Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to stand today on behalf of the producers of Battlefords—Lloydminster to discuss Bill C-40. This is the first chance we have had to look at the bill. It is a fairly innocuous piece of legislation, just a few little paragraphs that comprise the bill, but the effects are far-reaching.
We need to have rules based trade. No one will argue with that. The problem I find, time after time, is that Canadian producers seem to be held to a different standard from other producers in the world. We always seem to be getting the short end of the stick. I am not sure if that is because we bargained in bad faith or that we have turned in too easily and allowed other countries to overrun the system that we work with here.
I have some major concerns with this little piece of legislation. No one has a problem with the WTO and with good, sound rules based negotiations and trade around the world. The problem is how do we do that without having these sidebar deals constantly caught up in trade actions that take years to come to agreement and hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in hurt that we, as Canadians, seem to face on many different levels. I have some real concerns with being forced to make these changes as quickly as we are being asked to do so.
The government knew this was coming down when it starting forming legislation in September. It finally got around to doing this now. This has to be in place by August 1, the start of the next crop year, or we will face sanctions. There is no doubt in my mind that someone will pull the pin and we will face sanctions. The concern I have is the government wants us to treat this as housekeeping, look the other way and let it go through.
A lot has been made about the so-called consultative process that the minister undertook through his parliamentary secretary. The parliamentary secretary had a few meetings across the country. He lands at an airport, books a room in a hotel, invites three or four people from around the area to make a presentation, jumps back on an airplane three hours later and he is on to the next venue. That is not really a consultative process. We need to talk to a myriad of farm organizations, not just the ones that are government-friendly.
The Minister of Public Health introduced the bill, which I found a little strange in that the agriculture minister is here. He was here in question period. It was strange to have the Minister of Public Health from downtown Toronto introduce a bill that really has far-reaching effects on my producers in western Canada.
There was not a lot of agricultural intelligence in that speech. I am sure it was a canned speech from Agriculture Canada. She talked about the glowing results of what we are looking at. It just did not go anywhere. I asked a question about the billion dollar bail-out about which she was going on and on and she did not have the answer. I would have thought that if she was appointed and gave a glowing recommendation of this last announcement, she would have some idea about the aspect of the delivery and how far along it was, but she did not. I suppose someone forgot to give her that sheet.
Bill C-40 talks about doing three things. The government will now require, under the Canadian Grain Commission, entry permits, but there is no timeline in place as to how and when that will happen. We know that this will face the oversight of the other countries, especially the United States to which this is targeted, on August 1. However, we have no idea what form those permits will take, how they will be authorized, what the chain of command will be and what the bureaucracy will shape up to be. That is a concern.
The Grain Commission has become a real thorn in various parts of western Canada in the way it is operating. It is very secretive. It cuts back services, yet gets more and more money in its budgetary process. We have some major concerns with that as western farmers.
Another thing the bill talks about is blending. A person has to have permission from the Grain Commission whenever this is done. We have always had a blending aspect, but my concern is that we are losing the capacity to do that on the prairies. The Grain Commission really only wants that done at port. That could potentially cost my farmers hundreds of millions of dollars in a crop year by not being able to blend like we do.
The member for Macleod made the argument earlier, and I totally agree with him, that we have far too many grades and too complex a system in the country. We are graded at the various levels in protein and so on under milling wheat, yet when it goes into the boat to head off to Japan or whatever country is lucky enough to buy our product, it goes back in as milling wheat, period.
We clean it to export standards on the Prairies at these big huge terminals we built. When it gets back to the coast, then they are allowed a different standard and they tend to load garbage back into the hold of the boat.
I have heard complaints from the Japanese who import about stratified boatloads of Canadian grain that I have sold at a certain grade, cleaned to export standards, the 1% dockage or less that I am allowed. It is cleaned, but when it gets to the coast, they are allowed up to 4% on certain grades and they dump in lumber, bottles, crap and corruption. We had loads rejected at the other end a few years ago because of deer droppings.
If anybody knows how many times that grain has gone up and down an auger and an elevator and through machinery into trucks and back and forth to town before it got to Japan, one would wonder how that product could still be mixed in with the grain other than somebody bought the screenings and dumped it back in the boat after the farmer was done.
Part of the major concern I have is at what point along that chain do I no longer own and am answerable for it. I have dumped it in the pit at my elevator, however many miles away from my farm. We are fortunate because my farm is very close to some large terminals. Six months, eight months later, I can get a letter back from somebody saying, “We have now rejected your malt barley because”. How do I fight that?
In my role as an MP, I have had four of those instances come to the attention of my office. We have had three of them overturned and forced the company to take the hit, not the farmer. When is it no longer my product?
That is why I look to organizations like the Wheat Board, which is supposed to be there to help me. Lately it is not doing a lot of that. A gentleman by the name of Ken Ritter heads up the Wheat Board. Ken and I ran against each other in 1997. We get together a couple of times a year and I often kid Ken . I say to him that I supposedly won, but he got the better job. He gets to go home nights. His paycheque looks as good or better than mine. He does not have 75,000 people to whom he has to answer. His job can disappear, so can mine. That is the game we play.
I do not see a lot farmer farm gate-friendly resolutions coming out of the Wheat Board, the Canadian Grain Commission and a lot of the government programs out there. Therefore, I am very concerned about the bill and the impact it could have.
When we look at the blending and how we have to keep track of all the products now, under the legislation we have country of origin labelling inserted into Canada through the back door. There is a big uproar over why we would want to do that, and the cost of that labelling, but there it is. This is going to happen.
I do not know how they will do that without grain confetti or something. A few bushels here and there get blended off, but we do not run a separate train car or a separate truck for a few bushels of product. We tend to blend it and make the run pay. I am not sure how we will enforce that. I think we will see a tremendous amount of paper chase. A lot of bureaucrats will be happy with this. However, it will cost my producers a lot more in lost revenue because they will have to pay for it.
The third and final thing that is affected, and it is a sleeper issue, is the rail cap. This only affects board grains basically and it really will negatively affect our delivery, especially closer to the U.S. border. I know the member for Macleod made that point earlier about peak times when we need our grain moving. Right now there is no grain moving. He talked about the amount of elevators and granaries on the farms that were full. He is absolutely right, the system is plugged.
We have road bans on now in western Canada because of the spring thaw. We just had some more rain and snow up in our area so those bans will be on for longer than we would like. Farmers will then be in the field and forced to haul their grain while they try to do other portions of their farm work such as spraying in June and haying in July. Then we have the end of the crop year and they have been unable to move their product because they have not had the time to do so. However, will the cars be available?
This is a major concern in that the captive states in the north tier of the United States will, through this bill, be able to haul into the south part of Canada and use our rail system to get it to port. They will not like the turnaround times, but it does give them an extra access they do not have at this point. I know in the system, Portland. They drive right out on Roberts Bank and drop right into the containers that go off shore. We do not. We handle the grain three or four more times before it gets into the container.
I am not sure they are going to like the turnaround time or the freight rates, but the problem I have with this is that the rail cap was supposed to help western farmers access the 13,000 cars that the federal government owns and is in the process of supposedly rolling over to the Farmer Rail Car Coalition. It is a major concern at this point because then we would no longer control access to those cars to the same extent we do now, which is questionable.
We could not say no to a farmer from North Dakota, South Dakota or Montana who wants to make use of those same cars up into Canada. If he gets an elevator that will take his grain, under this bill we have to allow it. That is another concern in having access to those railcars: timely access to them. It may or may not put in jeopardy the whole Farmer Rail Car Coalition bid, because there will be some major drain on those cars. People have talked both sides of the fence in allocation of cars. This adds to that muddied water, let us say, in car allocation so that it is not in the best interests of our farmers in western Canada.
The U.S. has a vested interest in doing that, but the Americans also have access to the Mississippi River. They barge grain down at virtually no cost at all. Upgrades and maintenance required on the Mississippi are done by the Army Corps of Engineers. They use it as a training exercise. No cost goes back to the overhead for WTO compliance for American farmers. That is quite an ace in the hole. It makes a big difference. If the Americans start to load up our rail system plus having the ace in the hole of the Mississippi system, my guys are hit twice. That is why I have some major concerns.
I have no problem with this bill going through to committee, but I certainly want to see a full and open debate and a good strong witness list coming forward so that we can get this done in time for the August deadline.
We have another bill before committee right now. Bill C-27 is tying us up and does not have a snowball's chance in hell of passing before this session ends in the spring, election or not. No one other than the CFIA likes that bill. I would argue very strongly that the committee drop its hearings on Bill C-27 and get right into Bill C-40 if we are to make that deadline. This is something that we are going to have to do to hit that implementation.
Rules based trade is fantastic. My concern is that we seem to get mired down and continue to think that we are hewers of wood and drawers of water. We think that bulk commodities are all we can do in western Canada. A lot of this WTO compliance is targeted to our bulk commodities, as are the complaints, for that matter. If we were allowed to value add, to process that product on the Prairies, and if farmers owned those processing plants, we would see an extra $1 or $2 a bushel in added revenue, plus then we would be shipping a processed commodity that would not face all of this rigmarole under the WTO.
This would also get us into the emerging markets in the Pacific Rim that do not have the infrastructure to process. We could start to fill those markets. Right now we are not filling those markets. They do not want bulk grain. They want flour. They want malt ready to go into their malt plants that they have started to develop over there. They want the durum flour and pasta. We need to start filling those markets. This legislation does not help that out at all.
We really have to wonder whose side the government bureaucrats organizing these things are on. Are the bureaucrats thinking this through or are we just going in there being the white knight and signing all these international agreements while our producers here in Canada take the hit?
We are seeing emerging markets and emerging producers such as Brazil coming forward. They can produce twice the product for half the cost because they do not face the taxation and regulatory burden that my guys do, but we have to compete with them out there in the global market. Now, with WTO agreements and so on, I am going to have to start competing with them for the domestic market here in Canada. That is great. Good for them. Come on strong, I say, but let us get a level playing field. When they are starting to be the world supplier on several different commodities, how do they still fall under this developing nation preferred status and get the gold key to my domestic markets here in Canada?
Someone has to start to think this through and look after my farmers first, not someone else. As much as we like to see them coming forward as well, it cannot be on the backs of my farmers.
I do not really see how this rule change is going to help my producers in any positive way at all. Certainly until we get some amendments, as the member for Haldimand—Norfolk said today, this bill has no chance at all of getting through in time for the August 1 deadline.
Whose fault is that? Is that our fault for giving the bill due diligence as we should? Or is it the fault of the government, which agreed to this in this short term timeframe and is trying to push it through in the dying days of this session? Or in an election for that matter, it will try to point the finger and say, “You put our guys at risk”. No, the risks are in the day we signed on to this stuff. That is my concern.
In 2002 there was a very fulsome report on the grain commission and the whole grain trade. No one has yet seen a copy of that report. It has been hidden away. I asked for a copy of that report over two months ago at the agriculture committee. I finally got a letter back. The clerk of the committee showed it to me at the last committee meeting, last Thursday. We got a reply from the government. The government will get the report to me just as soon as it has a chance to translate it.
As far as I remember, the Official Languages Act was in place in 2002, so if that report was tabled as it was supposed to have been and as we were told it was, it is already in both official languages. The government is stalling. There are things in the report the government does not want us to see. Let us imagine that: these guys are being secretive.
