Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today and join the discussions on the budget implementation.
The last member spoke eloquently about the impacts, or lack of impact in some areas, of the budget in her riding. I guess we all face that same dilemma. Certainly it is difficult to come up with a one size fits all budget that addresses issues across the country.
However we see a spending spree with this budget. It is a kind of shotgun approach to everything and anything that has been on the Liberal list for the last nine years. We almost swear there will be a spring election this year when we start analyzing the budget. I know you look up with shock and awe, Mr. Speaker, but when we look at the spending, a little here and a little there in dribs and drabs, we swear somebody is shaping up for an election so he or she can point to all the wonderful things that finally have been done. Maybe it is just somebody shopping for a legacy. Maybe it is not an election at all; maybe it is just a legacy budget. However not a lot of folks out there fell for it.
I have become part of a new committee in the House that reviews government spending and looks at the estimates. How the money is allocated to different things is done in the budget and then we start to approach it from the standpoint of whether it is working. My interest in that committee lies more in the performance reports on a lot of these initiatives we see lined in a budget. Did we get bang for our buck? Did taxpayers actually get a program in which they were interested? Is there anything in there that they could say it is good for them? The more and more I talk to my particular constituents, they say that it has missed them totally.
I will not give the travelogue that the last member did but my riding is very dependent on agriculture. We have been on a downhill slide for the last five years, I guess since the demise of the Crow rate. We did not get the second half of that package to do the value added out west. The government took away the Crow rate that gave us the subsidy on shipping our product but it did not allow us then to take over the remanufacture of and add to the value of our product. That was supposed to be the second half of that package. We are still waiting for that, and that was five or six years ago. It has not happened. We felt that sting in my riding.
We look at this budget and the previous budgets. The same agriculture minister is still here so I guess it rests with him in an AIDA program, which he and his bureaucrats in Ottawa developed. It was supposed to address issues out west. They missed the target. The formula was wrong. The level of support was totally wrong. The area I represent Saskatchewan was hardest hit. It did not qualify for any of that money.
Of the money that went into the program, a good chunk of it, some 35% to 40% went into administration; money in, money out. Then the government compounded the problem by coming out with a program called CFIP, a son of AIDA. The only thing that carried on through were all the fundamental mistakes. There was still no way to trigger that sucker for most of the farmers in my area. They just could not make it work. The few that did systematically faced audits and clawbacks by Revenue Canada, with interest and penalties attached. In its wisdom the government retroactively and arbitrarily changed the rules. It did it all by itself.
There is a lot of discussion in this place about retroactivity in laws. We cannot do it with the sex offender registry because we are invading the bad guy's privacy and his constitutional rights. We cannot do retroactivity in a DNA database because their constitutional rights as criminals supercede the victim. However we can retroactively change the rules and regulations against farmers, and less people qualify. It flies in the face of logic and a lot of my folks are starting to come to terms with it. In spite of the government and its lack of initiative, they will carry on. That is the pioneering spirit which is alive and well.
I have a tremendous base in my riding too that are elk producers. There has been a lot of discussion about the elk industry in the last while. Unfortunately, a lot of it has been negative press with the chronic wasting disease. There has not been an instance in the past year and some. That is great, maybe we are on top of it. However we see the numbers. Roughly the same number of elk have been put down, as we saw with the scarpie epidemic in Quebec and the east side of Ontario.
The government is coming out now with a new policy. It has started valuing the elk at $2,000 a head when probably the average value is $15,000 to $16,000. The government is paying $2,000 for a $16,000 elk when it puts it down. We saw that same formula used in scarpie where a sheep or goat was valued at $300 or thereabouts and the government doubled it. It paid out at $600. How do we justify that to elk producers who see the value of their herd? The government increased the pay out to $4,000, which was still a quarter of the market value at that time, yet it doubled the value for the sheep payout.
It is Liberal logic and Liberal math. How can Liberals do that? I guess their MPs represent some of those areas so they have paid out and taxpayers have taken it through the nose. However my guys suffered on account of that. I still have folks who are doing battle with the agricultural inspection agency under Agriculture Canada because it has quarantined their ground. They have cleaned it up and have done everything the CFIA has asked of them. They dug up all the top soil, hauled it away and buried it with lime. They sprayed down the equipment, the buildings, the barns, the corrals, and everything else to sterilize the ground according to CFIA, the same thing the sheep producers had to do. My guys are still not allowed to put elk back on that ground, yet the sheep are back grazing in those pastures in Quebec.
My guys are to the point now where they have initiated a lawsuit against the government, and good for them. They need to wake somebody up here. Why are the rules different in one area than in another? Scrapie and CWD are the same diseases. They are attacking different livestock but they are the same darn thing. Why are my guys being punished? They did not see anything addressing a program in the budget. They wanted a three year program to put elk back in, then go back and test them but it is not in the budget. CFIA says that it cannot do it because there is no budget. Where is the money? It has money for a lot of other pet projects. Where is the money for the elk guys? It is not in here.
That is not all that hit farmers. The agricultural minister has come out with another new program. He changed the initials again. Now it is the APF. He shortened it by one letter. Maybe it will be better but I do not think so. Again, he cannot sell the darn thing to the provincial agriculture ministers unless he blackmails them and beats them into taking it or else. He cannot sell it to any farm group. Nobody out there supports it.
He had set an arbitrary deadline of April 1. He has backed off on that because he cannot find anybody who agrees with him other than his own bureaucrats. Rightly so because it will be a dismal failure. The funding has been cut again. The funding for agriculture, the third largest contributor to our GDP, is 1% of federal spending. We lose more than that through the cracks in one day. It is just not fair. My farmers realize that the APF will be a dismal failure as well. Most of my guys will not try to qualify for it.
I have another problem with the tail end of the CFIP. That program ends in 2003. All the billing and everything like that will be cleaned up by October. I have more and more guys in my riding who finally were able to trigger something in the 2002-03 crop year. However they cannot apply for CFIP because their fiscal year-end falls past January 2002. It just does not work for them. They are being told they have to wait for the applications for 2003. There will not be any because the program will be done, so my guys get squeezed out again because of a non-fiscal year end.
Did the bureaucrats not consider all this stuff? Apparently not. They wrote a program to get the public relations spin in the big cities so we had a safe, secure food supply. Again that is where the money will go in this budget. It will not go to the ordinary producer. Milk does not come off a shelf at Safeway, it comes out of a cow. Somebody had to get it there. Meat does not come off a shelf in the butcher shop, it came off an animal. It had to get there. With the bread, somebody had to grow the grain before they could grind it.
Agriculture has been forgotten totally in this budget. We have seen other instances in Saskatchewan over this past winter. We saw Revenue Canada come down with a heavy boot on junior hockey. It is saying that the little stipend the junior hockey players get for room and board, the $250 or $300 a month paid directly to the parents who board them, is income. The players are under the age of 18. Revenue Canada is saying that the player has income on which he has to play EI. He does not have to pay CPP because he is not 18 yet.
We have generated tax and EI. Some of these poor little hockey teams, which are run by charitable organizations, have been hit with up to $14,000, and they do not have it. They have charitable status. Not only that, the young hockey player who gets hit with a bill for $600, $700 or $800 does not have it. He is a young guy still going to school. The government had that program in effect through Saskatchewan. It whacked all the hockey teams there. It moved into Manitoba and it quit. I guess it hit a Liberal riding. It does not dare go into Ontario with that because that is the heartland for Liberalism, but it has not given the money back.
Taxation is all about fairness and we have not seen it. If the government is going to tax hockey players in Saskatchewan and their teams, then it should carry it across the board, and I would not have a legitimate complaint. However if it is only going to target Saskatchewan, then I have a complaint and a righteous one.
We look at the ludicrous amount of money spent in Bill C-68. We look at our junior hockey teams being hammered. We see agriculture being left out of the budget. We see a security budget from last year that left out the police and our military again. This budget just does not do it for the ordinary Canadian.
