Gerry Ritz

[Agriculture, September 25th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, if that line were actually true and if he really were telling us the truth here, he would have no problem getting the last signatures on his APF.

The livestock industry is only the latest victim of the Liberal government's inability to deal with international trade issues. Nobody can wait another six months to see if they can trigger any--

[Agriculture, September 25th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday the Minister for Agriculture hid behind the beef value roundtable he claims he instigated last June. That very roundtable designed a comprehensive plan to deal with the escalating problem of cull cows. The minister rejected its plan as out of hand and replaced it with what? Silence, and lots of it.

Is the minister stalling so his new boss will get the credit for resolving this or does he just not really have a plan?

[Committees of the House, September 25th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour today to present, in both official languages, the sixth report of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates entitled, “Meaningful Scrutiny: Practical Improvements to the Estimates Process”. Pursuant to Standing Order 109, the committee requests that the government table a comprehensive response to this report.

[Agriculture, September 24th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I can understand the minister trying to shift this from trade to health because they have no political capital to fight a trade issue with the United States.

If the minister feels this is a health issue, then we had better get some better answers than the Minister of Health had on SARS. If it is a trade issue, then the Minister for International Trade had better get up to speed here rather than what he did on the softwood lumber crisis.

If we are forced to reconfigure our livestock to a mainly domestic market, producers need a plan. We need that plan now and we need a budget now. When will the minister deliver it?

[Agriculture, September 24th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, in his speech yesterday on the BSE crisis, the Minister of Agriculture said, “Unfortunately we are dealing with a health issue”.

If this is a health issue now, there is no way live cattle will ever cross the border because of the testing requirements. If that is the new reality about which the minister is talking, then our livestock industry will need a massive overhaul.

When will the minister table his revised plans for dealing with this crisis as a health issue?

[Supply, September 23rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the member is absolutely right. That is the type of thing we are not seeing at the federal level. We are not seeing any sort of leadership that says that if it is going to be solely a domestic market, here are the changes we need to make to make that happen. Tell us. Show us the light at the end of the tunnel so that we can start making plans accordingly and cull accordingly.

We have a glut of culled cattle in this country and no place to go with them. We know they are safe. We know it is good beef. We just have no processing in play that will handle that type of a glut.

The member makes an excellent point. We are starting to get the border open. We have to have live cattle moving. We know that Mexico, Russia and a lot of other countries are looking at us and saying that it is safe and secure. Let us get it moving. Let us get it going.

[Supply, September 23rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, that really is not hard to explain. He is saying that his people do not understand farming, and so be it, but they have the safest, most secure food supply in the world, bar none. During and even before the crisis our grocery bill is still one of the cheapest in the world.

There are reasons that we did not see a change in beef and other livestock products over the counter. For one, we still have our NAFTA imports and in southern Ontario, and Toronto especially, a lot of American beef is coming in. It is not western beef. It is not even Ontario beef because it goes south to be processed. We have that inventory in the mix, roughly two months, at all times.

The problem we had was with the supplementary quotas, the Oceanic beef, Australia, New Zealand, Uruguay, the grass fed beef that feeds into the fast food chains. Again, that is in play and there is two months booking ahead of time. We have that kind of inventory in the cycle before we can start to see savings from domestic raised beef.

On top of that, the packers during the summer cycle were into the hamburger and barbecue cuts, so they could use about 25% of the carcass, that is all. The rest of it is sitting in freezers from coast to coast to coast until we finally get a lot of this offshore stuff going.

The minister talked about 10 million pounds crossing the American border. That market is usually 880 million pounds a year. Ten million is a drop in the bucket. We are starting to roll but not to the degree that we need to do.

We do not have Mexico on board yet. It takes some of the lesser cuts, which will relieve some of the strain back to the packers. That is, in a nutshell, why we did not see a lot of change over the counter.

We also have the argument that if they lowered beef, pork would suffer, lamb would suffer, chicken, turkey and so on would suffer. There are always those arguments. The retail associations that came before the committee did a great job of outlining that. They print their flyers with pricing in them two and three months ahead of time. A lot of those things go into the mix.

We are seeing some cuts where prices have been lowered, such as hamburger. I know Rick Paskal from Alberta brought six semi-trailer loads of hamburger into Toronto. He was practically giving the stuff away just to prove that the product could be moved.

The right things were done without a plan from the government.

[Supply, September 23rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today and speak to the motion put forward by my colleagues from the Tory Party. I certainly agree with it.

The motion came before the agriculture committee in an emergency meeting this summer. I think it was July. It was unanimously passed. It was a non-partisan push, that we need to do everything and anything to get back to normalcy in the livestock industry.

It is not just beef at this time either. We talk about beef because that is the key but it is the livestock industry as a whole. Every facet of it is facing crisis and needs to be let out.

I will be splitting my time with the member for Medicine Hat who just reminded me of that. Of course he is very much into the beef industry as well.

It is not just a photo op. The minister talked about that. It is fine to have all these folks go down to Washington and so on but Washington alone is not the answer. It is part of the answer but it is not all of it.

We have interventions from other countries saying that they are ready to get back into the Canadian beef trade. Who is over there talking to them? All members of the House who have been in sales know that if they get a lead on something they follow it up. They get over there, do their job, make the sale and then they are done.

The Prime Minister has led team Canada initiatives all over the world. At the drop of a hat, he is away. If he is looking for a legacy here is a chance. He can take a beef sample kit, hit the skies in his fancy new Challenger jet and get the job done. However he is not doing that. Where the heck is he? Neither one of the so-called leaders are showing leadership on this file.

We have the minister stumbling around saying that he talks to Ann Venamen on the phone and that he does this and he does that. I have a lot of constituents who will talk to me over the phone but a lot of people want a face to face meeting when it is a real crisis situation. I think this is and I think it requires a trip to Washington. We need to talk to the folks down there and show them the human side of this, show them the people who are in crisis out there.

In his intervention with the minister, the member for Crowfoot mentioned that we were not seeing a strategy now. We saw the CFIA do its job. We saw the trace-out working properly. They came back to a farm in my riding, McRae at Baldwinton. They are still questioning whether it was even their cow. There is a lot of concern out there that in their hurry to find the right animal they glossed everything over and, boom, we were done. They have some lawsuits pending and they are talking about going after the CFIA, the government and so on, because of the way they handled that particular farm. Others are looking at that too. That is something else out there on the radar screen, along with 3,500 people at CFIA who are poised to go on strike. Right in the middle of all of this, we may finally get some beef moving again and these guys will be off the job. The minister will have his hands full in the next little while, and rightly so.

We saw this develop into a crisis because they would not implement a floor price on sales right after the BSE incident happened. The minister talked about his round table and the beef industry, and so on. That recommendation came right from those folks. We picked it up as a political issue here and talked about a floor price. Let us not let it drop to the bottom. What is hurting cull cows now is not allowing the feedlots to restock and so on. People are not selling their cattle. The price is not back up.

We are starting to see it move. We are seeing some strength in grassers coming off, the six and seven weights, that the price is coming back, but a lot of folks out there who back-grounded over the summer are stuck with oversized cattle that will not fit into the feedlot situation. What do they do?

We have cow-calf operators, a lot of them up in my country, who do not winter their calves over. They do not even have the infrastructure to do it. No penning. No water bowls. Nothing. We are facing another year, in a lot of western Canada, with a lack of feed. We need feeding programs. We new a cull cow program. We need some leadership and some strategy from the government. We are not seeing it. It has dropped the ball right there at centre court.

We still have containers that were locked overseas when this hit 120 days ago. They are still sitting there now. The Beef Export Federation cannot get anybody to address the situation and get these containers home so we can start addressing some of these markets that will be coming back on stream.

The Alberta government announced $4 million to bring back a few from Japan and Korea specifically for some of their shippers but we do not know what the federal government has done.

According to the Beef Export Federation and the folks who do this, the government has done nothing. Those containers are still over there. We do talk about the future of the industry but we are not taking care of the ABCs to get us there. Again, it is that lack of vision and planning.

We do need a transition. We did not see one at the start of the BSE crisis and we are not seeing one now; a transition that will give the industry strength and something to hang on to and hang on for.

The banks and lending institutions have been very good. They have all restructured. Guys have gone in and renegotiated and done a great job at that. We have seen the PFRA, which falls under the minister's purview, demanding cash before cattle is released out of pasture. That is unprecedented.

The federal government's own agency is demanding cash from cash-strapped farmers when they cannot access all this APF money and transition money that the minister talks glowingly about. How do farmers get at it? Now he is saying that he will allow some advances to provinces that have signed on, which really puts pressure on provinces that have not signed on. The specific reason they have not signed on is that it will not work. There is less money in the system now for primary production of agriculture than there ever has been. The agri-food side of the Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food has always done very well and continues to do very well, but the primary producer on the agriculture side is getting short-changed again.

The federal government is trying to pull out of companion programs. There goes the farmers' crop insurance program, the drought and trade subsidies and so on. The feds are going to pull out. They are putting less money in. In the middle of all of this, the federal government announces that it will backstop Bombardier for $1.2 billion in loan guarantees for the purchase of Bombardier products. Where is the backstop for agriculture products?

The fiscal capacity seems to be there because the Liberals have money to stuff in all their pet pigeon holes, but they cannot backstop primary producers. What is wrong? Agriculture is the third largest contributor to the GDP in this country. Some 200,000 jobs revolve around agriculture on the in and the out. How come these guys cannot get that?

The member for Crowfoot asked: If there is a strategy, who designed it? That is a pertinent question because we see more and more of these flawed agricultural programs coming out of the ivory towers here from guys who have never seen a cow, never seen a dusty piece of ground, do not even know what wheat or durum is, or canola for that matter, and they are designing the programs. No wonder they are doomed to fail. The Liberals are going for the public relations spin for the people who eat in Canada but not for the guy who produces the food.

If we look back over history at any third world country, we see that they became third world countries because they could not feed themselves. We are facing that same situation because the Liberals do not take the production of food in this country seriously. A lot of money is going into food safety, biometrics and all sorts of fancy stuff out there but not into primary production, not to the guy on the ground, the family farm, the guy raising the cattle, the guy raising the sheep, hogs, or whatever it is. The Liberals do not take it seriously.

We are seeing supply management going into a tailspin because every time we have trade talks the Liberals start talking about dismantling supply management because they do not have the power anymore on the world stage to keep things up. We are seeing trade challenges to our Canadian Wheat Board again and again. Whether one likes the board or hates the board, the farmer pays the bill. It comes out of their pooling accounts.

Every time we turn around the primary producer is getting whacked between the eyes and the government is sitting back and saying it has all kinds of money to backstop producers but they have to make a deal with the devil to get it.

A lot of folks in western Canada are starting to wake up and say that they will not go that way. They are saying that they cannot be bought. Ontario is saying the same thing. The Ontario minister is saying that farmers in Ontario cannot be bought. Even through an election she is standing solid because her production groups are saying that this is not a good deal and that we should not buy into it. Once a province is locked in it is locked in for five years.

The minister has said that he will do an annual review. He is missing one little word in that phrase. It should be a mandatory annual review. We have seen annual reviews on a lot of things that Treasury Board has done and the reports get shelved, never get looked at, disappear from the light of day and are never scrutinized.

Looking for an annual review does not mean a thing. It is a hollow promise unless he puts it in the legislative portion of it that it is mandatory and has to be done. In that way the provinces would have some clout and could come back after the minister.

Where is the plan? Where is the strategy? We have a processing shortfall in Canada, an infrastructure that is sadly lacking. We need to do something with our culled cows. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of 300,000 to 400,000 head of cattle by the end of the year have to go somewhere. A lot of things could be done with those cows but we do not even have the processing to do it because we have let that go.

This all comes down to one mad cow and 100,000 mad farmers. I think the minister would be much better off to start recognizing these farmers.

[Supply, September 23rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, it was a pleasure to see the minister rise to speak to the issue.

He talked glowingly about a future for the industry. I agree with him. They are a tough breed out there. They will hang on. The thing that is missing, and the minister must show some leadership in this, is that we do not see leadership, we do not see a plan to transition the industry from the crisis it is in today to the future he talked about working toward.

We do not see protocols on the handling of the SRMs and rendering. Where is that protocol? We are seeing that type of thing happening. We are seeing landfills being filled with this type of product but we do not have leadership at that level. We are seeing the provinces and industry agreeing. Everybody agrees that the APF the minister keeps blackmailing folks into will never handle a crisis like this, or give us the transitioning that is required to get back to pre-May 20 situations.

Certainly there are going to be some changes but what we are not seeing is leadership and planning at the federal level. We have to have that. That is the void.

[Petitions, September 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to stand today after the vote last night to present a petition on the definition of marriage. Of course after the vote last night it will be interesting to see the result of the Liberals' response to this petition now. From 1999 until this point, of course, they agreed with everybody that it was the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others. It will be interesting to see the reply to this petition now, calling for that same thing.