House of Commons photoWon his last election, in 2015, with 61% of the vote.
Sponsorship Program October 12th, 2004
Mr. Speaker, a different set of lips but the same old song. Let us quote someone else here, “Anybody who knows about”--the scandal--“and did nothing should resign immediately”. That was the Prime Minister before he tried to cover this all up. In his rush to the polls the Prime Minister withheld vital information from the public accounts committee and the Canadian electorate. Why the cover-up?
Sponsorship Program October 12th, 2004
Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister pledged last spring to clear up the sponsorship scandal before he called an election. He said that he would provide all the documents to the public accounts committee. He did not do that. We now know he was more concerned about getting re-elected than in coming clean with Canadians.
How does the Prime Minister explain the sudden appearance of a 10 million page paper trail after the June election?
Agriculture October 7th, 2004
Mr. Chair, producers out there, including Mr. Eby, are grasping at straws. They will take anything that happens. They keep thinking one of these programs has to work. They cannot all be dismal failures, yet they are. We saw an announcement a month ago, and still no forms. We are seeing announcements made without consultations with the provinces that are supposed to pony up their 40%. All of a sudden these announcements come out of left field because the politics say that the government has to do something right now. Let us get the politics out of these announcements, make them practical , make them bankable and get on with the job.
Agriculture October 7th, 2004
Mr. Chair, there are a number of interventions there. I may have to have you read back the minutes so I do not miss anything.
The big thing he is pointing to is the CCA endorsement of this on September 10. There is an amazing thing to that. I think he will recognize the name Stan Eby. He is now the president of the CCA. Stan actually phoned me on Wednesday, September 8 and asked for help from the opposition party for any lobbying we could do because he could not get the minister to act on any program.
Two days later the minister made the announcement, and I read in the paper that Mr. Eby was on side and everything was wonderful. If he had been in the full consultation process, how could he have phoned me two days before and say that he could not get the minister to do something? He liked our idea about recalling the parliamentary committee and asked if we could put some pressure on these guys to get rolling. That was two days before the announcement, but the minister said that he was fully behind him. I think maybe he came on side after he saw some cash waved under his nose.
The CCA, as well as the CFA and these other folks, also say that CAIS is not the delivery mechanism. They are saying it will not work. They are already saying announce another program, but give them a vehicle that can actually deliver the program. There are still no forms on the web. The minister is talking about dollars that have been dispersed. They have not even been okayed by Treasury Board yet. He is getting the cart before the horse.
It just goes on and on. What he thinks is reality with in the Ottawa bubble is bureaucratic hog heaven because it is going around and around in this place. The dollars are not getting into the mailboxes. There is not a producer out there that wants to farm the mailbox. They just want a decent return on what they are doing. They are working hard to stay in business in spite of what the government says it is doing.
Agriculture October 7th, 2004
Mr. Chair, it is kind of with a torn heart that I speak here again. I am very thankful to the constituents of Battlefords--Lloydminster who re-elected me to this place to continue this fight, but it is in continuing this fight that I have a heavy heart. We are a year and a half into this crisis. We are talking tonight about the very fundamental problem that we had a year and a half ago, and we are no closer to any sort of solutions.
I agree with the minister that we have to get past this partisanship and work in cooperation to try to come up with programs and policies that will see us through this crisis, and it is a crisis. It goes across the spectrum of the livestock industry. Every type of livestock out there is affected, and everybody who has inputs, or processing or handling of that livestock is feeling this crisis. They are feeling the pinch right in their wallets, so it is reflected out on the main streets right across Canada. We are seeing that. The government will see that in Revenue Canada because the taxation will not come in.
How has the government reacted? We have seen ad hoc program after ad hoc program. It has been given a passing grade on some and a failing grade on others. The problem is the government has not reacted to the failing grade programs. It continues to try to build on that flawed foundation, and that is the CAIS program.
The minister, who has only been the minister for a couple of months, is the third Liberal agricultural minister to promise a review of a program that is two years old and still has not started. People can try to get an advance from 2003, which was the first year. It takes 90 to 120 days for them to process the applications to even tell people if they qualify. That is not acceptable. We have cash-strapped farms and farm families who cannot even get a reply back from the minister and his bureaucrats.
When we talk to the bureaucrats, they say that they are ready to go. They just need somebody to push the start button. When we talk to the minister's people, they say that they do know what is holding up those darn bureaucrats. Somewhere in the pipeline it got clogged. The money is not getting through. The finance minister stood here earlier today and said boldfaced that $1.8 billion had gone out. It has not left Ottawa. Less than half of it got pried out of the finance minister's fingers, and out of that we got about a 37% administration rate on the clawbacks and everything else that is happening. the government is not helping. It is sending a message to urban Canadian consumers that it is doing everything it can to backstop that safe, secure food supply, but in reality it is not.
The Liberals are frustrating the producers out there on the land because all these programs hit the headlines in the big papers. The Toronto Star , the largest daily paper in Canada, even gives these guys a failing grade on this BSE crisis. It said that they were sleepwalking through it. That is an urban paper in downtown Toronto which gets that these guys are sleepwalking through this crisis.
How do we fix this? I guess the first thing we do is that if they are going to use CAIS as the pipeline, they have to get rid of the cash on deposit. The only way to explain that is that anyone who wants to insure a house for $100,000 has to put $20,000 in a bank account before the insurance company will sell the person a premium. That is what the cash on deposit does to farmers. If they have the cash, they do not need the program. If they do not have the cash, they cannot get into the program. It is double jeopardy and it is absolutely ridiculous. The bureaucrat or the minister who came up with that needs to be hung at dawn.
Inventory values are being based upon closing inventory rather than opening inventory. Guess what? They went down, so right away they are kicking people off the program. The ones who need it cannot get it.
Less than 25% of producers across the country had applied for CAIS as of last spring. We have those numbers from Agriculture Canada itself. There are reasons for that: the cash on deposit; the inventory values; and the problems we face year after year after year using that five year olympic average. Nobody qualifies. It is a shell game or phantom money, as our critic said awhile ago.
The problem with CAIS too is it cannot handle the program it was designed to do and now the Liberals are adding more work to it with this latest announcement of money that will never go anywhere. Announcements that are not bankable and that do not help are only a frustration. They are a hindrance and a hurdle for everybody to work around.
They want to put some money into processing and that is great and is part of the solution here. Thirty-eight million dollars will not go very far, but apply that to provincial plants that can be upgraded very quickly and apply that to existing plants that only need a floor grain moved, let us look the other way for awhile, and let us get this processing ramped up. I could go on and on for hours about everything that has gone wrong with this.
We started to have a panel that went to the OIE to say that it was minimal risk outbreak and asked for that trading system for North America. We have dropped the ball on that. Nobody else is going to help us. We have to help ourselves and we have nobody left doing that.
We still have not implemented the five points the international panel gave us a year ago in July. No wonder everyone is giving us the bum's rush when we try to sell them product. We should get on with the job at hand, forget these goofy announcements that do not help anybody and let us get rolling.
Agriculture October 7th, 2004
Or they're backing out.
Agriculture October 7th, 2004
No, they won't.
Agriculture October 7th, 2004
They don't sell those--
Agriculture October 7th, 2004
Mr. Chair, the member opposite sat on the same committee as I did in the heat of all of this BSE controversy. He is starting to talk as though testing is the answer, to say that there are countries just waiting to buy if we test these animals. I have had meetings with a lot of the ambassadors and the purchasers and so on from those countries. Unfortunately, none of them, not one of them, even Japan, is ready to sign on a purchase order if we test an animal.
My concern is that we can do it--and maybe that is part of the solution--but there is a cost of $30 a test for every animal or $200 a test if we take the expanded one. Increased freezer space is needed, as is an increase in CFIA inspection vets, who are poised to go on strike in a little while. We are already short-staffed with CFIA. They are overburdened now. Plus, we need lab space to do all the testing. How does the minister square all that when saying that testing is the answer when we physically do not have the infrastructure or the people to do it?
Agriculture April 27th, 2004
Mr. Speaker, livestock producers need to see some sort of a plan to see an end to this trade dispute. We are not sending the minister down there to hold the towels while the big boys use the executive washroom.
In light of a recent federal judge's decision in Montana to hold up Canadian beef again, how can the minister think he is making any real progress on convincing the Americans that we have a continental beef industry?