Vic Althouse

[World Trade Organization Agreement Implementation Act, November 29th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member gave us a nice theoretical review of what would be nice if everybody agreed with the same kind of rules. We are debating though this world trade office which is international. It is not something we can control within the confines of one country.

As an aside I would point out that this country has had provinces ever since its inception and those provinces have certain powers which the hon. member has chosen in his theoretical discussion to ignore. They have control over production within the province which is why the marketing boards operate the way they do.

However my question concerns the international aspects of the bill. I would urge the member to turn his mind to our relations vis-à-vis other countries, particularly as they apply to assistance to agriculture since that was the main theme of his speech.

Since the negotiations began in 1986 I note that all countries made a verbal undertaking to start reducing subsidies and assistance to agriculture. I note that in the OECD countries he mentioned the aid to the agricultural sector has actually increased by 7 per cent in the past year over previous years. The trend is definitely not reducing assistance to farmers in OECD countries, with the exception of Canada which shows a decline of 12 per cent in the last year over the previous year in assistance to agriculture.

We hear a lot of talk about level playing fields. As a former hockey referee, Mr. Speaker, I know you understand the importance of having the two teams relatively well matched in terms of equipment and so on. It seems to me that what we have achieved to date with the verbal agreements is perhaps a field that will be more level than it was. However players on the Canadian team have hardly any equipment and players on the other teams we are competing against are very heavily padded and ready to go with the full support of their fans, their local national governments.

I read the documentation our country put together. I got it under freedom of information because it was not made available otherwise. I find it is the intention of the country under the Liberal government, and apparently supported by the Reform Party and others, to reduce the assistance to agriculture at an even faster pace than we have done to this point in time, even though the other countries are still a long way from catching up and taking off their special protections.

It is to the point that by the end of the decade when the six-year implementation stage comes and we start on the seventh, which is supposed to be the achievement of the new world order, Canada will be paying its agricultural sector $1.5 billion less than the agreement requires. We will be nice and squeaky clean. We will be out there playing hockey in our civvies while everybody else will have the same level of support they have now, with perhaps a few minor reductions.

I am wondering how he could describe that as fair or something he would advocate in terms of our relations with all other countries. How could this approach be something that he would support?

Mr. Hermanson: Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the comments of the hon. member for Mackenzie. I know he has a sincere interest in agriculture and a strong commitment to the industry.

He spoke just in passing about marketing boards and the fact that the provinces have been given some jurisdictional powers in that area. The actual act is a federal act and there have been some real discrepancies as a result of it.

For instance, I wonder if the hon. member for Mackenzie supports the fact that the province of Quebec has a leg up on the rest of Canada as far as the industrial milk quota is concerned. Provinces such as our province of Saskatchewan do not have fair access to the industrial milk market because of the inequities of the interprovincial trade barriers within Canada. It is certainly an area we need to rectify. It is an intolerable situation. It has certainly hurt the agricultural industry in our province.

With regard to his comments about the level playing field and being equipped to play in the game, I share some of the same concerns the hon. member has expressed but I mentioned in my speech that we were comparing apples and oranges.

I want to make very clear probably one of the most dastardly attempts at taking away the equipment we as Canadian producers need to play the game. It was the action undertaken by the minister of agriculture when he agreed to cut the export sales of durum to the United States by half. Certainly I would agree with the hon. member that actions such as that one when we have the trade agreements on our side are unacceptable.

Export sales of Canadian durum to the United States were steadily increasing. In fact they were on an ascending rate, an accelerated rate. Just because Uncle Sam south of the border put a little pressure on the Canadian minister of agriculture he forgot about the rules. He forgot about the equipment. He threw it away.

If we are talking about being out on the ice and playing the game, I do not think our agriculture minister has gone out on the ice yet. If he has he certainly has not gone across his own blue line. Perhaps he needs a penalty for not getting in the game. I do not know, Mr. Speaker, if you have ever called one of those but I think the agriculture minister needs one.

We have the NAFTA. We have the GATT. If we are to voluntarily give up just because somebody puts a little pressure on us when the rules are on our side and the judgments are on our side, it is wrong and a disgrace to Canadian farmers. I would call upon the minister of agriculture-and I am sure the hon. member for Mackenzie would as well-not to strip us of the equipment that helps us to play the game.

I am convinced that Canadian farmers, given a level playing field, will compete with any team. Just as we were able to compete with the Russians back in 1976, I am sure as agriculture producers and free traders we will be able to take on any competitor in the world and play an excellent game. I suspect when the final whistle blows and when the light comes on at the end of the third period we will win if the government does not get in the road and if our minister of agriculture pulls up his socks, grabs a stick and gets in the game.

[World Trade Organization Agreement Implementation Act, November 29th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I was pleased to hear the hon. member for Vancouver Quadra put an historical sense to what is being proposed at third reading of the World Trade Organization, something that was attempted after the second world war and was always, by my reading of history, blocked by the United States.

It was interesting to note the hon. member mentioned that in his opinion and apparently in the opinion of the government as well because they did stop all attempts to insert unilateral reservations into international agreements.

I think he was referring to the amendments that NDP members had put before the House at report stage. Essentially we were attempting and continue to make the argument for a level playing field between ourselves and the Americans. Their law which we copied and we are hoping to insert into our law effectively says that where a dispute or problem arises on trade matters, U.S. law shall prevail. That is something the United States has adhered to ever since it became a country. Its constitution gives its Congress that right. I understand that.

However, I have greater difficulty understanding the action it has taken with its proposed law which effectively says the U.S. considers that consensus is still the rule in mediating disputes. That is not what all people conclude the international agreement says. It says where there is a dispute, the disagreement shall be resolved by a vote with the majority carrying. The U.S. persistence in saying that consensus is required means that in any dispute we might have with one of the largest economies and certainly a country with one of the largest armies in the world will only be resolved by consensus. This means if the U.S. does not agree to it, we do not get an agreement.

Since this is an historic occasion and we have gone to a true World Trade Organization where a majority rules and where the same rules will apply to all parties, does the member not have a bit of a suspicion in the back of his mind that as far as our relations with the United States are concerned, it is still going to

be its rules and the World Trade Organization will take a couple of more decades before it arrives between Canada and our major trading partner.

[Canadian Wheat Board Act, November 3rd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I am rising to speak at third reading of Bill C-50. I note several of the previous speakers have wandered considerably off the topic of the bill.

I want to make a quick allusion to the story we just heard concerning the man who presumed it was his road and all the problems he got into as a result of that false assumption. That is one of the basic problems of many people who are opposed to the wheat board and want what they call change. They too fall into the trap of making false assumptions about reality.

The man presumed that it was his road and that no one else should be on it on a Sunday morning. What they presume is that the wheat board is just another buyer, just another grain company in the market, when in fact it is marketing the grain for all growers in western Canada. Once they get their heads around that space it will begin to make a lot more sense. That is one of the difficulties of my friend from Vegreville and his colleagues.

The bill deals with how to finance plant breeding. It is a further proposal by government, following some proposals of the last government and some that were put forward in the Trudeau administration, to extract itself from publicly financed plant breeding. Publicly financed plant breeding has a long history in Canada, going back well over a hundred years. When John Wise was the minister of agriculture we celebrated a hundred years of plant breeding under the Department of Agriculture in Canada.

In my region of western Canada it was an extremely exciting initiative that was taken more than 100 years ago. Without the publicly sponsored plant breeding effort that occurred at the central research station in Ottawa and the varieties that were developed for early maturing hard spring wheat, my region would not have had a reason to exist in the world of agriculture.

The varieties that existed prior to that time were not suitable for my region with its relatively short growing season. The development of Marquis wheat attracted the population there and made it possible for it to be economically viable. It made agriculture on the prairies the bread basket of the world, according to publicity at the turn of the century. Of course we were never that big.

Many countries grow more wheat and more grain than does Canada, but few countries export as much of their production as we do. We export about 80 per cent of our production. None of the other countries are forced to do that because they have larger populations and consume it at home.

Because of this we developed the marketing institutions to which some of my friends in the House have been referring. Essentially we built on that success by continuing the publicly financed breeding program to get around diseases that came up, rust that developed and insects that developed over time. As the region continues to grow grains, some of these pests and hazards insert themselves into the land and into the environment. It is a constant struggle to change varieties so they will be resistant to insects, pests, rusts, fungi and so on.

I noticed the minister made reference to the fact that it was possible to get as much as a 15 per cent increase in yield due to plant breeding. It is on paper and it is in the test plot. However when we go on to the farms and start dealing with the exigencies of the overall environment and the climactic changes that occur over time, it requires a lot of other attendant improvements in agriculture to keep yields up. Some older varieties will still yield almost as well as the newer varieties by using the techniques available now.

The advantages have been better but have not been terribly dramatic. They have been incremental to the point of producing huge benefits when compared to the pittance invested in them. Any economic research on the cost and benefit of plant breeding shows that for every $1 put in there is as a conservative estimate a minimum of $7 to other estimates that run as high as $15 or $20. The payback is extremely high. In spite of that, previous governments, administrations and popular wisdom have it that government has to get out of plant breeding and there has been a constant cutting back of share of the department's investment in that area.

We have not kept up publicly financed plant breeding and because we have not done so government has come up with various ways of assuaging its conscience about it. During the late seventies and early eighties they talked about plant

breeders' rights. The last government finally implemented plant breeders' rights. That has paid the developers of new varieties for their cost and trouble by virtue of giving them what amounts to a patent to extract a fee from anyone who uses their varieties of seed during the next 15 years.

On top of that we have the bill before us proposing to extract what some people call a voluntary payment and what others call a refundable payment from each tonne of grain sold in the wheat board region through the wheat board. The act does not say so, but the government indicates its intention is to extract $20 per tonne on all wheats and $40 per tonne on all barleys from the final payment paid out in January, following the closing of the previous crop year's pool. Producers would have the option before the end of February to inform the board that they wanted their deductions sent to them rather than to the research foundation if they disapproved of the activities of the research foundation.

It is difficult to oppose a proposal that permits individuals to make up their own minds on whether they want to submit payments to such a scheme.

I want to make it quite clear to the House that what we are doing here as governments, as politicians, as ministries of agriculture, is layering one more cost on to farmers that was not there 20 years ago. Farmers are now financing plant breeders, first as taxpayers through public financing albeit not quite as adequate as it could be because of government cutbacks. We are asked to finance plant breeding through the payments under plant breeders' rights for the use of the newly developed seeds. Now we are being asked to finance plant breeding a third way by a check off on our sales of wheat and barley through the Canadian Wheat Board.

I think that we have a right to ask how many more times we have to keep up this financing. The clear beneficiaries of this increased productivity are the consumers of the product. My friend from Frontenac indicated that it is the last bushels that create the profit, and that is true, but it is those last bushels that are used to depress the price. As we increase our production the supply is increased and the price for all of the production begins to fall.

The beneficiary of this increased production is always the consumers. They have been getting cheaper and cheaper food. The cost of groceries and basic foods that go into the groceries has been falling all through this century.

That has not been the case for a whole lot of other commodities and things that we use. Even housing has gone up in that period of time. With regard to transport, I hark back to just 15 or 20 years ago in making comparisons since today at the agriculture committee we were talking about cattle prices. In 1977 I remember buying a new car. It cost me I think seven 800-pound steers to buy a brand new car. It was a full size car, had everything going for it. Today that car would take something in the order of 25 or 30 800-pound steers.

We were being told in the committee that cattle prices had held up pretty well. They certainly have, have they not?

The technology for cars has changed somewhat. I saw an article in the press recently which said that because of demands from government for environmental improvements to the emission controls and other requirements by government, the cost of a car is now about $4,500 more than in 1977. This was for all the technical improvements. If everything else were equal the car would be about half the price that it is now.

When I look at what labour received out of that car between 1977 and today, it gets about the same amount of money. The input in hours has dropped dramatically but labour gets about the same amount of money. Somewhere there has been a doubling of the real price of that car and the beef has dropped in what it will really buy to about a third. It has dropped two-thirds. Eight would buy a car and now it takes 25.

I just present that to show that consumers have taken real advantage of the productivity of agriculture. I do not see the rationale for farmers to continue to have to pay a bigger and bigger chunk of the research to make productivity gains that consumers are going to benefit from.

I think there will be a great deal of angst among farmers when they see the amount of deduction that there will be on their final payment cheques after January 1996.

A lot of them will have to think long and hard whether they want to have their research deduction returned to them or go into the research group. One of the things that will be a factor for farmers in Saskatchewan and Manitoba at least will be the fairness of the extraction process.

Members will know from the debate yesterday that there has been a special dispensation granted to Alberta and some B.C. producers because they have a different form of deduction already in place. Their deduction is for research in general. It is not for plant breeding research specifically.

All the funds from this deduction will go into developing new plant varieties. We are told that perhaps 2 per cent will be used for administration purposes. The rest will be transferred directly for scientific work on developing new plant varieties.

We know from the public annual statement on the Alberta check off for instance that much less than 50 per cent of the funds collected are even allocated to research and there is no distinction made as to whether the research is economic research, marketing research or actual plant development research.

We have one set of oranges and one set of apples coming in for these deductions. Yet the government refused to make a change yesterday and so did the established parties in the House. They did not see any problem with this. They seem to be quite happy that Manitoba and Saskatchewan producers will pay 20 cents a tonne for plant breeding research. Alberta producers will pay an unspecified amount for research. They will pay the 20 cents for wheat but not for barley research.

We will be paying 40 cents. What will they be paying? Nobody seems to know. As long as that stays very fuzzy, there will be a lot of people saying: "Why should I contribute? If Alberta farmers are going to be getting the same benefits from those new plants as I am, why can they not pay the same amount?" We were trying to have that dichotomy straightened out in the act. Yet the government refused to take any action on it.

One of the problems that this federal government always has is a problem of treating people in each region the same within the region. I would argue that it failed this test miserably yesterday when it proposed to continue with this bill.

I find it very difficult to see why we should be pushing for support for this bill. I find it very difficult to go out and tell my producers that this is a good bill for them when I see that we are simply taking step three as a way of continuing to back off public responsibility for plant breeding and put it on to the hands of producers.

It is really a form of government offloading on to producers. It becomes a form of additional directed taxation that is a bad precedent to begin with. I have great difficulty supporting the whole concept that has been put forward in this bill.

It is laying out a system that is inequitable. It is treating some farmers different than other farmers who live in the same region and who will all benefit the same from the research. It is putting what amounts to a third tax on producers who have some interest in upgrading the genetic material that they work with.

It is also true that the final consumer is the one who reaps all the benefit from that new research. I find it very difficult to justify making an additional charge to the producer in those instances.

[Unemployment Insurance Act, November 2nd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, on Friday I raised a question with the Minister of Human Resources Development to whom I had given notice. Eleven ministers of agriculture for Canada had agreed to an initiative to help with community development, particularly concerning child care. The Department of Human Resources Development had allocated some $720 million for 150,000 child care spaces in this budget year. I was asking how much of that would be dedicated to rural child care.

I raised this question because we have just come through a harvest season which is a very busy time on farms. As always there have been reports of some injuries to children because of the exigencies of harvest.

The modern farm is not the idyllic place that we read or think of in mythology. There are huge machines around. There is noise. There are chemicals. There are factory type buildings. There are sinkholes that children can get caught in. There are grain augers. There are all sorts of hazards for children. It is not a place particularly for very small children to be involved. However, both parents of necessity are required to contribute to the work, especially in busy times and it is unsafe and quite impractical for those children to be among the machinery and animals on the farms.

There has always been difficulty in setting up child care facilities for rural areas because of the low population and great distances and the need for very flexible hours. Families will sometimes need child care for short periods of time during harvest and seeding that would run from eight o'clock in the morning until 10 or 11 at night. The rules that have been set out for urban child care just are not adequate and do not fit.

For the decade and a half that I have been in this Chamber, I know of groups that have been trying to find a model for rural child care that is flexible, that will work, and that provides all of the requirements for children and still provides the basic necessities available for urban child care but can be adapted to rural communities.

We have watched a model of child care develop at Langruth, Manitoba. That very small community of some 500 souls has developed a child care facility that meets all of those requirements. It has been in operation for about two and a half years and provides child care for some 40 children. It is considered to have overcome most of the organizational problems, the service delivery models and particularly provides the required flexibility.

There is an old saying that it takes an entire village to raise a child. All communities whether they are strung out rural communities or local neighbourhoods in cities understand that. Particularly in an era of the global village we understand that the whole of society must contribute to the raising of a child. Therefore it is only fair that the money which has been allocated for child care should also be equally available to rural families.

I would hope that the government would state how much, what proportion and what its plans-

[Canadian Wheat Board Act, November 2nd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I was not going to intervene on this motion until I heard the member for Vegreville. I wonder if he was speaking to motion No. 2 because he does not seem to have read it the way the hon. member for Frontenac wrote it.

We should remind ourselves that the research funding agency that is mentioned in the motion by the hon. member for Frontenac is to be the Western Grains Research Foundation. If members look at the section of the act where this all starts, the deductions for research portion on page 2 explains that the board collects the funds and then turns it over to this research funding agency.

The motion we have before us from the member for Frontenac directs that the research funding agency, which will be the western grains research fund, shall distribute funds to persons who will make the results of their research available to the people who contributed to it, namely the producers. I do not see anything wrong with that. This is something that should pass as a matter of course. However I realize the way some bureaucracies work and some funding works it does not always happen.

I do not know if the people who contribute to the check off for research in Alberta necessarily know what varieties of plants their deduction money has gone into. Neither do I know if the designation of research is the same in each case. In the bill it is quite clear that the funding will be for plant breeding research. It is not clear what the deductions are in some of the other provinces.

I hope the research granting agency, which is the western grain research fund, will make certain that it collects the same amount per tonne from producers in Alberta as is collected from producers in Saskatchewan, British Columbia or Manitoba. Whether it comes from a different collecting group should be irrelevant, but I hope that the same amount of moneys for a tonne of grain goes into the research granting agency from Alberta producers as is coming from Saskatchewan or Manitoba producers.

If that does not happen a lot of screaming and yelling will be going on by producers in Saskatchewan if this duality that the minister appears to be willing to support and which apparently the Reform Party is willing to support results.

If we cannot have fairness in the funding of research and openness to the point of allowing the people who pay for it know what the results are, then we are on a long, slippery slope into another form of taxation and another way for government to opt out of providing the kind of research dollars that it ought to have supplied in the first place.

I have one other thought as I look at motion No. 2. Since this money is being collected directly from farmers to finance this plant research I would hope that when a variety is developed that those same farmers will not be asked to pay fees under plant breeders' rights for the privilege of growing the variety they paid to produce.

I believe that is what the member for Frontenac is trying to avoid. If we know what varieties our money has produced as a result of the deductions from our grain sales then we should not have to pay plant breeders' rights on those varieties because we have already paid for them once, thank you very much.

[Canadian Wheat Board Act, November 2nd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. Since we will have to make a decision on how to vote on the basis of the minister's wonderful remarks, I wonder if he would tell us what method he is going to be using to assure that producers of barley, for instance, in Alberta will pay exactly the same amount into-

[Canadian Wheat Board Act, November 2nd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak on this grouping of amendments.

One is from the member for Frontenac. He proposes to set up a group with whom the wheat board would consult before setting the rate of the deductions that are provided for under this act. I commend the hon. member for his concern about consultation. However I remind him and the House that there is a group that provides consultation and advice to the board now. It is the advisory committee and the board would be asking for that group's advice.

The board will also be asking for advice and recommendations from the Western Grain Research Fund. It makes certain there is no duplication in the research efforts that go into plant breeding and the research programs that gravitate around plant breeding, whether it is to establish what methods and levels of fertilization should be utilized or what genetic changes should be searched for in order to avoid disease and to get better productivity and yields and to come to fruition in a shorter growing period.

Therefore there is in place already the kind of organization the hon. member for Frontenac envisions. I am sure it will be put to that purpose.

With regard to Motion No. 4, essentially the member for Vegreville is proposing to make it fairly simple for people to opt out of paying into this program. I have no personal problems with that. I would remind the hon. member that if he is going to support the idea of raising money for research through check offs that asking people if they want to save some money when they are applying for their permit book will almost always get the response: "Of course I want to save some money. I will not bother allowing the check off to occur". It will depend on how that part of the application form is drawn to the farmers' attention as to whether they do or do not decide to participate in the check off.

My motion proposes that a deduction fixed by the governor in council shall apply at the same rate to all holders of certificates in the designated area. First there should be a little bit of translation as to what that means.

Holders of certificates are people who are eligible for a final payment under the wheat board for the four pools that exist for various types of barley and wheat. These are people who will have a final payment accrue to them at the end of the crop year when there is a surplus that has accrued from the sales and marketing activities of the wheat board. That surplus is distributed on the basis of how many tonnes of each grade and variety the farmer delivered.

This act is proposing to take a certain amount from each of those pools which would go into specific research which would be designated and allocated by the Western Grain Research Fund. This works in conjunction with the other granting agencies which set out the programs that will receive public funding for research, whether it is for plant research as in this case, or for engineering or other disciplines throughout the country.

I am proposing this motion because the act as written now permits some parts of the wheat board designated area, which for those who do not know what that is, it is essentially the prairie region plus the mountain valleys and the valleys running into Thunder Bay in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. It is essentially the northern end of the great plains region. The climate and the soil and the farming technique there is such that most of the varietal research that will be done will be only applicable to that region. Therefore the plant varieties we develop for that region are usually of no application to regions in the rest of Canada. It is a nice, clear cut area whose economic interest in the area of plant breeding is basically the same.

The province of Alberta has decided to take a check off for barley and some types of wheat. That exists and is possible under provincial legislation. It is Alberta's constitutional right to do so. If we are going to take an action as a federal Parliament with a federal program, it should apply to all of the area the program is designed to cover. There should not be written into the law the ability for some regions to opt out. If some regions want to use their powers under the Constitution to do a similar thing, so be it.

We have plenty of examples of how that has been applied. For instance, when the GST was applied it was applied at the same rate right across the country, even though it was a tax on consumer goods and some of the provinces already had consumer taxes on consumer goods. However there was no recognition that because for example Newfoundland had a 9 per cent provincial sales tax that we would not bother to collect it in Newfoundland because those taxpayers were already contributing to the tax system in Newfoundland.

I think it is inappropriate for us to put forward federal legislation that will apply to all of the wheat board designated region that covers as I said basically the northern plains of North America. That is a very concise and well-defined region that has very clearly defined needs because of climate, geography and agrology for basically the same services. It makes no sense to have a separate rule for growers of some crops in some of the provinces.

Therefore, I would expect that there would be considerable interest in the House to try to apply the rules equitably and fairly across all the regions. I presume I would get support for this very logical motion.

Alberta growers may wish to continue with the activities they have been carrying out under their check off system which is different in many respects from the check off for research that this program is collecting for. As an example, the Alberta program only contributes less than half of their collected moneys to actual research and the the rest is either held in trust or used for administrative costs. With this program however we have been assured by the promoters at the department of agriculture that virtually all of the funds will be allocated for research through the Western Grain Research Fund.

If my amendment does not pass, I do not think it is fair for the contributors in Alberta under the proposal to contribute a lesser amount to the research needs of the area and still benefit from the activities of the surrounding areas. Barley growers in Alberta will benefit just as much as barley growers in British Columbia or Saskatchewan from the research that is done on barley varieties. Yet if we go along with the way the bill is currently drafted without my amendment they will be paying less toward research for the same benefit as everyone else gets.

I have no objection to Alberta growers taxing themselves by means of a check off to perform their political, administrative, and other activities the fund is now engaged in. However they should not expect the rest of us in the other provinces to finance the research and to give them the benefits from barley research they will get by opting out.

I urge members of the House to support this motion because it makes sense, because it is fair, because it is the cheapest way to get the most bucks for research. This will work if Alberta farmers pay the same rate as Saskatchewan farmers, as Manitoba farmers, as farmers in the rest of the wheat board designated area. I urge support for this because I think the only way the federal government and the federal jurisdiction can continue to receive the kind of respect this country ought to receive is if we treat them all in an equitable manner.

[Canadian Wheat Board Act, November 2nd, 1994]

moved:

That Bill C-50, in Clause 2, be amended by replacing lines 14 to19, on page 4,with the following:

"33.5 A deduction fixed by the Governor in Council shall apply at the same rate to all holders of certificates in the designated area."

[Agriculture, November 2nd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, here is something I would like the ministers of agriculture, transport and finance to think about before they discontinue the so-called Crow benefit.

In my region the benefit is worth between $22 and $28 per tonne. We grow about one tonne of crop per acre and good land rents between $20 and $30 per acre.

If the benefit disappears and freight costs rise by a like amount, the cash rental value of those lands becomes zero. The financial effect on the region is to further deflate farm land values by several hundred dollars per acre. This equity, which will disappear with the decline and demise of the Crow benefit, is what farmers and their communities have been using as collateral to borrow funds for economic diversity.

The proposal to save some $600 million per year will take billions of dollars worth of value and equity from existing farms and businesses in western Canada and will trigger further bankruptcies and business failures.

How can the government justify that?

[Child Care, October 28th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Human Resources Development, to whom I sent notice yesterday.

Last summer the 11 ministers of agriculture set up a rural initiative to develop child care in the rural parts of Canada. That

budget will come from the human resources department which now has some $700 million for 150,000 child care spaces.

I wonder what proportion of that will go to rural areas. Will it use the Langruth, Manitoba model of delivering child care which is quite flexible and perfectly suited to rural needs?