Madam Speaker, let me begin by congratulating the Leader of the Opposition for moving this motion on a matter of real urgency, not simply to people who live in rural Canada, as the member across the way indicated earlier, but to Canadians as a whole.
Let me serve notice that I will be splitting my time in this debate with my colleague from Brandon—Souris who, as the House will know, moved the first emergency debate on this issue when the House resumed after the election.
Just last night Statistics Canada reported that 63,000 Canadians have left agriculture in the last year. They are farmers, farm workers and farm families. What is most concerning is that of those who remain, the average age is steadily increasing. People do not see a future in farming in this country.
Let me be clear about what that means. There is a financial crisis now in agriculture. There could be a food crisis tomorrow in Canada. Consider for a moment a related field, that of energy. Whether the Bush administration in the United States is right or wrong, it has now embarked on an energy policy to reduce the reliance of its consumers on foreign energy producers.
In agriculture, the Liberal Government of Canada is embarked on a program to increase the reliance of Canadian consumers on foreign food, because that is the natural consequence of driving Canadian farmers off the farms. That would be food that could cost more than households in urban Canada are paying today. It would be food that might be of a lower quality. It would be food that could go to families in other countries if they were prepared to pay more.
We have taken for granted Canada's ability to produce large quantities of high quality food. We will lose that ability if we continue to drive farmers off our farms, and driving farmers off the farm has been a consistent result of the Liberal government, which has cut the federal budget for agricultural support by nearly $3 billion since it came to office in 1993.
How does this happen? One way it happens is that governments too long in power or too easily in power become so arrogant that they ignore what the public is saying. Indeed, in this House on this question, without any doubt at all, the government ignores what its caucus is saying. That is why the proposal by the Leader of the Opposition to have this as a vote that is not construed as a question of confidence is of such great importance.
The Liberal government governs by public opinion poll. When it does that it runs the risk of enormous harm. The Liberal government has done that before. This is the government, after all, that let Canada drift to the brink of losing the last sovereignty referendum. Do members remember the arguments? The Prime Minister claimed there was no crisis. He ignored the people on the ground. He said that public opinion polls showed there was no crisis. He nearly lost Canada.
Now, again, he claims that there is no crisis in agriculture. He took a poll on the farm crisis in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. The people his pollster questioned have not seen much of a farm crisis, not in Scarborough, not in Etobicoke, not in Ville Laval. Therefore, since they did not see it, the pollster did not report it and reality cannot exist. The Prime Minister puts rural Canada at risk because he has let urban Canadians believe that a cheap food policy is their natural right and there is nothing that would threaten it in Canada.
What the Prime Minister who nearly lost Canada in a referendum is in danger of losing now is rural Canada and, in doing that, losing the capacity to provide quality food grown here at home for Canadian families.
If farmers keep leaving the land, more Canadian supermarkets will have to look abroad for their supplies. They will have to look to Europe for their beef and their lamb. They will have to pay higher international prices that consumers are spared from today because past governments have protected a strong agricultural industry at home.
This government does not look after rural Canadians. It changed the employment insurance program, thus penalizing workers in seasonal communities in Canada, communities that live primarily off fishing, forestry, tourism and other industries that are inactive during the winter.
Most of these communities are located in rural settings and the Liberal government continues to pick on them.
Reductions in federal funding for health care have hurt all Canadians, but nowhere more than in rural communities where the quality of health care has largely diminished. It is impossible to attract doctors and nurses to many rural communities and to encourage them to stay there.
The federal government is not helping the situation at all. And so now, the government is turning its back on the Canadian agricultural industry and driving our farmers to bankruptcy. The Prime Minister, however, is saying that the polls reveal no crisis in agriculture. Why? Because the majority of the people polled live in large cities. They take agriculture for granted. That is unfair and dangerous.
If we lose our farming capability, the cost of food will shoot up in Canada. Our country can do better. We have done better in the past. It was my privilege to be part of a Canadian government that was familiar with agriculture and concerned about the sector.
However, the Liberal Party has cut substantially the programs we had put in place to help farmers. Federal aid paid out to the farm sector today amounts to nearly $3 billion less than in the time of the Conservatives. Agriculture is not a priority for the Liberal government. Rural communities are not either. This has to change.
This is not about fiscal restraint or fiscal prudence. This is about priorities. The government is quite prepared to spend public money. Let us look at the fountain in Shawinigan or the $1.3 million given yesterday to book publishers because Heather Reisman's company is paying publishers with returned books rather than cash.
When there is new money to spend, why is the heritage minister so much more influential in the government than the minister of agriculture?
More damningly, let us look at the spending estimates for the government's own propaganda. What is euphemistically called communications co-ordination services in the department of public works translates into government advertising. It has a budget of more than $75 million this year. That does not cover crown corporation advertising. It does not cover what the Prime Minister will spend in Quebec. The figure does not cover the cost of the polls which tell the Prime Minister there is no crisis in agriculture.
As Canadian farmers leave the land and Canada's food security is put in jeopardy, what is the government spending its money on? Perhaps the House has seen the expensive television ad for the Royal Canadian Mint featuring a little girl dancing over her birthday cake, lip-synching to the tune of All I Want Is Money . Now there is a celebration of Canadian values and a model to which young Canadians can aspire.
Let us assume the little girl in the expensive Liberal ad also wants her cake. Because the government is driving farmers off the land, the odds grow every day that the grain and flour in the cakes that Canadians eat will come from foreign fields and will be grown by farmers whose governments make agriculture a priority, as is not the case in Canada.
I wholeheartedly support the idea that there needs to be broad public debate about the future of agriculture. We have serious issues to face: the real nature of the viable family farm; what to do about international corporations and competition; what to do about vertical integration; what to do to ensure we are competitive around the world; and how do we sustain rural communities.
Those issues are critically important to the future of the country but they are being ignored. The House has a duty to play a leadership role in ensuring they are discussed. We must face them. We cannot simply let the future of farming drift away.
The urgent issue now is money. If it is urgent for us as a group, it is particularly urgent for Canadian farmers who want to continue to produce quality food for Canada, but who must go to their bankers and must put seed in the ground in the very next few weeks and have no help in doing that.
We strongly support the motion, but we also strongly support the need for a very real, thorough debate on agriculture, the place of food security in Canada and the importance of a food policy that will not only keep our rural areas active but ensure the security and quality of the food eaten by our urban populations.
