Leon Benoit

[Canadian Wheat Board Act, April 24th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I am here today to speak at report stage of Bill C-72, the legislation that the Liberals have brought in to change the Canadian Wheat Board.

Quite frankly, I am surprised that this legislation ever made it to the House. It should not have. It does not do what farmers in western Canada want done with the board. It does not even do what the Liberal government said it wanted to do to the wheat board.

Throughout committee and during clause by clause, it became very clear that this is extremely bad legislation. It is not legislation that should ever have found its way to the House. I am disappointed that it did. It does not do, by the way, what the panel that studied the wheat board and travelled across western Canada said it should do. It does not even come close. That panel recommended that the wheat board become accountable to farmers.

This legislation, if looked at on the surface, does that to some extent in a very minimal way. Clearly the government and the government appointees will control what happens to the board.

The amendments that we, the Reform Party, presented would have done something had they not been rejected by the government. They would have gone at least a little way toward fixing some of these problems. However quite honestly, this is a piece of legislation that cannot be fixed.

As we know, this legislation will never come to a vote in the House, nor should it. It will be thrown out. Whether we have a government led by Preston Manning coming back, a government led by Mr. Chrétien or a government led by somebody else, we will have to start again. I realize that I have used the names of members and I will refrain from doing that.

This legislation will not do what farmers want. A study done by the Saskatchewan government showed that 56 per cent of farmers want the freedom to either market through the board or directly, either through a grain company or on their own to another country, the United States or wherever. It does not do what that study indicated.

It does not honour the results of the plebiscite held in Alberta. That plebiscite showed that 66 per cent of farmers wanted dual marketing, as its commonly called, or wanted a choice to either market through the wheat board, or through a grain company or somewhere else as they choose.

That is what the panel that was set up by the government recommended. It recommended that barley be sold freely and farmers have a choice either to sell through the board or on the open market as they choose, whether inside the country or outside. The government did not honour the recommendations of its own panel.

In a survey in my constituency of Vegreville done by TeleResearch Inc. roughly 85 per cent of farmers polled by this professional pollster-and I tabled the report with the committee so the government knows what it showed-are in favour of having a choice, dual marketing, marketing either through the board or on their own for barley. It was slightly lower for wheat but not very much. In the Beaver River constituency even a higher percentage wanted to have that choice and did not want the monopoly.

This bill will not do what farmers in either Vegreville consistency, which I represent, or in the constituency that the hon. member for Beaver River, Deb Grey, represents.

[Budget Implementation Act, 1997, April 22nd, 1997]

That is untrue.

[Budget Implementation Act, 1997, April 22nd, 1997]

He never said poor people.

[Petitions, April 21st, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition is from constituents who are upset with some recent court decisions on the age of consent. They are asking that the age of consent be raised to 18. They say the majority of Canadians believe that the age of consent laws are designed to control adults who want sex with minors.

Therefore the petitioners pray that Parliament will amend the Criminal Code of Canada to set the age of consent at 18, with the exception of husband-wife relationships, so as to provide protection from exploitation and abuse.

[Petitions, April 21st, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I have two petitions to present on behalf of my constitutions.

In the first the petitioners are asking for the federal government to remove the GST and other tax on reading materials. They urge Parliament to remove the GST from books, magazines and newspapers. They ask the Prime Minister to carry out his party's repeated promise to remove federal sales taxes from reading materials.

[Farm Debt Mediation Act, April 17th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak today on Bill C-38, the farm debt mediation act. The purpose of the bill is to change the farm debt review legislation and replace this decade old legislation with a review board system which involves a mediation type service for farmers who are facing seizure of their property by creditors.

First I will discuss the legislation currently in place and then the changes that have been made to it. After that I will discuss issues related to the farm debt review bill. The main provisions of this legislation put in place a review of a farmer's financial affairs, as there was in the old act and the provision of mediation between farmers and creditors to replace the old system which was far more adversarial. I am very familiar with that system. I have worked through it with some farmers.

The bill puts in place an order temporarily suspending the right of creditors to continue proceedings against farmers. The intent of this legislation more than anything else is to hold off creditors that are knocking at the door if the farmers and the board feel there is a possibility of working out a deal that will be beneficial to the creditors and the farmer involved. That is the purpose of the act.

The new system would replace the appointed panel members with mediators who would be hired after a bidding process. It allows a farmer facing insolvency to apply for up to a 30-day stay of proceedings. Then a farmer could renew this 30-day stay of proceedings for up to a total of 120 days.

In complicated cases, an expert on debt and the reorganization of debt could be hired to prepare an assessment of the farmer's situation. That was done under the old system as well.

The main change in the process is to move to a system which involves more mediation. In fact I know from personal experience that in many of the cases under the old system it did work more like a mediation process. In a way this formalizes the process that was being used before this change to the act.

The appeal board is made up of farmers who are considered to be financial experts and would be available to hear complaints about decisions and to grant, extend or to terminate proceedings. That is what this legislation is about.

The Reform Party's policy, even before the last election, supports measures by government to give farmers the instruments necessary to create more self-reliance. Farmers have used these instruments. Some have been available for some time. Farmers have used them extremely well and are far more capable now of working through complex financial situations, the reorganization of debt and situations like that, than they were a few years ago.

Unfortunately part of the reason they have become so good at reorganizing debt is that some of them have had to do it several times. Agriculture has gone through extremely tough times. Unfortunately, governments-it is not just this Liberal government but the Conservative government before as well-have put in place legislation and programs which have damaged farmers immeasurably.

It is very unfortunate that we even need legislation that is geared to helping farmers reorganize debt or geared to finding some way

of working with creditors so they have something left should they have financial failure and should the creditors come to collect. I put the blame for that clearly at the feet of governments and again, not just this government. Certainly past Conservative governments have put in several programs which have made things much worse for farmers and which have distorted the market so badly that farmers really do not have the opportunity to work within a free enterprise market situation. Instead they have had to work under the framework laid out by these various government programs. That has harmed the competitive ability of Canadian farmers immeasurably.

Liberal governments before the Conservatives were in power and this current Liberal government have to share some of the blame for those programs which have replaced the market situation which would be much healthier for farmers.

While this legislation makes some improvements to the farm debt review board act, it does not solve the main problem that farmers face today. The main problem that farmers face today directly stems from governments becoming too involved in the agriculture industry. I am not just talking about the Canadian government, although the Canadian government is certainly guilty of this and has been for the past 20 to 30 years. I am also talking about foreign governments. The European governments have dumped completely unfairly on markets around the world that under a competitive situation, under a fair trade situation, would have been markets for Canadian farmers.

In the grain industry, for example, the American government with its export enhancement program depressed world markets around the world. Canadian governments, Liberal, Conservative and now Liberal again, have put in place programs that make it difficult for farmers to do business. That is what they want to do. Farmers have no choice with the present trade agreements.

We have moved to some extent back to the free enterprise system that farmers want, but we have a long way to go and the government certainly has not helped to accommodate that change. It should be chastized for that.

I mentioned in my opening remarks that I know how the old Farm Debt Review Act works. I have seen how the panels work. In some cases it has helped farmers work through some very difficult situations. Unfortunately in most cases it involves the farmers going out of business. At least in some cases they can go out of business without having to carry debt beyond the end of their farming business.

In other cases there have been successes. Some farmers who have used the farm debt review board have managed to keep their farms. In some cases they rent the land from the Farm Credit Corporation, which became the owner as a result of the farm debt review board process. The farmers were able to farm the land. In some cases they were able to buy the land from the Farm Credit Corporation and other creditors.

The old Farm Debt Review Act worked in some cases. It was good for some farmers. At the same time it considered what the creditors wanted. It succeeded in getting farmers and creditors together to try to work out a deal which would be beneficial to both.

On the other hand, this program involves a lot of overlap with provincial programs which are already in place. I have personal experience. I was hired as a consultant by Alberta agriculture to work with farmers. I know the Farm Debt Review Act duplicated the services which were offered by the province and by the private sector. The duplication was completely unnecessary. Unfortunately that will continue with the new act. In many cases it puts the federal government into provincial jurisdiction.

The services that the mediator and others in the process offer to farmers to work out a deal with creditors are being provided by private consultants and provincial governments. The provinces have hired farmers on a contract basis to do the work. There is a lot of duplication.

Ten years ago when the Farm Debt Review Act was put in place it served a purpose. However, the provinces were fulfilling that role much better than the federal legislation. In the late 1980s farmers were being forced out of business as a result of government involvement in markets, which was depressing the prices at alarming rates.

I believe there was a role for provincial governments. Private consultants were not available and they certainly were not trained to the level which would allow them to help farmers work through their problems. For provincial governments to get involved made sense back then. They provided a service.

I worked for Alberta agriculture. I worked with dozens and dozens of farmers as a business management consultant. I helped them work through their difficult situations.

I have often worked with creditors just as a go between to try to work out a deal, sometimes very successfully but in many cases unfortunately completely unsuccessfully in terms of saving the business. However, often the farmers who were leaving the business because they were being forced out ended up with something. They had a little something to help them.

I think that was a useful service. I really wonder about the necessity of duplicating that service. I now know that private consultants are far better trained, are there and are quite willing to help farmers to work through these very difficult situations and, more important, to work with farmers before the situations become

so desperate that they go to the farm debt review board or to this new farm mediation system.

I do think there are some improvements in this legislation. For some of the reasons I mentioned earlier this legislation does provide a better framework. However, I have some specific concerns on the amount of money involved. My first concern is that the budget for this process is way too high. It is not just an arbitrary judgment that I make. Right now the Saskatchewan farm debt review board handles about half of all the cases in Canada and the cost is $700,000. Yet the budget for this new new farm debt board is $2.2 million. It leads one to ask if this government is anticipating that the load of farmers needing this service will increase dramatically. There has to be a reason for a budget being much higher than would seem to make sense when one considers the current budget.

One has to ask whether this government really does anticipate that more farmers are going to end up in serious financial trouble and will need the services of this act to work through financial difficulty, which usually ends in farmers being forced out of business and losing, in many cases, all their assets but at least not having to carry debt beyond the termination of their business.

As members would know, many Reform MPs are farmers or were before they got into this business. Of 52 members of Parliament, we have somewhere between 14 and 17 members who have a farming background, own farms or have worked in the agriculture industry. That is a real high number for a caucus of 52. When we have meetings dealing with agricultural issues it is not unusual, as we have had many times in the past, to have 14 to 16 Reform MPs at these meetings. The interest in agriculture certainly cannot be equaled in any caucus. The level of expertise on agriculture certainly cannot and is not equalled in any other caucus in the House.

The importance that the Reform caucus places on agriculture, on farmers, on ranchers and on others in agricultural business is not equalled by any other caucus in this country. We have shown a commitment to farmers and we are going to continue to do that. We ask farmers, as we ask all other Canadians going into the election, which seems certain to be coming quite soon, to look at everyone's platforms. We ask them to take a good look at the platforms that are being offered in agriculture and in other areas by all the political parties. I then ask them to look at the Reform platform and compare it to the platforms offered by others in the agriculture area and other areas.

Let us have the election fought on issues, not on labels that one party tries to pin on another. Let us not have an election with name calling and dirty politics. I invite any other political party to compare what we offer in agriculture and in the the rest of our platform to theirs. If that comparison takes place during the election campaign, Reform will form the government after the election.

All I ask is that the political parties compare platforms so that Canadians can compare platforms and vote for whomever has the best ideas, the best policies, the best people to carry them out and the best leader. I believe it will prove to be the Reform Party.

Another problem with the legislation is that there is too much political patronage. That should not be a big surprise because members throughout the day have been pointing out Liberal patronages one after the other; all Liberals appointed to the Senate since they came to office. It is unbelievable.

Even under the Mulroney government there was an elected Senator, Stan Waters of Alberta. He happened to be a Reform member. But what is important is that he was elected to the Senate. A precedent was set.

British Columbia has legislation to accommodate elected senators. The premier of British Columbia has asked that senators be elected. Albertans and the Government of Alberta have asked for elected senators. And what do we get? Every senator since the election has been replaced by patronage appointees by the Prime Minister. That is completely unacceptable. That is just the start of the list of patronage appointments. It goes on and on. I am not going to get into the list because I do not have time in my presentation today.

This legislation just sets up space for more patronage appointments. That is completely unacceptable. That alone is reason enough to not support the bill. We do not want to support anything which would allow more spots to be filled by patronage appointments.

This legislation is a minor one, acknowledged. It makes minor changes to the existing Farm Debt Review Act. It is really dealing with a small issue in terms of how many people it affects and it should be dealing with important issues. At least it does offer some changes to improve the existing Act.

I want to congratulate the government for those particular changes. On the other hand, as I have said, there a lot of other things that should have been changed but were not. There is $2.2 million in the budget, but if we could trust that the government had any ability to forecast accurately, I think farmers should be very concerned because the budget is way beyond what should be required when we consider the present costs.

Instead of dealing with this legislation just before an election, the government should be dealing with some serious legislation to improve grain transportation which would allow competition in the grain transportation system, allow some recourse for farmers to make the railways and grain handlers accountable. But it is not

doing that. The government should be dealing with legislation that would get rid of the wheat board monopoly and instead improve the wheat board to make it accountable to farmers and to give farmers an option to either market their products through the wheat board or a grain company or on their own. The government did not do that, therefore we are debating this legislation. Much more important legislation should have been debated than this. For that reason I will not take any more time on this legislation.

[Agricultural Marketing Programs Act, April 17th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I am not in any way going to try to guess the motives. Look at the situation and the rumours that an election will be called in less than six months. Some say it will be called on April 27. That has been mentioned a lot. But that is early and I think Canadians are going to punish the government if it does call an election six months before the earliest acceptable date of four years. Farmers are also going to punish them if the government does that.

I am wondering why the government is raising this now, why it has been put ahead of a lot of other legislation which it stated is very important to it. I would guess that the reason is the Liberals want to deal with the negative reaction to their so-called gun control bill. It is really a bill that imposes penalties on law-abiding gun owners and makes things extremely difficult for them. It overrides normally accepted judicial principles. The legislation puts in place gun registration which will cost by some estimates at least $500 million. That is money that is not available for health care or other things that are really important to Canadians.

Maybe the Liberals are trying to get people to forget about that. Maybe they are trying to get farmers to forget about other legislation that has hurt them very dramatically, legislation such as on transportation which was a dismal failure.

We called for changes to that transportation legislation which would have made things better for farmers. Unfortunately it was not put in place.

The government says it puts agriculture at a high priority. There are two other pieces of legislation which really affect farmers quite dramatically and which are on the table right now. One is Bill C-65, the endangered species legislation. It is another piece of legislation that if it is rammed through before the election is called it will really put farmers in a very awkward situation. I am mentioning farmers because we are talking about an agricultural bill right now. Any land user or owner could be put in a very awkward situation by this endangered species legislation which allows government to mandate that land users, land owners will have to spend money to fence off an area to protect an endangered species or lose the use of their land completely without compensation. That is the key. There will be no compensation for losing the use of their land. There will be nothing to help pay for the cost of fencing the land.

This will not only affect farmers. Think of someone who intends to build a business in an industrial park and a habitat for an endangered species is found in the park. The endangered species legislation can require that the land will never be used for development. The value of the land could be lost almost entirely. Would they be compensated for that? No.

That is another piece of legislation that maybe the Liberals want farmers to forget about. Or could it be the wheat board legislation? I did polls in my constituency and there was one done in the constituency of Beaver River concerning the wheat board. I tabled the results with the agriculture committee of the survey done by Tele Research out of Edmonton. In Beaver River 92 per cent of farmers wanted a choice in marketing grain. They want the wheat board to remain but they want the monopoly removed. They want

what many call a dual marketing system. They want choice in marketing.

Bill C-72 does not give them that choice. The plebiscite that the government held on barley marketing did not even have the option of choice on the ballot. Farmers either have to market their barley through the board in a monopoly situation, or the board would be abolished. That was the choice.

Maybe with this legislation the government is trying to cover up Bill C-72 which is not supported by farmers. It will not give farmers any substantial control over the wheat board. It will make it more difficult for farmers to change the board and to remove the monopoly.

Bill C-72 was rammed through committee. It is a very complex bill. It deals with the Canadian Wheat Board, which is a very complex and secretive organization. I did not feel that I was given enough time to look at each clause as we were going through the bill. I examined the clauses ahead of time and was prepared, but I do not believe the proper amount of time was given at committee to go through the clauses and lay out arguments. The legislation is being rammed through. Farmers do not want it. Maybe the government is trying to cover it up with this bill.

It is not that this bill is a big deal for farmers. Advance payments have been around for many years. This is not putting anything new in place, it is just changing the legislation to ensure that advance payments will not be eliminated.

My best guess why this legislation has come up now is because, according to the rumours in the media, an election will be called some time in the very near future, some time like Sunday, April 27 at one o'clock in the afternoon.

[Agricultural Marketing Programs Act, April 17th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak on Bill C-34. We will support the bill because enough in it should be presented to farmers.

Why is the bill coming before the House now for final debate? It has been around at least two years. For some time farmers have been calling for the legislation to pass. It has been let sit. It was not of particular interest to the government to deal with it in spite of a very light legislative load before the House.

The government has debated very little of importance since Parliament was called. Very little of importance has passed. In spite of that these pieces of legislation, Bill C-34 and Bill C-38, were forgotten somewhere in a stack on the parliamentary secretary's desk or something. That is unacceptable.

The government has shown a lack of caring and a lack of interest when it comes to farmers. We will raise its record with farmers across the country. They can compare it to what we have proposed, pushed for and presented in our agriculture policy sheet since the last election. We have presented many ideas. Farmers will see the choice is very simple to make and will choose Reform.

Why was the legislation brought forward now? Why was it forgotten on the parliamentary secretary's desk? I cannot answer the questions. There is a rumour that I find difficult to believe, but it could be true there is to be an election. I would not expect it because there are still six months before the four-year mandate is up. I suspect the election will be called between six months and a year and a half from now. That is what normally happens.

A government only calls an election early, especially this early after only 3.5 years, if it is afraid of holding off a little longer. The government has a lot of reason to be afraid of calling the election after four years, as is normal. It was given a five-year mandate. Calling an election after 3.5 years would mean an extra election over a 10-year period and extra cost. What does an election cost? Maybe $400 million, with all the costs to taxpayers. It is somewhere in that range. There will be an extra $400 million spent over a 10-year period and for that reason I doubt the rumour is true.

Let us say that the rumour is true and an election is called in the next few months, or maybe even the next few weeks. I have even heard that rumour. Why would it be that the government held off on the legislation until now? Why would that be?

Could it be that the government is absolutely terrified farmers will reject them en masse because of Bill C-68, the gun control legislation? It has been widely rejected across the country by farmers and by many people in cities and small towns. It is a bad piece of legislation. Farmers will be considering that piece of legislation very carefully when they go to the polls in rural areas.

Could the legislation have been forgotten on the parliamentary secretary's desk deliberately? Not caring about the situation it could put farmers in, it was put aside on the minister's desk to be kept until just before an election call to try to make farmers forget that the $120 million figure that comes the legislation. That is not what it will mean to farmers but it is the political figure that will be thrown around. Could this have been saved until just before election time to cover up for Bill C-68?

Or, could it have been left and forgotten on the parliamentary secretary's desk because farmers remember Bill C-33, the legislation that gives special rights to homosexuals? We now have to pay benefits for any of my staff who claim they are in a same sex relationship. This us what Bill C-33 led to. This was widely rejected right across the country and very strongly in rural areas.

Could the bill have been left on the parliamentary secretary's desk, on the bottom of the pile in the dark, until just now? Surely the government would not be so blatantly willing to cost Canadians an extra $400 million for an election that should not be held until after four years. However, let us say that it is the case. Is the legislation being used to cover up some very bad pieces of legislation rural areas would rather the government had forgotten? That is the reason it was been left on his desk.

I will talk a bit about the bill. Later I will talk about some related issues. Most Reform MPs will support the legislation. We have some very grave concerns about it that I will talk about. Some members have already spoken about the bill and what it deals with regarding advance payments and so on. They have also talked about what it is not.

The concerns of the Reform Party and the changes we tried to make were in four main areas. First, we say a limit should be entrenched on government contingent liability instead of just an open ended liability. Most taxpayers do not accept an open ended liability. An upper limit should be entrenched in the legislation, or the House of Commons Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food should review any increases in the legislation on a regular basis rather than just having orders in council. Orders in council have the power to act on their own. Under the legislation the minister has the power to determine an acceptable liability without it ever coming to Parliament. That fits in with the lack of democratic process the government has shown over the 3.5 years it has been in power.

Second, farmers should be allowed access to emergency advances on an interest free basis but only within part of the existing $50,000 interest free portion. That did not happen either.

Third, we have pushed the government to eliminate the government purchases program which allows government under certain completely unspecified circumstances and with unspecified crops to buy crops. This supposedly helps farmers out of serious situations. It has not been used since 1985 and we really do not know what it is to be used for. It has not been defined in any way. It is bad legislation when it has no guidelines.

Fourth, we pushed throughout the process for all agricultural organizations to be treated the same with regard to this legislation. That has not happened. Which body was given a two-year reprieve from enactment of the legislation? The Canadian Wheat Board. Why would I be surprised by that?

Wheat board commissioners run the board. Farmers have absolutely no say in what happens with the board. We do not even know what is going on inside the wheat board. Everything is kept top secret, a level of secrecy equal to CSIS and the privy council. It is unbelievable. It is the only organization given a two-year reprieve from the legislation. It is no surprise. Government members are in bed with wheat board commissioners.

The wheat board serves a very useful purpose for Canadian farmers. I have always supported it as a marketing agency. However farmers accountability. They want to know what goes on inside the wheat board. They want some answers when they have questions. They want the auditor general to have access to what goes on inside the board. For Pete's sake, the auditor general cannot even get at it. We get no answers.

Only through a leaked document did we find out that commissioners who are fired or choose to leave are paid a severance package of up to $290,000. It is unbelievable.

Why was that the only organization the government decided to give a two-year reprieve in the enactment of the legislation? It is no surprise but it is not acceptable either. Those are the changes we have pushed for regarding Bill C-34.

Again we support this legislation because it is something that farmers want. We believe that the advanced payments do provide

some stability in the whole grain marketing industry. We believe that is required and it has been our policy all along. We support it for that reason but it is unfortunate that the changes we proposed were not dealt with.

I have already talked a bit about why this has come up now. Of course I cannot say why and I would not want in any way to guess at motives. However, the timing is really strange. Could it be that this government is really concerned with the problems in other areas of agriculture which have been brought about directly as a result of its action and inaction?

For example, we have a problem in the grain industry right now. I have neighbours who right now should have all of their supplies on hand for seeding. They should be starting to seed two to three weeks down the road. However, they do not have the money to do that because they have not been able to move their grain. Why can they not move their grain? This government, in the three pieces of legislation that dealt with grain marketing, has failed miserably.

An example is the elimination by this government of the Crow benefit, the Crow subsidy as it was called, which the Reform Party supported. However, our policy was that it should go into a trade distortion adjustment program so that it would be there to help fight the trade battles such as those provided by the European Economic Community and the export enhancement program in the United States. That was our policy that we ran on before the last election. We said that the money should go into that but we recognized that the Crow subsidy was doing a lot of damage moving grain out to central Canada so that all the value added took place in central Canada or in fact encouraged exports through a subsidy so that processing would take place outside the country. That does not make any sense, so eliminating it made sense.

However, there were changes that had to take place before this move was made and they just did not happen.

The same types of changes should have been made when CN was privatized. The same types of changes should have been made with the new Canadian transportation act. Those changes are changes which would have made the transportation system much more effective. It would have brought competition into the system and allowed for competition. It would have dealt with the car allocation problem which just has not been dealt with in any way after 3.5 years of this government knowing when it first came that it was a huge problem. It knew car allocation was not working. We had a special subcommittee set up to deal with that but it just did not happen. Therefore the car allocation system is failing dismally. The wheat board as too much control over car allocation. That is a big part of the reason why we do not have grain moving properly now.

As a result of action and inaction on the part of this government, I have neighbours who just are not going to have the money to buy the inputs to seed this year's crop. They go hat in hand to the banks. Some banks in some cases will lend the money. In other cases, because of the drought situation that we have had for many years in our part of the country, there are many bankers who will not lend the money to farmers. We are going to have farmers who will not be able to seed their crops this year. For many of them it is going to mean the end of their farming careers and the loss of their family farms in many cases.

Why? This government did nothing to allow competition in the system. It did not put in a series of incentives and penalties so that railways and grain companies would perform. It would not put in place, as we recommended, a system of final offer arbitration to deal with disputes with captive shippers. We talked about it under the new Canada transportation act and the privatization of CN and the legislation that eliminated the Crow or the debate around that issue.

We proposed this. We said let us do it. At the committee we proposed the changes that would have given captive shippers the power to deal with the railways and with grain handling companies when they did not perform. Unfortunately those changes were not made.

We have a system that predictably is not working. We predicted that this system would not work with the changes that this government put in place. It was predictable, unfortunately. It has happened.

Now we have grain farmers in a very serious situation where their grain is left, in some cases, in piles on the ground and will spoil. In other cases the bins are full but they cannot get money to seed the crops.

Of course, the wheat board did not help this situation out with its price forecast set extremely high when farmers went into planting last year. Of course, now we are finding that the actual price that farmers are getting for their grain has dropped off to such a low level that it certainly has not helped the problem.

That is the problem and it is the reason that this government brought this legislation up now. It wants to cover up for its inaction and in some cases for its actions since the last election.

Do the Liberals want to cover up that they have delivered on less than 25 per cent of the promises they made in the area of agriculture? That is the case.

While I support this legislation I want farmers to recognize, as I am sure they do, that this is an election ploy. They were left in the lurch for I do not know how long. It seems to me it has been two years since the legislation was proposed. Farmers will recognize that is why this legislation has been held off the table for so long.

[Agriculture, April 9th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, the Liberals say they are going to win the election on their record. Let us see how their record has served farmers.

When farmers and Reform MPs proposed amendments to the Canada Transportation Act, the CN privatization act and the bill eliminating the Crow benefit, all which affect grain movement, the Liberals said no.

These amendments would have built a more competitive rail system which would deliver on time. Reform amendments would have put in place a system of incentives and penalties to encourage on time delivery and a final offer arbitration process to give grain shippers some clout. The Liberals said no.

As a result, little grain has been sold. Ships are waiting and farmers are paying demurrage. Customers have been kept waiting and Canada's reputation as an unreliable shipper is being reinforced.

Sales lag as prices drop. Farmers are squeezed once again as they go hat in hand to bankers to get a loan to seed this year's crop. When Liberal candidates ask farmers for their vote, farmers should say no.

[Criminal Code, April 7th, 1997]

He really said that.