Gerry Ritz

[Supply, March 22nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to stand today and represent my province as a whole, as well as the constituents of Battlefords—Lloydminster, heavily benefiting by the oil and gas sector that needs a kick-start as it were. We are sitting on the border with Alberta poised to rush into Saskatchewan to take advantage of the huge reserves there, but to this point in time it has been a negative connotation to do that with the clawback situation that we are facing under this flawed equalization formula.

In this our centennial year, ours and Alberta's, if we look back 100 years to when we both came into this great Confederation, we ask what has changed? What made Alberta surge ahead as it has and Saskatchewan be held back? A lot of it is provincial governments of the day. All the way through Alberta has been more entrepreneurial, more progressive, we may say. Saskatchewan has been held back by some socialist thinking. A lot of it in the last 50 years since the inception in 1957 of this equalization formula has been the basis of the undoing of Saskatchewan.

Alberta got its real kick-start in the 1940s around the time of the second world war when that first oil well came in. Alberta really got a toehold and started to build and blossom from that time forward. Saskatchewan missed that opportunity. Since 1957 with this equalization formula it has almost been regressive to see it move ahead. In this centennial year we would certainly like to see that changed around.

It has been said here before and it bears repeating that under the Liberal government over the last 10 years if the formula had operated as it should have, Saskatchewan would have benefited to the tune of $8 billion. Half of that would have come from oil and gas revenues. There is no way to really sit back and quantify what that number would be today. That $4 billion catalyst over the last 10 years would have returned us 10 times that amount in oil and gas revenues and economic spin-offs in the province of Saskatchewan.

The province has been stagnant. It was said earlier today but it bears repeating that in the 1930s the population was around 930,000 to 940,000. Today Saskatchewan's population is still less than a million. The province has gone up 5% and that is all. It is stagnant.

The finance minister commented in his speech that he had a vision for Saskatchewan which saw the province really going ahead in value added, and as the minister responsible for the Canadian Wheat Board he was one of the guys who shut that down. He certainly made the government a catalyst and it just has not happened.

The one comment I really took exception to was that the government is really pushing immigration for Saskatchewan. That is all well and good, but the problem we have in Saskatchewan is the out-migration of our own kids. We educate them to be the best and the brightest, and out they go. They start running companies that are global in structure. A tremendous number of our graduates and our kids are working in Alberta in that oil patch that Alberta started before this equalization formula became a hindrance. I take exception to that.

The minister also mentioned that Saskatchewan with its huge future potential has the fiscal capacity to tax and all this type of thing, that it could step up and take over where the federal government has come up short. I am paraphrasing, but that is basically the message he was giving.

The problem with that is that the higher the taxation rate, the more regressive it is to any business moving in. We have seen that with our socialist-minded governments that are on side with this initiative at this point. However, they are certainly willing to let someone else do the heavy lifting, as we saw when Danny Williams from Newfoundland and Labrador stood tall, came forward and basically traded blow for blow with the Prime Minister. Danny Williams said that this is what was said, this is what was promised, promise made, promise broken, fix it. The Prime Minister did. Begrudgingly the Prime Minister has signed on to a deal.

No one has seen any cash yet. I know Premier Hamm of Nova Scotia who was also a beneficiary of that deal has been in touch with our caucus to ask, “Can you guys kick-start this somehow and get that cheque flowing?” It is coming to Nova Scotia's fiscal year end and the province would like a little bit of that cash flow up front as well. It is just not happening.

The finance minister has some idea that one year in Saskatchewan of this so-called have status has fixed everything. That is like going to the dentist and having one good check-up. We know there will still be problems later on.

In this our centennial year the time has come to get this fixed. It is somewhat suspect in that the Liberals knew this motion was coming, but the day before we had this supply day motion on fixing equalization, the minister finally tabled his expert panel and gave the panel its terms of reference. One would have to be a Philadelphia lawyer to figure out those terms of reference when looking at them. I am sure those folks are up to the job being the good Liberals that they are. I am sure they will be able to wade through it and come back with something that the finance minister can live with.

I know Saskatchewan took exception to one of the names that was put forward. Now we have a panel of five, instead of a panel of six. We will see how that works out. The panel has a full year to get back to the finance minister with any changes. We could very well have an election before then and we will fix this thing. We will not need a panel of experts to tell us what is wrong because the provinces and the people out there in tax land have already done that.

The whole equalization process, and the fundamental word in there is equal, has become a political process, not a practical process. We see reviews every five years, but what the government does is make the situation more complex. The parliamentary secretary alluded to that. He said, “It is not a perfect system, but it is complex”.

Thirty sources make up the basic formula. We have tinkered with it, we have played with it, but we have never done a fundamental overhaul to get it in today's terms. If we have potential in Saskatchewan, it is ours to get out there and work with, but we do not need the federal government clawing back 110% of that potential. It is regressive and there is no reason for it.

One of the huge hits we see, especially in Saskatchewan, is in the rural areas of the province. Compounded with a provincial government that has no political gain to be made in the rural areas, plus a federal government that has basically taken slap after slap at rural Canada, we see that sliding backwards. There is very poor political attendance in those areas by both the provincial and federal governments because there is no political gain.

We have to turn that around. The potential is there. The potential is not in downtown Saskatoon or Regina. The chambers of commerce may argue that, but those two communities live at the whim of the agricultural sector and of course the oil and gas sector, the cash flow commodities. They make take exception to that, but if they stop and look back, this year's Christmas rush in the malls in Saskatoon and Regina was nowhere what it should have been. The rural economy is hurting. Those people come in and spend their dollars, and it is just not happening at this point.

People are getting angry. The provincial government is crying poor when it comes to ponying up its share of the CAIS, its 40%. One can argue that formula is as flawed as the equalization one and I would agree. It needs to be changed, as well.

The provincial government is withholding the cash flow to my farmers and other farmers of Saskatchewan. Look at the changes the provincial government has made to production insurance, the old crop insurance program. Premiums have gone up as much as 50% in some instances and the coverage has gone down a minimum of 10%. They are getting caught on both ends. That speaks to the very viability of my farmers. We see the hook that is being made by the bureaucrats in both the provincial and federal governments called best farming practices. If they do not have production insurance, it affects their CAIS payout. If they do not have the cash to put on deposit in CAIS, they cannot collect the same amount of money in production insurance because of this best farming practices.

I have a lot of folks who will go through the motions this year, put the seed in the ground which they already have, but no fertilizer and chemicals. Under their historical average, they will get nailed with not following through on best farming practices and that will hit them again.

We have to start to look at some way to get some cash flowing out there. This is probably the quickest way it can be done.

The finance minister will hide behind the fact because he does not want to tamper with it. It is the same excuse the Prime Minister uses on fixing the Senate. He does not want to do it ad hoc.It basically comes down to he does not want to do it at all. The finance minister is falling into that same trap. He does not want to change anything so he hides behind the fact that he needs seven provinces and he has to have this or that. However, they can make sidebar deals with anybody they want for political gain. That speaks to the fact that it has become a political process and no longer a practical progress.

As we go through this, we look at hit after hit that has been placed on the provinces. Then the government is supposed to revive them with the equalization formula, the $25 billion that the finance minister of the day, now Prime Minister, ripped out of the health and social transfer to the provinces. Then he started to pump them back up again with a bit of increase in equalization.

The Liberals have never met a tax under any name they do not like. Tax the heck out of something and when it can no longer bear that burden, prop it up whatever way they can until it starts to crawl again and then hit it again with some more taxes. It is just a merry-go-round. The power is the money and the money is the power. Those guys are great at forming government but they fall short on governing.

When we go through the whole equalization system, look at the complexity of it, look at changes that need to be made, every political party in the province of Saskatchewan, bar none, other than the finance minister, the key Liberal minister, is in favour of changing this flawed system.

I know Harry Van Mulligen, the finance minister of Saskatchewan, was here. His quote when he came before the Senate was, “The current program does not improve stability in provincial finances as it is advertised to do, and it is not responsive to changing provincial fiscal circumstances”. I guess that sums it all up. The program that is supposed to help has become a tremendous hindrance.

[Civil Marriage Act, March 21st, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, this issue has moved Canadians to action and to become involved, reinvigorated as active members of the Canadian democratic process. I have had interventions from several thousand of my constituents, more so than on any other piece of legislation, even Bill C-68, and we know how controversial that has been and how many people have come to the fore on that. Several thousand of my constituents have told me that they are also against the purpose of this bill. They also wonder why we should be occupied by this matter rather than the more pressing issues that affect millions rather than a few hundred Canadians.

It reflects the nature of our modern age, perhaps even the corruption of our legal system, that a very vocal minority can put their issue on a national platform even when the vast majority of Canadians have better things to do. And they still claim they have no voice.

I know the Prime Minister will feign outrage at this, but we are pretty tired of his phony moral stances over here. It has taken him only a few years to run completely from poll to poll, from one side of an issue to the other. He has now exhausted every position he can hold on every issue. He has nowhere left to run.

Speakers on all sides of the House have articulated the background to the introduction of Bill C-38, but not everyone has been playing with a full deck of facts. The former justice minister said in the House that the traditional definition of marriage was safe and secure and that the Liberals had no intention of changing anything. Not that long ago, like every Liberal promise, those words disappeared after the election.

Despite voting to take every action necessary to protect our foundational institution, those same Liberals stood by while junior court after junior court defied the Supreme Court and Parliament and thousands of years of history to claim they have discovered words in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that are not actually there at all.

The Prime Minister claims to hold the charter sacred while he lets judicial activists distort this document into radical new shapes. He says nothing while judges claim they find words where none exist. This is not progressive. This is radical and there is always a danger to the overall common good when a few radicals hijack a national document and use it to push their own agenda.

A few of my colleagues in the House circulated a letter in which they claimed no one was behind the push for same sex marriage. It just sort of sprang up from the ground. We are not sure how it came about. The radicals we are concerned with are a group that wants to overthrow the institution of marriage because it does not conform to their social view. But they are not the only radicals at work. Greater conflicts are coming. When a democratic government participates in the breakdown of its own foundations, it cannot know where that process will end and neither can the radicals who are pursuing this narrow agenda.

The Prime Minister said that this bill is about minority rights. He is wrong. The Supreme Court has said that he has a choice to legislate on marriage because the definition is up to Parliament. It did not say he had the right to establish or create a right for marriage. No one has a right to get married. When we believe we have found a mate that we want to spend the rest of our lives with, there are a number of options. Some will shack up, as the saying goes, and not care about government or parental approval. Some will seek government approval after a time and get benefits and pension rights. That option is open to everyone now.

Some will enter into what they hope is a lifetime commitment. They will look at the list of prohibitions contained in the marriage act and finding they qualify, will get a licence and undergo a solemnization ceremony at city hall or in a church. They will promise to stay together for life and raise their children in a loving household. Not everybody makes it through their whole lifetime, but no one regards divorced individuals as second class citizens which is one of the spurious complaints of these radicals.

If I had a right to be married, I could ignore the rules set out in the marriage act, ignore any rules of solemnization in my province and certainly reject any fees they try to charge me for that process. If I had a right to get married, I would tell the clerk that I am not paying for the licence because it is my right. What about divorce? My wife can never divorce me because that would contravene my right to be married. That is how spurious this is.

Many people are miserable after divorce and it is not because they lose half their income. If the government shared the court's preoccupation with people's feelings and dignity and actually believed it was guaranteeing rights, surely it would bring in legislation to force people to stay together, or maybe provide a spouse to anyone who still wanted to exercise his or her right to be married. It is a lot of nonsense of course.

Society, not courts or governments, created the institution of marriage to provide security to men and women in a relationship they could both understand and count on and to create a unit that nurtures and protects vulnerable children as they grow and learn about their heritage. We know this breaks down often in our society and it is tragic when it does, but people do cope. Children can be and are raised in a variety of environments and turn out well. We are not talking about what everyone must do, but about what society has come to understand as to what is best for the most people most of the time.

The radicals would have us believe that because the guidelines do not include every possibility, they are flawed and must be rewritten. They have obviously convinced the Liberal cabinet, apparently, in the last few months that by rewriting the rules of society, all will be happy and we will not have to rewrite any more.

It is ironic that the Prime Minister now wants to paint himself as the great defender of minorities. We know the gun registry is an onerous document that targets a law abiding minority in this country. We know that Bill C-68, as written, tramples on at least a dozen rights from the Constitution and, as it is clumsily applied, violates a dozen or so more. So far, no Prime Minister has stood up for this minority.

We have had language laws imposed in this country that the United Nations has recognized as illegitimate, but not one Prime Minister has seen fit to help minorities where votes are at stake. So much for fundamental rights.

Our primary food producers are abused by trade disputes, hammered by unreasonable restrictions and taxed off their land. Their crops are seized and sold, and they get nickels back while somebody else makes millions.

There is the ongoing case of single income families that the Supreme Court admitted are discriminated against, but apparently they do not have much of a lobby over there. There is not a single Liberal standing up for their rights.

The whole process is pretty selective and clearly more about what is fashionable than what is right. The methods used by selfish radicals and their Liberal allies to manipulate discussion are reprehensible. Just because we say it is about minority rights does not make it so, especially when the rhetoric can never match these actions.

The Liberals claim to stand for a repressed minority, but this minority, which is really a small part of a minority, seems to have access to government and courts that most Canadians cannot even dream of. I have heard some Canadians say that we should just throw in the towel and give in whenever someone makes enough noise. Often they reflect a level of frustration about the lack of control they feel in the political process. Sometimes they are apathetic and do not realize that what is at stake is more than marriage and more than the demands of one politicized section of one minority.

To give up would be a mistake for two reasons. What the Liberals are pushing here is illegitimate and giving in will only make things worse, paving the way for more demands for so-called rights. They are prepared to let a few activist judges not interpret the Constitution but to continuously remake it without any input from the people who have to live with those consequences.

Canadians who let the government get away with that are guilty of putting their future into the hands of a smaller and smaller group of radicals whose demands we cannot imagine at this time.

What about marriage itself? Some people say, since they will still be married afterwards, what is the big deal? The same sort of dismissal greeted the change in divorce laws, and probably the insanity and lack of debate that passed for abortion laws in this country. The fact is, when a group manages to alter an institution that affects all of society, then many other changes creep in, whether we object to later consequences or not.

We are not talking about changing marriage here. We are talking about changing society. Professor Thomas Sowell points out that marriage is not an institution that grants rights. On the contrary, it imposes responsibilities. He writes:

Marriage laws have evolved through centuries of experience with couples of opposite sexes--and the children that result from such unions. Society asserts its stake in the decisions made by restricting the couples' options.

Society does not tell individuals what to do; it only provides a framework to carry on that society for posterity. It is ironic that the radicals would invite the government into their bedrooms to take away their rights under the guise of claiming new rights for themselves.

Journalist John McKellar, who founded HOPE, Homosexuals Opposed to Pride Extremism, reports that the January 2001 same sex wedding in Toronto was an embarrassment for most gay communities, not a triumph. He said, “Better to stay at home and clean out the fridge when your public image is so embarrassingly represented with such maudlin specimens of martyrdom”.

What Mr. McKellar objects to and what every thinking Canadian should object to is the Liberal's knee-jerk reaction to every claim of discrimination and hurt feelings. He also said, “This is no time for the modern, feel good, pop culture mentality that stands behind C-38”.

He counts himself among the happy, successful and independent gays and lesbians who do not wake up every day finding hate, bigotry and discrimination under the bed, and go running to the courts, governments and human rights commissions for a lifetime of therapeutic preferences.

McKellar is describing the heart of what is so objectionable about Bill C-38 and, of course, last year's Bill C-250, for that matter. There is a disturbing trend today to bend the purposes of society and democracy to the will of the few with the hope of making one group feel good about itself. In the meantime, everyone else's right to free speech and opinion, everyone else's right to a dependable social order, and everyone else's right to enjoyment of property is trampled in the misguided rush to satisfy the perceived feelings of a minority of a minority.

In closing, I have always personally supported the traditional definition of marriage. I will continue to support and fight for the rights and freedoms of all Canadians to order their lives as they see fit, and I unequivocally reject the false assertions in Bill C-38.

[Canadian Livestock Industry, March 8th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, that was a glowing account of what the government has done but what we were hoping for today were new ideas. However we did not get any.

The Deputy Prime Minister said that the government recognized “heartache and economic stress faced by our producers in this country”. That is wonderful but to that very end, ranchers and feedlot owners in Alberta launched a chapter 11 challenge some months ago and sued to get back some $350 million that they felt had been wrongfully taken from them by the Americans in the way this was being handled down there.

The government has kind of given that a pass. It was asked to help with the financing of that or to launch a parallel chapter 20 that would be government to government to try to expedite some of these files but the government of the day refused to do either one. Why?

[Canadian Livestock Industry, March 8th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, that was a nice try by the member, with that little bit of misdirection. He is good at that, like the old magician he always was.

Supply management for the beef sector is up to the beef sector. It was up to the dairy sector, it was up to the chicken sector and it was up to the feather industry to decide whether they wanted it or not. If it is the beef sector that drives it, certainly it will happen and that is what the member should be aware of.

Everybody wants the border open in the short fix, but the problem with the ultimate opening of the border is that it will not move us ahead. We have identified some major problems in our industry in this country. If we do not learn something out of the two years of hell we have been going through, then we have not gained a darn thing. If we just go back and reopen the border, we have not gained as a country. We have not expanded our processing. We have not gone out and looked for those new markets. We have gone right back into the same old rut that we have been in for the last 20 years.

[Canadian Livestock Industry, March 8th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, certainly there are regional variances in slaughter capacity. There are huge regional variances in where the animals are; that is part of what drove it to begin with. The vast majority of the beef market is in Alberta, followed by Saskatchewan, so certainly the slaughter plants need to be built there.

Manitoba finds itself without any kind of federally regulated slaughter facility. Several groups have been taking a run at trying to get something under way there.

The minister talks glowingly about a 20% increase in capacity, driven by the big two, with Cargill and Lakeside expanding. The problem with it is that they are directed at the animals under 30 months and we do not particularly have a problem at that point. The problem is in slaughter capacity for buffalo, hogs and cull animals. That is the big capacity we need.

The minister cannot seem to differentiate that two streams of processing are required, certainly the one under 30 months, and the big guys are going to do well. They are expanding. They are putting in new technology and so on. They are doing okay and they will continue to.

What we need is a secondary line of processing that will address the domestic shortfall that we always used to import for. We always used to bring in grass-fed animals to feed our fast food lines in our specialty restaurants. We no longer do that, other than our WTO and NAFTA commitments. We do not do the supplementary quotas. That is a good thing, but we need specialty processors that can step up and fill that niche.

We used to export the vast majority of our culls and then buy back two-thirds to fill the niche markets here. We have never addressed that shortfall yet. That is what the minister is missing. Those are sustainable markets and sustainable plants.

Certainly we have to be very stingy with taxpayers' dollars and not put them at risk, but sound business plans directed at markets where there is a huge and glaring void now should be sustainable.

[Canadian Livestock Industry, March 8th, 2005]

moved:

That this House do now adjourn.

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise the second time today to talk about agriculture and to get a few more things on the record. I am more than pleased to see that the minister is joining us today. He has been dedicated on this file. We cannot take that away from him.

I will be splitting my time with the member for Newmarket—Aurora.

For a number of producers who are watching tonight, the urgency started 18 months ago. They have been living on a wing and a prayer ever since that.

Government programs have been announced, and they have come and gone. Not a lot of producers were able to trigger what they needed in a timely and bankable way. The light at the end of the tunnel disappeared the other day with the injunction by R-CALF in the United States.The light blinked out for the time being, and we have to reignite it.

Part of that will have to be done within our own borders. We have to start to develop programs that are domestically driven and that will see our industry survive, in spite of not getting into our major exporting partner in the United States. It may be a while before that comes around.

A lot of anger and frustration is out there as well as a lot of backlash, which people are talking about now. The Americans are not the bad guys. We have a tremendous amount of allies across the line. We need to ramp up our work with them. I am sure the minister will run through that list later.

The retail association, the consumers association and the American Meat Institute are calling this a blow to free trade. Those are their words. They all are looking for that cross-border shopping to recommence.

The packing industry in the States is facing as big a blow as the Canadian packers at this point. The packers are not getting enough product in to keep their lines open. They are down to three-quarter weeks. People are being laid off. A lot of hurt has been created by the R-CALF injunction, some 10,000 members of a 1.5 million member organization. It is economically and politically driven. Science has no bearing at all on that injunction.

We saw the work up from the judge in Montana. A lot of the things he talked about were just pure nonsense, and will be refuted. The unfortunate part is we are relying on the USDA, secretary of agriculture Johanns and the President of the United States to intervene on our behalf.

The government could and should be doing things. We need a stronger presence in the States. Let us buck up and start to realize that we are in this in a common way. Let us get down there and make those points. I know they have been done on an ad hoc basis, much the same as the programs were on an ad hoc basis. We need consistency at the political and diplomatic levels. We have it at the bureaucratic level. We have to ramp that up a little or we will face the same types of things.

There has been a huge ripple effect and a lot of collateral damage over the past two years in the livestock sector. It is not only cattle. We talk about cattle because that is the mainstay of that trade. However, a tremendous number of other sectors have been negatively hurt, and we are not carrying the flag for them in the same way. We think that they got drawn down with the cattle and that they will get built back up again once the cattle moves.

When we talk about processing for livestock, every facet of livestock needs more processing. Our pork producers are facing the same things trying to export live hogs, but as soon as they are processed, there is no problem. We need to ramp up the processing. Our buffalo producers were just starting to get their feet back under them, but they have been hit and sucked down with this as well.

The problem that needs to be directed or solved in the near future is in our processing sector. We have let slaughter capacity and processing go over the last 20 years.

We have had heavy-handed regulations. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency inspectors have not been as user friendly as perhaps they could have been. I guess the minister may have to drive them a bit harder to do that. We have seen a couple of plants squeak into production, only after they have jumped through a lot of hoops and hurdles that were put in their way. They did not need to be there. They dragged it out, and they could have got there a lot quicker.

We have a few other plants that would like to open, but they have seen the trials and tribulations of other plants so they are pulling back a bit. As I said, there is that collateral damage on other livestock sectors.

We have to ramp up our processing and slaughter capacity. The government has talked about that. The only thing we have seen to that end is the loan loss reserve, $37 million or $38 million announced in September, topped up again in the budget by another $17 million, but nobody can trigger it. The forms are not even available yet. We met with the Canadian Bankers Association the other day. It said it was still working out the details with the government.

We have again lost six months in getting some slaughter and processing capacity going because we are playing around with the loan loss reserve, which means somebody will finally get some money. When and if they ever get built and go broke they will finally get some coverage. That is not going to trigger any expansion. Nobody is going to buy that one. That is something that definitely needs to be done.

First and foremost is to get some cash to hard-pressed livestock producers. Agriculture across the country in the year 2003 hit bottom with a minus $13 million income and 2004 is not looking a whole lot better.

We get into a little bit of positive numbers when we put all the government moneys in. A lot of announcements have been made. The minister talks about a cumulative almost $5 billion going into agriculture across the country. Those are the announcements. The reality of cash in the pockets of producers is a third of that at best. We still have pools of money sitting here in Ottawa that have not been triggered and have not got out there to the farm gate. They are still sitting on the cabinet table and not on the kitchen tables out there.

Spring is coming. We have grain and oilseed sector guys who are worrying about how they are going to get their crops in the ground. We have livestock producers who are bringing another crop of calves on the ground and do not know whether they will be able to move them in a timely way to pay their loans and get caught up again. Agriculture in this country, for all commodities, has faced some serious hits. Let us get some cash out there on these ad hoc programs.

Of the three pillars that are required, one is the new and emerging markets that are out there. They are buying from someone, but not from us at this point. China is a huge market coming on stream with a billion people who are hungry. The big thing with China is that we are going to have to process some of it to get it over there and we are not up to that game at this point. There are things the government can be doing almost immediately to get that started. We are seeing more of the farm groups coming to bear on this and struggling for their producers.

David Rolfe is the chair of Keystone Agricultural Producers in Manitoba. He said that he has problems with the CAIS program. He is not optimistic that CAIS can ever be made effective. He says it is a bad deal. He is quoted as saying that “CAIS is essentially CFIP”, the former program, “with a deposit”. Farmers have to put cash in a bank vault somewhere in order to trigger a payment someday somewhere down the road. That is like me going out to the dealership, buying a new tractor, leaving it there and never using it. It is cash stuck away that I cannot use.

We met with the Agriculture Canada officials today, who said that it is not a negative thing. The farmer puts some cash in the bank, triggers a CAIS payout and gets money back, so it is not a bad deal. The problem is that it costs him a couple of thousand bucks with his accountant to make that happen and in a lot of cases what he triggers out of CAIS does not even pay for his cash on deposit. It is not the cashflow stimulus that everyone is looking for. There is actually a negative hit in a lot of this.

I know the minister has talked about how the government is going to do a review. In the budget, the Liberals talk about getting rid of the deposit, but the officials today told us that the most they can do by the end of March is pay back anyone down to the third value, which is what all of us called for, but some guys are trapped in a catch-22 and had 100% of their deposit in. They will get two-thirds of that back and probably will be taxed on it if it came out of certain NISA accounts, but they still have to keep that third in there until all governments figure out how they are going to keep farmers “engaged” in this business risk.

Producers are engaged. A $44 billion agricultural debt across the country keeps them engaged. Having to put a crop in the ground every year and spend the value of the equity of their farms keeps them engaged. Bringing on another inventory of cattle into their livestock sector keeps them engaged with all the costs that are involved in that. They are engaged up the wazoo.

So a cash deposit is not required; it is trying to make the CAIS program GATT green. That is what the government is trying to do. It is taking an amber program, running disaster relief through it and requiring a cash deposit to make it GATT green. That is what this is all about.

The government is penalizing our producers to stand up to the global agreements that we have signed on to, and our guys are going down. They are. They are taking this hard. They cannot stand up to it.

The Canadian Federation of Agriculture, in its meeting just last week, called for the government to implement a cull cow program. We talked about that a year ago. We talked about putting $500 an animal cash in the pockets of producers out there to get rid of some of these cull animals that are a drag on the market and pulling us down.

The numbers show that the programs are not working. The ad hoc announcements after ad hoc announcements are not doing what they are supposed to do.

The government is looking for direction. It is talking about doing the right things, but implementation is awfully slow. I am hopeful that some of our producers will survive long enough to see a difference.

[The Budget, March 8th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, there is no doubt that we would need a better definition of what constitutes a corporate tax cut.

The budget mentions a 2% reduction in the corporate tax rate from 21% to 19% but that is over 10 years. It will take 10 years to move 2%. What is the cost of inflation, the cost of production and everything else doing in that same 10 years? They are probably ratcheting up far more rapidly than that.

Certainly farmers need to see some tax relief. We still have guys who are overburdened with the drought, livestock problems and everything else but the government is still demanding that they pay taxes. It does it on many different levels. The offloading by the federal government over the last 10 years has created a tax burden at everyone's doorstep.

We are seeing that ratcheting up. We are receiving less health care but we are paying more taxes. We have less infrastructure but we are paying more taxes. We have less services on any government situation we want but we are paying more taxes. Even the so-called huge tax cut the government implemented a few years ago never showed up on anyone's tax forms. I defy anyone to show me where it was. It did not show up on my form or on any of my family's forms. It was ratcheted up and eaten up by other things.

We have three different layers of tax grabbers in the country and each one has its wish list and all come after the same target. As the federal government backs off in certain areas, the provincial government has to step in or the RM has to step in because they are no longer getting the cash transfers that used to come from the federal government.

We saw $25 billion carved out of the health and social transfer to the provinces. Where did that money get made up? It was made up at my doorstep, just like every other taxpayer.

What is wrong in this country is that we need a unified voice when we talk about tax relief and letting people do what they do best, which is getting on with their lives.

[The Budget, March 8th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the member from the Bloc is absolutely right. A lot of people feel they have lost their voice with the government.

One thing the Liberals have always said is that they want to form the government. They are good at doing that and have been doing it for the vast majority of time in this Confederation that we call Canada. However there is a big difference between forming government and governing. It is in the governing context where they stumble, trip and fall. They cannot seem to identify with the fact that government is the people.

What do the people want? They do not want to be led by the hand. They want to be shown some leadership which they are demanding. They do not want a crisis created by the government and then have the government rush in to fill that need. They want truth and reality in government but they are not getting it. They are feeling disenfranchised. We are seeing that in the lower and lower voter turnouts across the country.

The government has basically been telling untruths about the money that will be put into different programs. We have seen that in agriculture, in health care and across the board in every federal government program.

The point was made that the bureaucracy has grown by 77% in the last 10 years and yet services to the people are being withdrawn, and especially in rural Canada. We are seeing less and less impact there but we are seeing more and more government intruding in our lifestyles. It tells us to stand back, that it will take our money because it knows best how to spend it. It tells us to be happy but we are not happy.

[The Budget, March 8th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak today to the 2005 budget.

It is a little perverse and a little hard for people out there in TV land to understand budgets that come and go. As a matter of fact, we were still debating the 2004 budget the day after budget 2005 was tabled. It is just the crazy way this place works. With the election last spring, everything got backed off, backdated and back-end loaded as this particular budget is too.

I know we are not supposed to use props but this budget is government propaganda. The big headline was “The Budget Plan”. The budget is okay, but plan? There is no plan in here, which is part of the problem with this whole budget. We have announcement after announcement and a tremendous amount of money being spent but no plan is in place for how the government will actually put that money into play and get bang for the taxpayer's dollar.

We agree with some of the initiatives and with the direction in which they are going but they do not get there in a proper and precise manner. They are all back-end loaded. To begin with, nothing will happen until 2006 and the big dollars will only be seen by taxpayers in 2010.

What has happened is that the government has changed from its two year forecasting, which it used to do, and under the new finance minister is now using five year forecasts. The Liberals cannot even predict next year's surplus. They have historically underrated that surplus and then spent it down to try to get their numbers to balance and to match.

The minister himself, as late as last fall, was saying that the surplus would only be $1.9 billion. It turns out that he must have been dyslexic because the surplus was actually $9.1 billion. That is a huge differential in budget forecasting and yet now we are working with five year forecasts. If they cannot get five months' forecasting right, how the heck will they do five years? Those guys are traditionally out to lunch on their forecasts.

Budget 2005 contains $42 billion in wish list spending. In some instances it is money heading in the right direction but in a lot of others it is overspending because there is no plan.

Let us go down the list. Kyoto is identified in this budget. It was finally implemented on February 16. They have billions of dollars allocated to a Kyoto type function, addressing the environmental problems in this country, which is not a bad thing, but there are no mechanics, no nuts and bolts to say how they will put that into play.

They are also adding another billion dollar foundation. The Auditor General comes out year after year with scathing indictments on the $7 billion that is hidden away in foundations now. The money in a lot of cases is sitting there. The interest on the money in the millennium scholarship fund is not even being spent on kids for scholarships, which was the purpose of the whole program. It has become another wasteful slush fund. We have no plan on that.

They are going after the auto manufacturers and so on. I received a letter from a car dealer in my riding, Ross Ulmer, who has seven or eight dealerships and is a fairly major player in the auto industry in western Canada. In his letter he states:

In regards to the automotive industry the implications are enormous [of the Kyoto plan]. I am an owner of several dealerships and it does not take a lot of research to find out that the cars that will be offered for sale in 2010 have already been engineered.

The government is calling for huge reductions in emissions and everything and these cars have already been engineered and are already way under the 1990 carbon emissions. GM's manufacturing plants, which are in Canada, are already below 1990 carbon emissions. The clear hard fact is that vehicles manufactured in 2005 are 99% smog free. The dealerships have already done it and yet the government is going after them to do a whole bunch more. The dealerships are already within the Kyoto guidelines. The government is way off track on where it is going on some of these initiatives, again squirreling money away.

Health care has again been addressed in the budget. The Prime Minister is on the record saying that he will fix it for a generation. The problem is that it will take a generation to implement his fix. Again, there is no plan, just a lot of money being thrown around. He will control the rules and the spending. The provinces will not be allowed to fulfill the needs in their provinces unless the Prime Minister okays them, stamps off on them and says that it is okay to go. They are starting to do their own thing, and rightly so, because they have to.

Let us discuss infrastructure. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce says that we have a $66 billion problem in infrastructure. How do the Liberals address that? They address it with $600 million in the first year.

These were all part of their election promises and throne speech promises. Now they are saying that they are delivering on their commitment but we could deliver what they are delivering in a wheelbarrow. It is not going to take much to get that money out for these programs.

Let us look at agriculture. This is another year that agriculture and primary producers have been insulted. Agriculture was barely mentioned in last year's budget and no dollars were allocated. This year, after another horrendous year on the farm, agriculture shows up and there actually is a bit of a program for it but there is no plan and no money. The $130 million under the agricultural envelope in this budget is 0.3% of the spending. Agriculture, which is the third largest contributor to the GDP of this country and a huge trading component that creates jobs, receives only 3%, and it is in trouble.

Those guys missed it again. We have the border staying closed and we are not seeing any relief or any plan from the Liberal side. They talk about promises made and promises kept, but they have no plan on how they will implement any of these so-called promises.

Of the $130 million that was allocated in the budget for agriculture, $5 million is to be dedicated to PFRA. Those are government bureaucrats. This money will increase their management capacity to start moving out of western Canada across the rest of the country. We have been calling for the agriculture minister to allocate another $5 million to the PFRA but it was not for more management. We wanted more water wells drilled. We wanted a fall program to parallel the spring program that is always overbooked. A fall program would have alleviated a lot of that summertime drought when wells tend to dry up and disappear. The Liberals did not do it. They put it into management for more bureaucrats.

Another part of the allocation will be $21 million for the Canadian Grain Commission as it withdraws services from the prairies. Where the bulk of the testing should be done at terminal, it now only wants to do it at port. The commission's concern was that it did not have the budget to keep on doing it at terminal but if it is done at port we will lose the capacity to blend and gain a grade. The problem we have in the west right now is years of drought, frost damage and so on. We need to blend off that product in order to keep farmers farming. However we give another $21 million to a government agency that is not farmer friendly because it is withdrawing services.

We have $17 million added to the loan lost reserve program that was introduced as part of restructuring of the livestock industry last September. They allocated $38 million to it and now they have put in another $17 million. It is not all bad because it is supposed to stimulate processing. However when we had people from the Canadian Bankers Federation before committee the other day they said that no forms were available on the website or from the banks for anyone to trigger the first $38 million let alone talk about this other $17 million. Everyone says that a loan loss reserve means that people have to go broke before they can ever have the government come in and underwrite on that processing facility and that it will not stimulate any sort of packing expansion in Canada.

Things will have to be done through tax credits and regulations. We need to get CFIA out of people's face and allow them to do what they need to do, such as process some of the excess livestock that we have here. The only thing that deals with the farm gate is the $104 million program over five years of cash advances to livestock producers but it will not start for another full year. Other than taxes staying high for farmers, the budget contains absolutely nothing that will give farmers a bit of a break.

The only thing mentioned in the budget that will give farmers a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel is that the cash on deposit for the CAIS program will be withdrawn for 2003. However, again there is no plan. We have since asked the minister when this would happen. We know he has the provincial ministers, every farm commodity group and all the opposition parties in his face to get this done. The deadline for having one-third of the first cash deposit is at the end of this month. The guys out there are crying for cash and now they have to find the cash to squirrel away in a bank account at this government's whim because it needs them engaged. Producers are engaged to the tune of $44 billion debt. They are engaged in putting that seed in the ground or breeding that cow. They are already there.

The government also saw fit to withdraw the services of the farm improvement loan, which is a big hit again to Saskatchewan because we use those loans for capital assets on the farm. There is no more access to lending institutions. We are tapped and so are they. The government is sending a signal to the lending institutions that it does not want to backstop farmers so why the heck would a bank?

As was stated by other members, it is a negative impact. The budget contains no tax relief, pennies a day, and the equalization problems that Saskatchewan faces, like Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia did, are not even addressed. It is a billion dollar hit to Saskatchewan.

Time after time the government forgets where Saskatchewan is and, for that matter, the rest of Canada outside the Ottawa bubble. Even though the finance minister is from Saskatchewan, he does not even get it. Thankfully, other members of Parliament from Saskatchewan are here to get that message through.

[Request for Emergency Debate, March 8th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, in accordance with Standing Order 52, I seek leave to make a motion to adjourn the House for the purpose of discussing the continuing crisis within Canada's livestock industry.

This crisis must again move to the forefront as the American border remains closed to live Canadian cattle, and efforts made by the United States department of agriculture to reopen the border are now being delayed by a temporary court injunction recently brought down in Montana.

To that end, I would ask that your attention to this matter is urgently required and would be greatly appreciated by the livestock producers of this country.