Vic Althouse

[Questions On The Order Paper, September 27th, 1994]

Have any grain or specialty crops shipped into the United States been destined for final destination outside the United States?

[Questions On The Order Paper, September 27th, 1994]

In this crop year, how many loaded hopper cars taken into the United States by CP and CN were diverted to United States owned lines for transport of cargo to final destinations?

[Questions On The Order Paper, September 27th, 1994]

How many Canadian grain hopper cars have been dispatched with: ( a ) CWS cargo; ( b ) open-market WGTA cargo; ( c ) specialty cargo into the United States in each of the past three months and what is their turnaround time?

[Canadian Potato Marketing Act, June 22nd, 1994]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-266, an act respecting the orderly marketing of potatoes.

Mr. Speaker, this bill would have the effect of creating an agency to present a single desk selling organization for the marketing of Canadian produced potatoes. It proposes a marketing commission for Canadian potatoes in order to permit producers to market through a single desk selling agency for the pricing, marketing and grading of potatoes.

This process has been ongoing in Canada for more than 20 years. It has reached near fruition several times but has always been successfully blocked by the potato trade. I believe this process would avoid that. In fact it would permit producers to use single desk marketing.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed.)

[Committees Of The House, June 22nd, 1994]

Yes, Your Honour. I hear rumours we may not be here tomorrow. It has only been filed long enough for presentation tomorrow.

[Committees Of The House, June 22nd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order I seek leave to introduce a private member's bill.

[Motion To Extend Hours Of Sitting, April 28th, 1994]

My thanks to you, Mr. Speaker, and to the House for extending the session for 10 minutes. I am sorry that we had a misunderstanding a few minutes ago when we tried to do the same thing and failed.

Being from the riding of Mackenzie, which is located in northeastern Saskatchewan, we are very concerned about agricultural policy and the terms that the government imposes on agricultural policy in this country. We were faced with local conditions that are quite unusual this past year such as flooding and extra rain which has meant harvesting not completed from last year and it means that many producers will not be able to seed a crop this year because last year's crop is still in the fields.

There was a great deal of hope that a third line of defence would be worked out given this circumstance in northeastern Saskatchewan and northwestern Manitoba. However, no such thing happened. The minister and his counterparts across the country simply said that the crop insurance and the GRIP programs that are in effect are going to have to be used.

We urge all farmers in the circumstance of perhaps losing two crops to make certain they take advantage of that part of the crop insurance program that covers inability to seed in the coming year.

There have been other problems that these people have been facing. They face the same problems that all Canadian farmers have faced: low incomes due to low grain prices because of the

grain wars that have erupted between the United States and Europe; the United States' insistence upon using export enhancement funds to depreciate the value of export prices to the point that the only place Canadians can get a decent price for durum wheat is in the United States, which is the only country that has not been targeted for export enhancement funds.

In effect the market is $40 or $50 U.S. per tonne higher in the United States than it is in any of the markets that we normally sell to because the United States has been paying our old customers $50 to $60 a tonne to take their durum wheat instead and their other grains as well.

As well, for a short period of time a small window of opportunity opened up in the U.S. market for barley and that became the high value market. Canada sold barley into the United States which has triggered a short skirmish in the continuing skirmishes along that border in agricultural trade to the point at which one of the senators from North Dakota-although he says it was in jest-actually suggested to one of the committees of Congress that the 300 Minuteman missiles located in silos in North Dakota be reprogrammed to hit Canadian wheat farmers.

Those problems will pass and they will be resurfacing again from my experience in free trade with the Americans. We have had free trade, I might add, in meats for over 50 years and there have always been times when border access was very difficult even though we have a program of free trade in pork and beef between our two countries.

The challenge I want to speak about today in the short period that I have is the global challenge that arises now that we have had Canada-U.S. trade agreements, the North American free trade agreement, followed by the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade.

All of these agreements have substantially limited the power of national governments to impose or to have their own programs for agriculture or for production of any kind of product whether it is manufactured products or a raw product like most of the agriculture products that we export.

This has been assessed by various world trade experts and economists who have concluded that in Canada's case Canadian agriculture is going to have to get used to a lower level of export, lower incomes and this means that we have a great challenge ahead in rural Canada and at the federal level as well to find new ways of reducing production costs.

Where I live our ability to export is highly dependent upon the continuation of the crow rate which was there to entice us to settle that region in the first place. We are a long way from tidewater and cheap shipping. We are relatively close to Churchill but none of our purchasers of raw products seems interested in picking up products at Churchill so we have to ship to Vancouver, Thunder Bay or Prince Rupert, very long distances.

We are located about as far from those ports as it is possible to get on the prairies. Yet the government has continued to pursue the policy of the previous government of reducing the benefits to the crow rate.

The panel has looked at who should receive that payment. Though it has not made any recommendations the study shows that there is very little to be gained by paying the payment to the producers. It shows that if you paid the producers rather than the railways barley exports would disappear. There would be very little change in the production of meats, beef and hogs, which has been the contention by those who wanted the payment made to producers rather than to the railways. The government has what will probably be a difficult decision because there is so much politics behind the feeling among some farm groups that they could do a better job of spending the money by paying the railways themselves than the government paying the railways in order to keep the rates down.

We are left with very few options in government policy for the federal government. Under the new GATT arrangements it will have to reduce its subsidies. We have a challenge of trying to identify the subsidies of other countries so that we can make certain that we are operating on a fair basis. The previous government did not do a good job of that. It did not identify the subsidies the United States has even though it spent a lot of time negotiating the agreement with the United States.

We have some positive things we can look at. I am trying to hurry because of the time. We can still use marketing boards. There are great advantages to producers in gaining regulated control of the products they wish to market. That has been proven through the wheat board, the hog marketing boards, the Ontario Wheat Board, as was mentioned, various milk marketing boards, and the chicken and egg marketing boards across the land.

These agencies do an excellent job of making certain that a product finds a market, that it gets to market with the least possible cost without running trucks and trains back and forth across the country. It is the most efficient way to work.

Therefore I would urge the government to pursue those options, particularly putting more grains under the Canadian Wheat Board and expanding the jurisdiction of the Canadian Wheat Board to go into eastern Ontario and the rest of the country as it chooses as well.

I note that there is a need for revitalization. I was at a committee meeting this morning at which the department officials talked about rural revitalization. I note that there are a lot of things that need to be done in this area and that can be done even in spite of the GATT rules.

We have taxation policies that favour the relatively wealthy, medium and high income people, relatively old people, but we do not have any RRSP treatment for the young which would permit them to invest in their farms and businesses at a young age to get some tax benefits. Instead, we wait until they get into their middle years and older and then the tax system encourages the investment in RRSP. We actually lose taxes as a result of that.

Why do we not invest the tax treatment in the younger people so that they can revitalize local communities and maybe back off a little bit the tax advantages that we are giving to the medium and high income people? We should be pursuing these and a whole host of other things that I had on my list. Perhaps some other time the House will grant me the privilege of presenting the rest of those ideas.

[Supply, April 28th, 1994]

Point of order, Mr. Speaker. I would like the permission of the House to speak for eight or ten minutes, please, if that is possible.

[Supply, April 28th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I enjoyed the hon. member's remarks but I have questions on two issues that he raised.

One is the deregulation of transportation which he has been advocating. I wonder what the arguments are in favour of doing that given our experience this past crop year in shipping into a deregulated market, namely the United States which is relatively deregulated in transport. Our hopper cars hauling wheat and durum into the United States have a turnaround time of something in the order of 40 days or more before they are dumped and returned in a deregulated system. In Canada under regulation the turnaround time is 13 to 15 days.

I wonder if he would comment on the advantages of deregulation given that experience. Would he also explain a little further why he was so critical of the proposed high tariffs on butter and dairy products between ourselves and the United States and

other countries. In reality most of the likely trade in dairy products will be between Canada and the United States.

Given the fact that it is impossible for us to export anything into the United States by way of dairy products, the reality is that its tariffs will be as high or higher than ours given that it has had a GATT waiver all these years on dairy products.

This is one of the reasons that Canada was very loathe to implement the GATT ruling that the U.S. got prior to these last negotiations forcing us to open our markets to its yogurt and ice cream. The facts of the situation are that if we had opened the border we could have bought ice cream and yogurt, put it in the freezer or fridge of our motorhome in order to go down to Arizona and hit the border only to find that we could not take those American products into the United States because it was absolutely illegal to take dairy products the other way.

I wonder if the member would tell us about deregulation and if he does not recognize that there may be some fairness to the high tariffs on dairy products.

[Petitions, April 13th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I have several hundred more names to add to the thousands that have already been presented from my riding and surrounding areas calling on the Parliament of Canada to urge government to abolish the Senate.