Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Macleod who is very competent in this area. I know farmers will want to hear from him.
I want to read what the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food actually said yesterday. He stated:
Mr. Speaker, I heard about the real voice for change group. They met the other day. I think there were about 30 of them who got together. It was a completely non-partisan event. David Orchard introduced the Leader of the Opposition and it just went on from there.
That is all he said. The member for Malpeque need only check Hansard. The member accused the minister of saying that he refused to meet with them and that is just not true. I think farmers are getting used to that member making things up.
This issue is obviously an obsession with him. Those of us on the agriculture committee have been trying since last October to deal with other important issues in agriculture, such as our business risk management planning, the APF issues that are going on and farm income support issues, but the member has consistently insisted that we come back to one issue. He is completely obsessed with it. We can see that by the motion that was put forward today.
If members take the time to read the motion, they will see that the minister the other day referred to him through his tinfoil hat. Members will see that it makes absolutely no sense for this motion to be in place right now because the barley plebiscite is underway. Thousands of ballots have already been sent back and farmers are responding to the plebiscite questions. If we have thousands of ballots back, it is probably evidence that the farmers actually do understand the questions.
Just as the ballots are coming back, the member comes forward with a motion that says we should call back all those ballots and replace them with something else. The motion does not make sense.
I hear the member referring to things like collectivism. It is a clear sign that he does not understand western Canadian agriculture in any way, shape or fashion. He laid out a lot of rhetoric today. He talked about there being more choice under the Wheat Board than there would be without it. He knows that is just ridiculous, that it is foolishness.
The CEO of the Canadian Wheat Board appeared before the agriculture committee yesterday and, as he gets paid to do, defended the Canadian Wheat Board. He rolled out the rhetoric that western Canadian farmers have heard forever, which is that the Wheat Board is doing a good job, that it gets premiums wherever it goes and that farmers should trust it. One of the reasons western Canadian farmers actually do not trust the Wheat Board is that for years they have asked for information but the Wheat Board has not been required to provide it. The farmers have said that they are smart enough and they want the information to sort it out for themselves.
This government has moved to bring the Canadian Wheat Board under the Access to Information Act so that western Canadian farmers will finally be able to find out what has been going on at the board, how their money is being spent on things like communications, advertising, promotion and what polling companies are being hired.
We know the former prime minister's campaign chair for the national campaign was hired by the Canadian Wheat Board in the past to do polling. That was a good gig for him, especially after the failure that the Liberals have shown in the elections.
The member says that if we open the board up there will be a problem with the grain companies having influence in the market. I do not think he realizes that the grain companies already sell over half the grain that is marketed in western Canada. There is a whole list of companies that are called accredited exporters. They market half the grain for the Canadian Wheat Board. Farmers do not need to be scared of a situation where they are dealing with grain companies. They deal with them in lots of other areas with other crops as well.
Yesterday in the agriculture committee, the member for Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound raised a very important point. The member said that Ontario premiums were at a discount to the western Canadian premiums but one needs only to look at what is happening in the market. In the agriculture committee yesterday, we talked about the fact that Ontario wheat was going into the United States and that the Ontario market was backfilling its market from western Canada.
If we were to think about that in any kind of economic terms, we would think that Ontario wheat was going into the higher priced market and the lower priced wheat was coming in to fill the gap that is left by the wheat that has gone out. We should take a closer look at what is going on and what advantage western Canadian farmers are getting from this system.
At the CFA reception last night, I spoke to a western Canadian dairy farmer who is very well respected in western Canada. He has been involved in the industry for a long time and has been successful at it. He found it to be quite a joke that people were trying to tie supply management to the Canadian Wheat Board. I asked him if he knew why they were trying to do that and he said yes, that it was a political thing. He was willing to acknowledge that the two systems were not even comparable. He got a bit of a kick out of the fact that the opposition was trying to tie these two things together.
I believe it is a sign of the opposition's desperation that it is far more willing to put its political ideology ahead of farmers' interests. We see that continuously.
I was disappointed today to hear the member's descent into personal attacks. I think he realizes that since his arguments are not sufficient he needs to resort to personal attacks. I guess I am getting used to that.
One of the points I should make is that there is no gag order on the directors of the Canadian Wheat Board. The member should be in western Canada to see the number of letters to the editors that three or four of the directors of the Wheat Board have written. One would almost think there was an organized campaign for them to get their message out into the papers. The Canadian Wheat Board was told not to continue to be involved politically in this and to get out and market grain. Yesterday, the CEO told us that they have been doing that. I think everyone in western Canada is comforted by the thought that the Wheat Board is trying to market grain rather than trying to influence things politically.
One of the other things we found out yesterday that was very interesting came from some events that happened a couple of months ago. When Mr. Arason, the new CEO was appointed, several directors on the board were indirectly attacking him by saying that his salary was higher than the salary of the previous CEO. We found out yesterday that the compensation Mr. Arason is receiving is definitely not higher than what the previous CEO was getting.
I am really concerned about the fact that those directors knew that what they were saying was not accurate. Farmers are calling me and saying that if the directors were lying about that kind of thing, they wonder what other things they have been misleading them on. There are a lot of questions in western Canada about what some of these directors are doing in their representation on the board. Farmers would like some answers to that as well.
We believe that western Canadian farmers need to have the freedom to choose how they market their grain through a strong, viable and voluntary Canadian Wheat Board.
Last fall, a task force on implementing marketing choice for wheat and barley had this to say about choice:
Marketing choice implies an open market in which CWB II, as an entity operating in that open market, will be a vigorous participant through which producers could voluntarily choose to market their grain. To achieve this, the existing CWB will need to transform itself over a transition period into CWB II. For this ‘choice’ to occur, CWB II needs to have a high probability of success in an environment where it will have to compete for business. One of our focuses has been on creating the environment for a high probability of commercial success for CWB II.
In closing I just want to say that it is the board of directors that has the opportunity to set the future direction for the Canadian Wheat Board in a voluntary system. There are some things they could do that would allow them to maintain their position in the industry and to move ahead and give farmers choice. I look forward to some of the options that they may come up with in the near future.