Mr. Speaker, I want to compliment the member for Selkirk—Interlake for his presentation on the ongoing crisis in our agricultural sector and I urge him to persevere.
This is the fourth time in five months that the official opposition has tried to raise both the consciousness of the House and, more importantly, the consciousness of the government with respect to the seriousness of the income crisis facing our farmers, a crisis further compounded by flooding earlier this spring in certain parts of Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
We are frankly at our wit's end as to what more can be done to get the Prime Minister to personally address this issue and to get the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food to acknowledge the inadequacy of his efforts thus far, but for the sake of our constituents and Canadian farmers everywhere we will try again today.
Once again we will lay before the House the mounting evidence that Canadian farmers continue to face record low incomes due to factors beyond their control. We have already done so once before in this session during our replies to the Speech from the Throne, a speech in which the government completely failed to even acknowledge the problem. If only one fact could be cited, which should be sufficient evidence in itself to prompt the government to greater action, it is the fact cited in the motion that combined realized net income for farmers in Manitoba and Saskatchewan is down 98% from the previous five year average.
In human terms this means a lot more than the loss of income. It means tears and heartache. It means the churning of stomachs, worry and despair for thousands of farm families. It means a loss of the ability of those families to provide for themselves and their children. It means the loss of hope, which is the worst loss on the farm, a loss of confidence in the future and a desperate feeling of people not knowing where to turn. For some it has already meant the loss of the farm itself.
Once again we appeal to the government. If the government will not be moved by the statistics and the hard facts concerning the disastrous drop in farm income, surely it must be moved, and moved to do something more, by the human tragedy that surrounds those facts.
The position of the government appears to be that it has done all that it can or can be expected to do. This position we categorically reject. We urge the House to reject it by supporting this motion. Instead of pursuing its current policy, we therefore urge the government to do the following six things.
First, we ask that it acknowledge that its ill-conceived, ad hoc AIDA program is a failure. It should be reformed or replaced so that it actually delivers payments to farmers in combination with provincial contributions in the order of the $25 to $50 per acre promised in the press releases and the public statements of the minister.
Second, we ask that it present to the House an immediate plan to provide tax relief to Canadians, including agricultural producers and farm families. This plan should include reductions in taxes on agricultural inputs such as fuel and fertilizer and it should include reductions in user fees such as those collected through the Canadian Grain Commission and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
Third, in order to find the money to meet the cost of providing any additional emergency assistance, the government should make a formal and urgent request to the Standing Committee on Finance to do precisely that, to find the money; not by increasing total taxes or borrowing or returning to deficit financing, but by readjusting the government's current spending priorities. This is precisely what any family or business facing an emergency situation would have to do. It would have to take funds from other areas to address the emergency requirements. This is what the government and this parliament should be learning to do, whether it is to cope with the spending requirements of an agricultural emergency or to cope with the government's $5 billion pay equity bungle.
Fourth, in order to address the longer term dimensions of the problem and to ensure that there is a long term future for agricultural producers, the government should present a plan to the House to redress the inadequacies of its current farm safety net programs, in particular crop insurance and the net income stabilization program.
Unlike the NDP we do not advocate a return to the protectionist or dependency creating subsidies of the past. Such measures would not survive challenges under either the NAFTA or the WTO and proposing them only raises false hopes that will be dashed later on.
What we do advocate is reforming crop insurance to include disaster insurance so that programs like AIDA do not have to be invented on an ad hoc basis after the fact every time there is a major climatic disaster like a flood or a drought.
We advocate an expanded NISA-type program that will really do the job, a single trade distortion adjustment program, a single agricultural income insurance program that compensates agricultural producers for income injury suffered as a result of somebody else's subsidies in violation of the spirit and letter of free trade.
This idea was first raised in this House by Elwin Hermanson, our former agricultural critic and now the leader of the official opposition in Saskatchewan. He is a respected agricultural leader who has just received an overwhelming mandate to represent the farming and rural communities of that province.
Fifth, we demand the immediate formation of an emergency team Canada mission to Europe and Washington, led by the Prime Minister but including the Minister for International Trade, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food and other provincial officials. Their mission would be to make the case as it has never been made before that European and American subsidies, contrary to both the spirit and the letter of free international trade in agricultural products, are killing our farmers.
We have one further proposal for the agricultural minister which we insist he convey to the Prime Minister and that is that the Prime Minister himself participate in this debate. The Prime Minister has consistently absented himself from every major discussion of this issue in the House since he became Prime Minister six years ago. This is inexcusable in a country where agriculture is one of the major primary industries and where hundreds of thousands of Canadians are dependent on agriculture for their livelihood.
We are aware that the Prime Minister does not know the difference between wheat and toadflax, but surely the agriculture minister could brief him before he came down, because the Prime Minister's continued indifference to this issue is an insult to farmers everywhere in this country, particularly in the west.
If the Prime Minister really cares about this issue, why does he not come down here and say so, and present to the House not the usual fluff and chaff, but a plan incorporating the emergency measures and agricultural reforms which this motion urges upon the government?
