David Anderson

[Agriculture, May 5th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, farmers are continually disappointed by the government. After years of denying western farmers marketing choice, and defending the system that is at the heart of the U.S. trade challenge, the Canadian Wheat Board minister changed his tune Friday when he said in the House:

...the government defends the rights of farmers to make their own marketing decisions...

There is a simple solution to this latest trade challenge. Will the minister and the government end the U.S. trade challenge by opening up the Canadian Wheat Board, allow westerners the right to make their own marketing decisions, and give western Canadian producers a chance to compete in a market that both wants and needs our grain?

[Agriculture, May 5th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, when the Canadian Wheat Board minister is not jailing farmers he is failing farmers.

On Friday the U.S. imposed a 10% levy on all Canadian grain imports. The minister says that Canadian farmers will not be immediately impacted and “that the practical impact at the moment is very small. It is largely in the category of a hypothetical problem”.

A 10% loss of income and a potential one half billion dollar loss of markets is not a hypothetical problem to prairie producers, especially after last year. When will the government move to fix this looming disaster for Canadian farmers?

[Agriculture, May 2nd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, that is rubbish. The minister responsible for the Canadian Wheat Board has assured farmers for the past year that this U.S. trade challenge has no substance. The Canadian Wheat Board has assured producers for the last year that the U.S. trade challenge has no substance to it.

Now we find that the United States department of commerce will levy duties of up to 20% on all Canadian wheat sales into the United States.

Is the minister so incompetent that he failed to take the United States seriously, or has he been deliberately misleading Canadian producers?

[Agriculture, May 2nd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, today we hear that the United States is imposing a 20% duty on all Canadian wheat exports to the U.S.

Western Canadian grain farmers are shaking their heads in disgust while the U.S. slams our grain industry with multiple trade actions and the government stands idly by.

The catalyst for these trade challenges has been the Canadian Wheat Board, but now all Canadian grain producers will be penalized.

Will the minister make the Canadian Wheat Board voluntary as so many producers want, or is he prepared to punish all Canadian producers for an outdated compulsory monopoly marketing system?

[Agriculture, May 1st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the government has failed to protect Canada from imports of dairy substitutes. The importation of butteroil-sugar blends has reduced the market share for Canadian dairy farmers. It has cost them a pile of money.

Now the working group has said that its report will not be ready for another month.

Is the government waiting until after the Perth--Middlesex byelection to give its dairy producers the bad news?

[Agriculture, May 1st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the dairy farmers of Canada have spent eight years trying to get the government's attention on the butteroil/sugar blend issue and the government has been indifferent.

Now the working group that was established to study the issue has also pushed producers right out of the loop.

Why, as has happened in so many other agricultural areas, is the government ignoring dairy producers?

[Agriculture, April 11th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, those presentations were made back in February. This agriculture situation makes absolutely no sense. It has taken a $5 billion department two years to create a program that now needs to be assessed by a private consultant. If this is not incompetence, then this abysmal failure must have been by design.

Why has the government left farmers standing alone just as they are going back into their fields? What is the real agenda here?

[Agriculture, April 11th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, it has taken the agriculture minister two years to come up with a risk management program which so far is a complete disaster for producers. Canadians farmers were hopeful they would finally have long term stability in their safety net programs.

Could the Minister of Agriculture explain why he waited until the implementation date to hire private consultants to then assess the already beleaguered APF program? Just how incompetent is the minister and his department?

[Situation in Iraq, April 8th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I also would like to rise and challenge the position that the member has taken. Basically he said there is not active genocide taking place in Iraq. I would ask the hon. member, what do 5,000 civilian casualties a month, civilians killed by their own government, count as? There is the brutality of prisons established specifically to rape women, prisons established to torture those people who worked against the regime, and the gassing of ethnic minorities. What is his definition of genocide if those kinds of things do not fit into that definition?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2003, March 28th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, we are here today to discuss the budget and the implementation act regarding that.

I have a quote from Ronald Regan that reminds me of some of the facts about budgeting and governments. He said at one time that the government was like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and absolutely no responsibility at the other. We see some of that in the budget we are addressing now.

I want to talk about some of the issues that really have not been addressed much. Those are agriculture and how it fares in the budget.

We have been misled once again by the government in terms of the promises it made to farmers. Over a year ago the minister had made a commitment that farmers would get some funding over the next few years toward their farm programs.

We have watched farmers fight over the last year to get a program in place under the new agriculture policy framework, which has not worked well. There is very little co-operation from any of the farm organizations. The government has been unable to put the program together so the details are in place, and that program has to be put in place by April 1.

Here we are a week before implementation is supposed to happen and the government after 18 to 20 months of consulting and talking about the new agriculture policy framework has been unable to put a program in place that producers can agree would be of any use to them. I may come back to that a little later.

I want to talk about the money which was promised specifically in the budget. The farmers were once again given a balloon that looked like it was blown up to be quite a big thing and once we started looking at it, the balloon popped and we realized there was nothing there but more hot air.

The finance minister told us that there would be $465 million in new spending for producers. We took that at face value, went back to our offices and started to look over what he had promised farmers. It turns out that of that $465 million, $220 million is called an advance for crop insurance spending. Over the last couple of years the crop insurance programs in a couple of the provinces have basically gone to zero or have gone into the hole because of claims. Rather than put money into that, the government has given farmers what it calls an advance. We have found out that this is not money at all; it is a loan that producers will have to pay back to the government over the next 15 years.

Out of the $465 million, the first $220 million will not even go to farmers. The government calls it an advance. Producers themselves and the farmers will have to pay it back. To tell people they are getting money under those circumstances is to mislead them.

Then the government said that it would give $20 million to FCC. That is not going directly to producers. It is a stand-alone institution. It has been given to it for some specific projects and specific things that the government wants to do. Once again, that money is not available to the farmer who is sitting on his farm wondering what he will to do this spring to get a crop in the ground.

The government also mentioned that $113 million would go to the vet colleges. It is great that this money will go to the veterinary colleges, except this was announced six months ago. The agriculture committee travelled last year and heard regularly and often from the veterinarian colleges that they needed some help. They were in danger of losing their accreditation which allowed them to credit veterinarians for international standards. In every presentation they made, the veterinarian colleges made that same plea for money to upgrade their facilities which had been left to deteriorate by the government for the last 10 years. The government announced last year that it would put that $113 million into the colleges. Then it announced it again in the budget, trying to convince people that it was new money.

The government also announced that there would be $100 million for the CFIA. That was only partially true because it was spread out over two years. I guess I am like most Canadians. It annoys me when I hear the government is to put huge amounts of money into a project and then I find out that it will be divided by two, three, four or five years. All of a sudden money that it said it would put into these programs basically amounts to virtually nothing.

As someone who is interested in agriculture and is committed to agriculture and our farmers, it is frustrating to see a government across the way either be incompetent in its programs or mislead farmers about the support it says it will give them.

Of the $460 million that has been announced, not one cent will go directly to farmers. Basically, most of this will go toward an expanded bureaucracy. It is hypocritical for the government to mislead farmers by pretending to give them support and money when in fact it is not doing that.

I want to talk a bit about the APF and the struggle the government has had to find a successful program. It was set up under five pillars. Farmers do not really know what is going on with this program. The government is coming forward now with different aspects of it. From the beginning, it looked like it would be a bureaucratic nightmare for farmers. In so many of the programs over the last few years, like AIDA and CFIP, the accountants and the bureaucrats did very well. We know for the AIDA program alone, between $150 million and $200 million worth of program money was spent on bureaucrats.

One of the top bureaucrats told a member of the agriculture committee a month ago that we should be happy for this new program because it would mean more jobs in Winnipeg. The point of the program is to help farmers. It is not a make-work project for urban areas. Once again the government has failed in its ability to come up with a program that is easy to use, that will backstop farmers and give them some success.

We see the government committing $100 million to environmental farm plans. I guess I would have to ask the members around me this. How can $100 million be spent to come up with a farm plan for farmers to use so they can explain what they are farming and whether their farms are safe and secure? That is appalling. It is ridiculous to think that much money can be spent on a bureaucratic device so that farmers can say what they are doing with their sprays, chemicals and gases. It is crazy.

There are other things like renewal. The government talks about renewal and trying to get younger farmers onto the land to renew the rural communities, but it does nothing that directly affects those communities. It has massive bureaucracies and meetings here and there with their rural secretariat and those types of things but it never comes back and touches the rural people.

I mentioned the risk management part of the APF earlier. It is extremely frustrating to have to deal with a bureaucracy that gets billions of dollars a year, but has taken two years to come up with a program that will not be ready when it needs to be. Farmers do not know what kind of coverage they have. They do not know what kind of triggers will be used to trigger coverage. Farmers are expected to take between $2 billion and $3 billion out of their own pockets to get this program off the ground and make it viable.

The really frustrating part about that is they have between $2 billion and $3 billion in the NISA program already. It is sitting there. It is in a program that has worked reasonably well for farmers and the government has persistently said that one of the things it wants to do is shake that money out of the NISA accounts. It is going to do that, but then it is going to turn around and force farmers to put that money back into the new programs which the government has set up. It seems to go on and on.

Another frustration is this. We were told a $45 billion EI surplus existed. It supposedly existed up until just before this budget. Then all of a sudden we are told that it is not there. We know someone is attempting to take the prime ministership away from our present Prime Minister. He is the person who has been responsible over the years for building this fund, putting it in place and letting us believe that it was there.

I guess I am reminded, as I think about him, of a quote from George Bernard Shaw, which says that a government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. Unfortunately, the problem is that the one who is named Peter in this country is the taxpayer, it is not the other prime minister. The government took $45 billion from taxpayers under the guise of putting it into an EI system. Then it turned around, applied it somewhere else and told people the money was gone; it has completely vanished. If anyone in the House did that, I think we would find ourselves in some serious difficulty with the legal authorities.

I will close with another quote from P.J. O'Rourke, who is a well known civil libertarian from the United States. He says that giving money and power to government is like giving whisky and car keys to teenage boys.