David Anderson

[Committees of the House, October 18th, 2006]

They were invited. Get the facts right.

[Committees of the House, October 18th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The member has attacked me personally. I would like to make it clear that our position is what it has been in the past, and that is, we want to see the Canadian Wheat Board as one of the options for farmers. If he is going to accuse me of other things than that, he should be accurate in what he is saying.

[Committees of the House, October 18th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, this actually ties into the last question with what I can only call it scare tactics from the member from Winnipeg when she was giving the information she had. I will put it that way.

The fact is there are voluntary boards around the world. There is a voluntary board in Ontario. There is one in Australia as well. In order for the board to continue to exist, it does not need to be mandatory. The Australian wheat board has almost an export monopoly on grains in Australia. It functions well. People are free domestically to move their grain. The Ontario Wheat Board has been a marketing board that has had choice in Ontario here for several years. Those opportunities exist and the options work for farmers.

[Committees of the House, October 18th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, now you see what farmers are supporting. They are the ones who have kept the Wheat Board over the years.

The members opposite say the Wheat Board is going to completely fail. We do not say that. We say we are going to offer it as an option. We think that it has a lot of potential. It has a lot of advantages right now over most of the other entities in the industry. If she is saying it is going to completely disappear, I hope that the farmers are not listening to her when she says that because they hope that the Wheat Board can be one of those options. They know there are going to be jobs still in Winnipeg, that there is going to be a payroll there.

Most of the jobs that are in Winnipeg are not volume dependent. If the board is at all competent at being part of this marketing choice option, those jobs are going to continue to exist. That money is going to continue to come into Winnipeg and farmers will have the opportunity to prosper as well.

[Committees of the House, October 18th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad that question was asked, because I really wanted to get into that and I actually forgot about it during my speech.

The Wheat Board itself has done surveys. We would have to stretch it to say that it was trying to find a real neutral position with the survey. The last one actually showed 54% of producers in western Canada want choice as their option. They want choice in marketing. That was the Wheat Board's own survey. Sixty per cent of them in the Wheat Board survey actually said that the Wheat Board would be far better off if it had competition. It would make it a far more effective and efficient marketing entity if it had some competition.

While the member wonders if we represent farmers, we actually do because we have the rural ridings in western Canada, so we are proud to say we represent farmers. It is not just ourselves who are saying that there needs to be choice. Farmers themselves are saying, even to the Wheat Board when it asked in its surveys, that they want choice and they would like to see the opportunities that come out of that, the same opportunities that the rest of this country has.

[Committees of the House, October 18th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, it is also good to see the member for Malpeque realize he has problems with the motion, so he will try to turn attention away from it. The fact is that it is so poorly written it would affect virtually every activity in which the Wheat Board is involved. If we had a vote tomorrow, we would see the member voting for it. Obviously, we have to be far more responsible than that. The member is in opposition. He can resort to whatever hysteria and hyperbole he wants, but as the party in power, we have to be responsible for the decisions that we make. Our decision is that we think western Canadian farmers need choice in marketing and we would like to bring that forward to them.

I would like to make one other point, which is that I am extremely proud to follow the man who is the Prime Minister of this country right now. Canadians have seen what a leader he is and they are turning to him. They are very thrilled with the fact that we are actually keeping our promises. Everywhere we go across this country people are saying, “We cannot believe that you people kept your promises after 13 years of what we had before”.

[Committees of the House, October 18th, 2006]

Plus freight and elevation, exactly. It just did not make sense. It did not make it profitable. That project has sat for years waiting for an opportunity. I talked to people at home and they still wish that they had the opportunity to participate in that. Bill C-300 deals a little bit with that opportunity that we think we need to have for western Canadian producers.

The surprise to me was that members of the opposition decided that they would oppose this. The opposition is led by an agriculture critic who says that farmers need some strength in the marketplace, but when we came forward with a bill that would actually give them some, that would not have changed the marketing system, he opposed it. His colleagues opposed it because they do not know any better and they get their direction from him.

We would think the NDP would be on side with a proposal such as this, small community projects and people could get together and work with their neighbours and set up a processing facility to process their own grain. One would think the NDP would take that up in a minute, but the NDP decided that ideology was more important than farmers. For some of us this is not much of a surprise any more.

We see it in the debate that is going on right now. We simply want to offer western Canadian farmers the choice to do their own business. Let me as a western Canadian producer when I get up in the morning decide that I am going to sell some grain. I am going to take a look at what the price of grain is. I am going to make what I think is good deal and I am going to move my grain.

The opposition members do not want that to happen. They want me to have to go to the Canadian Wheat Board and I have to sell it to the Canadian Wheat Board. I have to buy it back and then I have to try to find someone to buy it from me.

Someone called me last night and said that right now he has a barley sale, organic barley into the United States. He made the sale. He went to the board for the buy back and the board told him that he could have the buy back if he wanted to pay $122 a tonne for a buy back, which is unbelievable. That is almost $3 a bushel extra just to buy his own grain back. His grain is sitting in the bin. He has made a sale into the United States for his organic grain which the board does not market. Then the board tells him, “You have to give us over $3 a bushel just to get your own grain back”. That is a true story.

It is interesting that the member for Malpeque will not believe me when I say that. He does not understand how the system works. That is very unfortunate. He is the one on the other side who is in charge of telling the opposition members what their agriculture decisions and policies are. He does not understand what farmers have to go through.

The member for Malpeque wonders why people become angry. The reason is that he does not have a clue what is going on in western Canada. He does not seem to care. He has an ideological position that he thinks he is going to stay with no matter what. Meanwhile our farmers are going broke.

The Liberals have a history of doing this to our farmers. I do not think they should stand up in the House and try to pretend that they are protecting farmers on the Canadian Wheat Board issue. A few years ago when we had grain farmers who wanted a choice, who wanted to do something different with their wheat, what happened? Did the Liberals offer to have a plebiscite? Absolutely not. The Liberals locked the farmers in jail.

People went to jail and people were being strip searched for weeks at a time. That was as a consequence of that member, the member for Wascana and the Liberal caucus at the time making a decision that that was the way farmers in western Canada should be treated.

Western farmers are tired of it. They want the opportunities that farmers in the rest of Canada have. They want an opportunity to get out there and market their grain. Western farmers are not afraid of the opportunities that face them.

When I say that the George Morris Centre says that there are between 8,000 and 15,000 jobs that would be available in western Canada if we had these value added opportunities, farmers say, “Let me at it. Let me have the chance to do that kind of a thing”.

The government will continue to move ahead. We want to bring choice to western Canadian farmers, the same choices that farmers across this country have. We want to give them the same opportunities that other farmers have. The farmers are very supportive of what we are doing here. It is unfortunate that some of the special interest groups funded by NDP governments and by Liberal caucuses are standing in the way of the opportunities for western Canadian farmers.

[Committees of the House, October 18th, 2006]

Absolutely, cash advances. The member is absolutely right. It would stop the board's ability to offer or to administer cash advances. I do not think the member for Malpeque probably understood that when he wrote the motion but that certainly is the impact that it would have. Actually, my colleague makes a very good point. One of the reasons he probably does not understand the impact is because he does not live anywhere near the region where the board applies.

Western Canadian farmers have told me time and again that they are capable of making their own decisions. They do not need people coming from outside and telling them what is good for them. The member for Malpeque has been doing that to western Canadian farmers for many years and they are getting mighty tired of it.

One of the things that the motion would affect is the ability to administer cash advances. If our farmers do not have that ability, they have nothing. We just extended and improved the cash advance program. We are working through the final regulations to give farmers the opportunity to borrow up to $100,000 cash free and then they can turn around and borrow up to $400,000 against their inventory. We do not want to interfere with that and we are wondering why the member for Malpeque would be.

The motion would also interfere with the ability to manage the contingency fund that is so important to the board's operations. It interferes with its ability to establish and to manage any of the separate funds that it sets up. I am sure that the board itself does not want restrictions put on that. It restricts any opportunity to provide for enhanced employee benefits. I do not think the member for Malpequeprobably understood that either when he brought this forward.

It actually interferes as well with the ability to change the election process and improve the election process even as the board requests. The board actually agreed with us on the idea that these permit books that were not active be removed from the active mailing list. The board was with us on that in spite of what the NDP and the Liberals have said. If they were to come to use with a suggested change for an election process, this motion that the member for Malpeque has brought forward would stop us from being able to do that.

It also would stop the government from being able to appoint directors or a president. I am sure the member did not mean to interfere in that way either. It would interfere with the board's ability to invest in outside projects and, of course, it is involved in a number of things at universities, at research centres and there are partnerships around the world. It would also interfere with the ability to do the board's final audit for the year.

It actually goes further than that. It would interfere with any ability to change regulations that have anything to do with the board's operations. That would render the board's operation impossible because there have been 525 orders in council over the last 14 years and they deal with most of the issues that I have just mentioned. Orders in council concerning the board regularly go out. The member for Malpeque apparently wants all of that stopped until we have a plebiscite.

I do not think he understood what he was doing when he wrote this. However, I am sure that will not change his mind in terms of insisting that his party would support it. The motion would actually cripple the board and bring total chaos. He has brought 100 unintended consequences that he did not realize because of the poor wording of his motion. Hopefully he will take a bit more time the next time and maybe talk to some of us who understand the board and how it operates. A number of people, including some of my colleagues, have spent many years dealing with this issue. They certainly have the capability and the capacity to direct the member for Malpeque and to give him some clear understanding of what the board is all about.

I want to take a minute to talk about one of the other options or opportunities that we have offered western Canadian farmers. The member for Malpeque said that he has been a farmer advocate for many years and that he wrote a report last year that supposedly said that farmers needed more access to opportunities and to capital, and that they needed more ability and power in the marketplace.

My colleague, the member for Battlefords—Lloydminster, brought forward Bill C-300. It is not a big bill but it is a good bill. It basically says that under Bill C-300 prairie producers could market their own wheat and barley directly to processing facilities owned by prairie producers. It seems pretty straightforward does it not? Prairie producers can market their own grain to a processing facility that is owned by their friends and neighbours.

Finally, we have a small thing here that would give farmers an opportunity. In the past of course this has not been allowed. Swift Current is in the centre of my riding where a few years ago people wanted to set up a pasta plant. They had support from the area and they had a great project going. It was going to be very successful and we thought we could compete with anyone in the world. We decided that there was no sense in sending our grain to another country so someone else could make it into pasta and get the benefit from that. We decided we should keep it at home and make pasta in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, and ship it out to the world. Since we grow the best durum in the world we wanted to see what we could do with pasta.

The project never got off the ground. The main reason the project did not get off the ground is that the Canadian Wheat Board said, “We are not going to let producers deliver their own grain to this facility and then process it. They have to go through the buy back”. They have to take their grain which is in their bins and they have to sell it to the board and then they have to buy it back at a higher price. Then they can try to sell it to the pasta plant.

[Committees of the House, October 18th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, we heard a bit of an attack earlier on the character of the Prime Minister and I want to respond to that because I do not think the member for Malpeque should be talking to anybody about character.

I will tell the House a bit about the circumstances of how we come to be here today. He is one of the people in the opposition who insisted that the agriculture committee have extra hearings and meetings. This afternoon the agriculture committee had an extra hearing. All committee members were there while he was here introducing his concurrence motion. I would suggest that he does not have that much of an interest in farmers. He is way more interested in playing with this issue politically than he is in actually dealing with the issue honestly. I know a number of people at the agriculture committee were very upset. They expected that he would be treating it seriously, particularly since he is the official opposition critic. However, he does not seem to be treating his position seriously and I suspect he will not be treating this issue seriously at all.

I want to point out a few different things. We have heard a bit about the hysteria and hyperbole that accompanies this issue. The NDP member just spoke about the fact that she thought the Alberta Conservative government should not have been spending money on promoting its side of this issue and that the federal NDP government seems to be against it.

I would like to ask her a question and perhaps I will get the opportunity later. However, will the NDP speak out against the money that the Saskatchewan and Manitoba NDP governments are spending on this issue? The NDP government has clearly taken one side of this issue. It is supporting and actually helping to establish organizations that will then be speaking to this issue. I would be interested in hearing a little later what she has to say about that issue.

There is another thing that we need to deal with today. She mentioned that there seems to be too much secrecy and not enough oversight. I am not sure what she was talking about, but we can certainly say that about the Canadian Wheat Board over the last few years. Western Canadian producers have not had access to information about the Wheat Board. For example, they can no longer find out through the Wheat Board's annual reports how much money is being spent on communications, advertising and those kinds of things.

As a consequence of that and with the help of the NDP, we proposed an amendment to the accountability act that would help people to access that kind of information with regard to the Canadian Wheat Board. We look forward to dealing with secrecy and providing a bit more oversight into the organization in the future.

There has been an issue over the last few days about the voters list. I need to speak to that and address the issue. Yesterday, the leader of the NDP rose and started to make wild accusations about the voters list for the director elections this fall. He clearly did not understand what he was talking about, which is unfortunate, but hopefully we can provide him and the public a bit of information so they can more clearly understand what is going on in terms of the director elections and the voters list for those elections.

Over the past few years there have been director elections regularly. The voters list has always been a huge concern because everyone who indicates an interest in grain gets a permit book. There are many permit books that are not even used. People do not deliver on them. Someone may own a quarter of land who lives in the city and has nothing to do with the operation of the farm but still has a permit book.

Up until now the ballots have been mailed out to everyone and have actually gone to people who are deceased. There has been no way to know whether people are farming or not farming, or if they have retired or are living in another country. The minister decided to send ballots to farmers who had actually delivered on permit books over the last two years. In that way the government would know that these people had made deliveries and were actively farming. Anyone else who has an interest in grain has not been kept from voting. They simply need to make a statutory declaration saying that they have an interest in the grain and that they would like a ballot and a ballot will be sent out. We definitely wanted to clear that up because there was misleading information coming from particularly the NDP but the Liberals seemed to be mouthing some of that as well.

I would also like to make a point for the member for Churchill who admitted that he was not familiar with agriculture. She said that the Canadian Wheat Board stands between farmers and conglomerates. We would suggest that the CWB is actually standing between farmers and opportunity. We looked into this.

The agriculture committee heard last week that the present grading system, which is based on having to visually distinguish the kinds of grains, costs farmers in the neighbourhood of $200 million per year. That grading system is maintained primarily because of the Wheat Board. It has made statements that it cannot possibly get rid of it for another 10 years. Everybody else in the world has a declaration system where farmers can declare the kind of grain they have and then it is checked to ensure it is accurate. That is costing about $200 million a year.

We also know there are freight costs because rail cars are not being fully tendered. George Morris Centre has done work that says that western Canadians are missing between 8,000 and 15,000 jobs that would be available if there were the value added opportunities that we could get if we were able to market our own grain. Western Canadian farmers will have a huge opportunity when we move ahead on this issue and when we move to choice.

I noticed that the member opposite did not really want to talk that much about his concurrence motion and I would suspect the reason he does not want to talk about it is that it is a mess. Tomorrow we will request that people vote against it. We tried to explain to the agriculture committee what the implications of it were. The opposition members were not that interested in serving farmers. They are more interested in their own political stunts so they went ahead and passed this.

I just want to point out some of the consequences that would come out of passing the motion if the member for Malpeque has his way. The Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food recommended:

That the government prior to any legislative or regulatory action affecting the mandate of the Canadian Wheat Board as it is currently constituted under the Canada Wheat Board Act, submit through plebiscite to all those eligible to vote in Canadian Wheat Board elections, a clear and direct question asking whether those eligible to vote support or oppose the single desk selling provisions of the Canadian Wheat Board.

That is a mouthful which I am sure hardly anybody could understand. I think the reason the member for Malpeque chose to word it that way was to try to confuse people and to confuse the issue. He probably does not even know this but the board itself does not have a legislative mandate. We can look right through the act and it does not have a legislative mandate. People have tried to take different sections of the board and say that it does but the only possible place that one could actually imply that there is a mandate for the board is in section five where it talks about the object of the board. It says that the object is marketing in an orderly manner in interprovincial and export trade grain grown in Canada. It does not say anything about a single desk and there is no mention of a mandate anywhere in the Canadian Wheat Board Act.

Right off the bat the member's motion does not make any sense, which may not surprise some of us here. The consequence of this is that the recommendation either applies to nothing in terms of the board or it applies to everything. We assume that he does not want it to apply to nothing so he is probably saying that it applies to all the activities in which the board is involved.

Let me explain the consequences of that. This would mean the end of the government or the board's freedom to do a number of things, such as setting initial grain prices. Farmers would not be allowed to set initial grain prices. They certainly would not be allowed to adjust grain prices.

We are sitting in a situation right now where grain prices are the highest they have been in 10 years and our farmers are telling us that, more than ever, they want the opportunity to market their own grain so that they can take advantage of the market. The market is surging and they have opportunities now that they have not had for a decade. What happens? The Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc working with them are preventing western Canadian farmers from having an opportunity to access the market when it is at its peak.

As usual, they are working against the interests of farmers. They want to keep them poor. They want to keep them down on the farm and unable to stand on their own two feet so they have to depend on them. My farmers are telling me that they do not want that. They want opportunities. They want to move ahead and they want to market their own grain.

The motion would also stop us from making a final payment to farmers. I guess everyone here understands that the board sets the initial payment in agreement with the government and then, throughout the year, hopefully, if the price goes up, adjustment payments are paid out and at the end of the year the farmers get whatever extra money is in the pool account. The member for Malpeque wants to shut that down. We do not think that makes good sense at all.

Another thing the motion would do is affect the board's borrowing capabilities. It would stop loan financing and the board's ability to guarantee payments.

[Canadian Wheat Board, October 6th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, the member can scream all he wants, but the reality is the latest Wheat Board survey shows that 55% of farmers want change. Sixty per cent of farmers in western Canada believe if they have change, if the Wheat Board has competition, that will improve the way they conduct their business.

We are committed to giving western Canadian farmers the same choice as farmers in the rest of the country. We think that is a good option for western Canadian farmers.