quebec it falls by one full per cent?

[The Late Douglas Charles Neil, February 24th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I consider it an honour to rise in the House today to pay tribute to a veteran honourable member and a friend of this place.

Hon. Douglas Charles Neil passed from this world on Monday, February 21. Mr. Neil served his community and country well. Along with community service Mr. Neil, like so many others, was part of the overseas forces during World War II. As a member of Parliament, Doug had nothing but the highest respect from his colleagues as well as from his constituents. He truly was an honourable member.

He served as member for Moose Jaw from 1972 until 1984. This was the southern and urban part of the current riding of Moose Jaw-Lake Centre, the electoral district which I am now privileged to represent.

Although I did not know Doug personally I have heard many in my riding refer to him and the service he gave to them, to his country and to the House. These references of which I speak were without exception favourable and commendatory.

Just today I was reading through press accounts of Doug's passing. I am struck by the deep sense of loss many of his personal friends are expressing at this time. Even stronger than that sentiment is the gratitude and respect these friends hold for Mr. Neil. Truly his life of service impacted his fellow citizens in a profound way.

I join all those who sorrow at this time of Mr. Neil's death. On behalf of members on this side of the House I express my sincere condolences to his wife, Charlotte, and to his family. I also join in the recognition that Doug Neil has had and will have a lasting influence for good. May his memory be blessed.

[Justice, February 24th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, my supplementary question is for the Minister of Justice. The ugly reality of child abuse in our society demands a response from us as leaders.

What plans does the government have to help Canadians work toward preventing this type of horrible crime against innocent children?

[Justice, February 24th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Justice.

Three weeks ago the decisions on the Martensville child abuse case were released. There is an uproar in Saskatchewan from all those involved in this case. The people of my province are demanding an official inquiry.

Will the minister press the Saskatchewan authorities to initiate an inquiry in this case?