Madam Speaker, I truly am delighted to take part in this debate. For me personally, this is the beginning of the end of a 40 year struggle. I started 40 years ago to work to try to end the Wheat Board monopoly, but I will talk a bit about that later.
It is the end of a 70 year period during which time the Wheat Board has had a monopoly and farmers have had no choice. Marketing wheat and certain classes of barley had to be done through the board. Other grains were included during part of that time as well.
It is the beginning of the end of an era, and I am proud to be a member of a government that is doing the right thing after all of this time.
I cannot measure exactly what the benefits or the hurt caused by the Wheat Board having its monopoly. What I do know is some of the hurt caused to my father who farmed most of his life. When I was a young boy during the sixties and early seventies, I remember the harvest finally finished when fall arrived. For many of those years, my father had good crops but he could not market them. We were a large family and we did not have a lot of cash flow. I remember my father desperately trying to get money to buy boots for us for the winter. He did not have the money. I remember my father desperately trying to get enough money to pay some of the bills for fertilizer and pesticides and other farm inputs, and he could not do it. He had the grain, but he could not find a market for it. Therefore, he went out to find a market on his own and he found one for his wheat and barley across the border. It was a poor price, but at least it would provide the cash flow to help get the winter clothing for the family and to pay enough of the bills that the suppliers would send again next year.
As a result of the Wheat Board rules, my father could not cross the border to sell the grain when he found one so he could do those things for his family. I am not talking about the border with the United States. Our farm was two miles from the Saskatchewan border on the Alberta side. Because of the laws in place under the Wheat Board legislation, he was not allowed to take his grain across the border, 50 miles away, where he found a market with feeders, people feeding cattle and hogs, because the Wheat Board had to be protected.
That is what I grew up with. My father's opinion of the Wheat Board before that I do not know, but I do know he was frustrated by these restrictions put on him by the board at that time.
I am proud to say that with this legislation one of the many changes that will take place is that farmers will now be allowed to take grain across provincial borders without fear of penalty. That is a step in the right direction.
It has been a 40 year struggle for me. It started when I took agriculture at university. In 1970 I took my first marketing course. I was fortunate enough to have as my instructor Professor Joe Richter. He came into that marketing course the very first day and said that monopolies were always a bad thing, whether they were private or government. He said, furthermore, that this applied to the Canadian Wheat Board.
I admit that a lot of my classmates were not very sure about that. They had been taught by their parents and grandparents that the Wheat Board was something almost sacred. By the end of that course, every one of my colleagues understood why the monopoly simply was not a good thing.
That was the start of my struggle, but I moved on. I went on the advisory committees of the Alberta Wheat Pool, things like that, and then 18 years ago I became involved in politics.
Half of my first speech as a politician was on the Wheat Board and how we had to end the monopoly. I talked about how we had to give farmers the freedom to market their grain in the fashion that they saw fit. It has been 18 years as a member of Parliament. Now, finally, it is the beginning of the end. The monopoly will be removed and we will be on to bigger and better things.
This is a rights issue. I hear all the arguments about plebiscites and other things, whether the board has offered an advantage or not. Personally, I simply do not believe those things are the issues.
The issue is rights and equality. On the equality issue, why should farmers in western Canada be treated differently and given fewer rights and options than farmers in central Canada? There is no good answer for that. No one can come up with a good answer because there is not one.
When it comes to rights, it is property rights issue. Farmers put all of the money into producing their grain. Farmers put all of the work, the sweat, the toil into producing their grain. When it comes time to sell their grain, they simply do not have a basic right that anybody else in any other industry in our country has and, in fact, that anybody else in any democratic country has. That is wrong.
This legislation is about restoring the rights to western Canadian wheat and barley growers and restoring equality so that western farmers are treated equal to eastern farmers.
People ask how we ever got into this mess in the first place. The mess started back in the early 1920s. There was a form of the Wheat Board that was put in place at that time. It was put in place absolutely respecting the rules of co-operatives. One of the basic principles, the key principal of all the co-operatives that helped build the west, was freedom, freedom to either use the co-operative or not, freedom to be a member or not. That is the way the Wheat Board was established. It was voluntary.
Then in 1935, once again, it was established as a voluntary organization. It is exactly what we are asking for right now. Farmers had a right to either market through the Wheat Board, if they chose, or to market through any grain company they wanted, if they chose to do that. That is the way the Wheat Board was established.
It was only in 1943, under the War Measures Act, when the government wanted to get cheap grain for the war effort in Europe, that the monopoly was put in place. It was put in place under the War Measures Act, why to give farmers a better price for their grain? Absolutely not. It was to get cheap grain for the war effort, and that was acceptable. In war we have to do some things we do not like to do. I am not criticizing the government of the day in any fashion.
What I am criticizing governments for is that after the war the monopoly was not removed, and it has not been to this day. That is a basic and unacceptable infringement on basic human rights and, in this case, property rights. It is time this was changed.
It is about that. All of the talk about a vote and plebiscite is not valid, because I would argue that democracy should not be used to remove basic human rights.
To use maybe a poor analogy, and I do not have much time to do it, we were all elected in the House knowing what our salaries would be. What if the Speaker decided that there would be votes in each of our constituencies, but only in the constituencies in central Canada. A vote would be held to have the people determine whether an MP should get paid or the amount an MP should be paid.
There is a vote and democracy takes place. The people decide that maybe MPs should not get paid at all or should get paid much less. It is a vote. It is democracy. That is what the members are arguing for over there. However, is it right? Of course it is not right.
Maybe it is not the best analogy, but whether there is a vote and all of the other arguments made whether the monopoly is good or bad is not the key issue. The key issue is we have to restore the basic right of farmers to sell their property and to do it in any way that they see fit.
