Madam Speaker, here we go again. The minister is here today and I welcome his presence. He is quite upset though that we sprung this on him. I would like to remind the minister that this has been going on for the last 12 to 15 years.
The first meetings that I attended when I started farming in the early 1970s were on this same issue. Farmers cannot get a fair share of the market, if that is the way they want to phrase it, but the bottom line is that our input costs are choking us. Freight is killing us. There are a number of things that the government can do tomorrow to help alleviate some of the pressure instead of all these studies and ongoing crisis management that it seems to be under.
Madam Speaker, I would also like to mention that I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Cypress Hills—Grasslands.
There are a couple of things that never really enter into the government side debate on agriculture. What is the reality out there? The last member talked about passion. He is absolutely right. Every minister that I have been head to head with over there talks about files and numbers and programs and so on. We deal with faces. We deal with families. There is a big difference. We start to get into the passion that the member from Quebec talked about. I have been accused of being very strident in my language condemning the government but I am not alone.
As a former producer, now a parliamentarian who is supposed to come up with some of the answers, it is a frustrating time. The parliamentary secretary led the charge thirty-some years ago. He was the same person who threw wheat at Prime Minister Trudeau and threw chickens off the balcony of the Alberta legislature to prove his point. He was far more effective then than he is now when it comes to the farm lobby. Certainly, he is a strong voice, but his voice is one that is defending the lack of positive action by the government.
All the promises in the world can be made. The minister stood up and gave us a litany of dollars here and dollars there, promising $10 billion or $100 billion. However, if he never intends to deliver it, the numbers are inconsequential. The Liberals have to understand that. The numbers do not matter here. The only number that really matters out of 2003, the worst year in history, is that 11,000 primary producers left agriculture. That is the only number that matters. The numbers in these programs are inconsequential because they can never make them work.
Everything is based on this compliance with WTO. We are compliancing our farmers right out of business. By the time we step up or the other countries finally come on board with the WTO list, where we are always the Boy Scouts and get there first, there are no Canadian producers left to defend.
Let us start to defend our guys and our women as opposed to the producers from Brazil. We talk about this burgeoning market but one farm there has 490,000 acres. They have a beef herd of 170 million cattle. That is well over 10 times ours and we are going to compete with them? We cannot begin to and it is not that our folks are not up to the challenge. It is that our folks are overtaxed and over-regulated in complying with the wish list of the government. They cannot compete with someone who does not have that regulatory burden. That is part of the problem.
The government is looking for long term solutions. We heard this morning that the minister has been looking at the CAIS deposit since last July. The committee was supposed to be struck in December. It is now February and it has not happened. Some of the provinces have not come forward with a list or whatever. Let us get on with it.
I have records here. I asked for access to information on the safety nets advisory committee that three of the ministers have last used. They have been on the record since the start of CAIS with all of these questions that we are raising today saying that this is not going to make a bankable program. They have been on the record for almost four years and they are still not being listened to. These are the folks that represent the producers out there.
The minister hides behind the fact that he has to have provincial approval. He should show some leadership. All the provinces want is for the minister to pony up his share of the bucks. They are not really concerned about the criteria of the program. They want to support their farmers. I have talked to those provincial ministers. They just want the federal government to show the leadership that it should. We have not seen it at all.
It is frustrating. There is a lot of passion involved here. The CAIS program was supposed to be successful. Third time is the charm for the Liberal government because the first two programs, AIDA and CFIP, were a washout.
The government built the CAIS program on that same flawed foundation. Instead of the third time being the charm, we got strike three. The people who are being affected are the faces and families we deal with, not the files and numbers that the minister hides behind. That is not going to make it happen. He has to get out there and make things go.
There has been a lot of talk lately in the media about the increase in the price of milk for the dairy industry. Good for it if it was able to pass its costs on. The rest of us have not been able to find that magic bullet. The bottom line as to why that happened is because the CAIS program failed the industry as well. It has the option with its supply managed sector to move in another way.
It made a difference of maybe 4% or 5% in pricing and the market is going to absorb that. I have not had one phone call complaining about that other than the restaurant association, which would never pass it on to consumers anyway. The consumers certainly do not get their fair share. If someone goes to a restaurant and buys breakfast for $10, the farmer gets less than what the tip would be to the waitress. Good for the waitress and the restaurant for getting their fair share, but where is the producer's share?
The minister says it will take a long term solution, we have to have a list, and he is looking to us for positive suggestions. Here are a few. Input costs are roughly half tax. That includes fuel, fertilizer, chemical, farm machinery parts and so on. Fuel, fertilizer and chemical are half tax. Problems arise in cash crunch situations. The government has linked crop insurance or production insurance, it changed the name to make it more palatable because crop insurance did not work, with the CAISP under a little thing called best farming practices.
If I do not put in my historical average of fertilizer, spray on the chemical and all that type of thing, when I ask for a payout under production insurance or CAIS program, the government is going to send me a letter saying, “Under best farming practices, you didn't do it according to our rules, so we are only going to pay you half”, which means I do not have the cash to pay for the inputs that I should.
Last year again we were frozen out in my neck of the woods after two years of drought, so cash is a commodity we do not have. We cannot even go back to the banks and talk about lines of credit because these guys laugh at us when we say we have a certain amount coming from CAIS program. They know it will never be delivered.
Credit lines and cashflow are non-existent. When I go to my suppliers and say I have to charge this or that, they say no, they are still carrying $1 million, $2 million, $3 million from last year. If we think 2003 was bad, wait until we see the numbers from 2004 and then 2005. It is only going to get worse. We have to start to do something today, not next July when we want these guys to report, not next January when grain producers will finally see some money out of CAIS program. We have to start today. It could be cash advances. We have to do whatever it takes.
We talk about a whole different program using 10 year averages, working in the cost of production, looking at market value of product, and a combination of some of the programs that worked over the years, but there was never the political will or the cashflow to carry it through.
It was said earlier today and I have said often that agriculture accounts for 250,000 to 300,000 jobs in this country. The ripple effect is unbelievable. We saw that with the BSE crisis.
In response to somebody else a while ago I heard the minister speak glowingly about $115 million that went out to cattle producers. It is big money. The industry lost $2 billion. A 5% solution is not going to measure up. It is not going to get the job done. The money was there. We saw it in announcement after announcement. The Liberals get an “A” for announcement and a “D” for delivery, a failing grade by anybody's standards.
They are not changing anything. They are saying that they will address this and that, and they will conduct a study and have a look at it. People are going broke while they dither and dally on the other side. They have to start the process yesterday. We cannot wait.
Producers are on a very slippery slope. We are competing on a global market. The European Union now is talking about re-subsidizing and the minister says that is not fair. Everybody knows that.
