Wayne Easter

[Business of Supply, October 1st, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I believe that tax measure, if I am correct, passed this House and we are glad to see that the tax measure in fact goes to producers, but if he would follow my remarks, he would understand that there is just no way. Farmers are suffering. I find it unbelievable that the member from Manitoba can stand up in this House again and again and support the government.

The fact of the matter is that the minister from 2003 to 2006 put in place a program to get processing capacity and slaughter capacity up in this country and we could slaughter all our own. Since the government came into effect, that has eroded away and we are in the same situation again.

Maybe the Minister of Public Safety had it right in terms of the government's position relative to farmers. He is closing down the Frontenac prison farm in Kingston and here is what he had to say about why he was doing it:

We felt that that money could be more adequately redirected to programs where people would actually gain employable skills, as virtually nobody who went through those prison farms ended up with employable skills.

Obviously the government does not think farming--

[Business of Supply, October 1st, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I talk about the HST as the Harper sales tax. I know there is great effort on the government side to try to blame it on the governments in B.C. and Ontario, but that is in fact what I call it because the Minister of Finance is promoting going to that harmonized sales tax.

In Prince Edward Island, members will know very well that the Prince Edward Island government, which is also being forced and basically bribed with more money to go that avenue, has said that it will not go that way. The connection is there that Ontario, B.C. and Prince Edward Island have all been pushed by the Minister of Finance to go to the harmonized sales tax.

However, the member's information on how it would affect the beef industry is wrong. It would not be--

[Business of Supply, October 1st, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak to our party's motion of no confidence in the Conservative government and build on the substantive evidence. Other speakers before me have put forward why the House should show no confidence in the government and, especially, in the Prime Minister.

Simply put, it is a government Canadians cannot trust and cannot believe. It has actually squandered our nation's potential away. The biggest cost of the government's incompetence will fall on our children and grandchildren, not only by the increased debt that the government has laid on their backs but also by the decreased social and economic programs that lead to our children and grandchildren's potential, such as research and development, early learning and child care, education, and the list goes on.

As the member for Wascana said earlier, the current Conservative government has squandered the surplus of the previous Liberal government that Canadians worked so hard to attain. It moved Canada from being best of the G8 to the bottom of the G7. However, instead of admitting to their failure, the Conservatives use taxpayers' money to advertise. Their basic purpose is to mislead and confuse.

As our leader has said, they have spent six times more promoting their own inaction plan than on warning of the dangers of H1N1.

Let me give the House one small example out of the thousands of examples of waste by the government.

I have here a picture and I know I cannot use a prop, but this is a picture of a sign that was put up in front of the Jean Canfield Building and it talks about Canada's action plan using stimulus to create jobs.

The member for Charlottetown announced that building in 2004 and the member for Kings—Hants was the minister of public works at the time. It was built before the current government came to power.

Why would the Conservatives put a sign like that there? As our the leader said, they are “using public funds to promote untruths”. That is what the current government is all about: using public funds to promote untruths.

President Obama, in an August 5 email that he sent out when he was taking on the Republicans over the health care issue, said, and I quote because I believe it is the same problem in Canada:

So we've got to get out there, fight lies with truth and set the record straight.

That is what we have to do in Canada. Because the government over there is using false promotion, trying to confuse the Canadian public, trying to leave the impression that it is doing something when it is really doing the very opposite, and it is tearing down the social and economic structure that Canadians have spent their lives fighting for. It is driving this country into deficit. That is why we can no longer support the government.

Nowhere is the government's record of failure worse and nowhere is the hurt deeper than in rural Canada. Rural Canada is where the great economic potential of this nation lies: in agriculture, in fisheries, in forestry, in mining, and in energy. Those industries are the generators of wealth. However, most are being undermined and left to drift on their own because of the government's inaction.

Forestry was sold out in an agreement with the United States. It still pains forestry workers and plants are still closing to this day. In fisheries, while the east coast lobster fisheries faced disastrous prices, the minister promised help, in March. However, to this date, not a dime has been spent in that help for fisheries. Again, it is lost hope and lost dreams, announcements, and nothing delivered.

The Fraser River fisheries is facing a disaster. Instead of the Prime Minister listening to one of his own, the member from Delta--Richmond East who knows the fisheries, the Prime Minister fired him from the fisheries committee, and now, we are losing the salmon industry in the Fraser River.

Why did he fire him? Because the member was asking for government involvement that would have helped the industry. This is a Prime Minister that is in charge of governing but does not believe in government. That is why the member for Delta--Richmond East is not on that committee.

One of the government's worst record is in the area of agriculture. Remember the Prime Minister's promise in 2006 on cost of production for the farm community? Farm debt has soared to four times that of United States farms and we have lost an average of 3,600 farmers per year. How many dollars were spent under that cost of production program? The answer is zero.

In fact, in the last budget the cost of production program was dropped. What does that tell us? It tells us that the Prime Minister broke his word, not for the first time and probably not for the last.

What about hog producers who are facing the worst financial crisis ever in Canadian history? We have a Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food who announced a few things in the spring, but during the worst crisis ever to hit our industry, he decided to give one press release on top of another and thought that this would do the trick. No, it did not.

The scheme he came up with at the end is almost like a Ponzi scheme, which ensures that farmers can borrow money from a bank that is guaranteed by the government. However, the first condition is that farmers must pay back the government for the unsecured money they received from the government the year before.

Really, what is happening is farmers are now obligated to the banks and they pay off Treasury Board. The minister from Manitoba sitting here, where hog production is the highest in the country, should be ashamed of himself. The minister's department is getting paid while producers acquire more debt. How can farmers in this country have any confidence in a government like that?

What about the beef industry? The minister announced in the spring he was going to challenge country of origin labelling. October 9 is an important date. If the consultations are not completed by October 9, then the investigation cannot get started and that means the investigation will not get started until well into 2010.

What are the consequences to the beef industry without action? The result is this. Our closest market is the United States. Hog exports are down 50%. Slaughter cattle exports are down 20%. Feeder cattle exports are down 50%.

As a farmer in my province told me, five years ago he was getting an average of $1,500 for an animal that went to slaughter. What is he getting in 2009? He is getting an average of $1,106. How can farmers survive that? Who can have confidence in the actions of the government and the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food?

Let us look at AgriFlex, which the party over there committed itself to during the last election. Liberals did as well, but we would have kept our word. All the Conservatives did with AgriFlex was put less money in over more time and did not allow the flexibility to do what farmers wanted it to do. In fact, the applications have now come out.

I believe it is designed to be a slush fund for the minister. Maybe the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food has learned from the Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communities that he could use a slush fund catered to people who support him and to Conservative ridings. However, that has nothing to do with the economic crisis in the farm community.

Then there is AgriStability. Conservatives promised in 2006 that they would get rid of that awful CAIS program, that they would cancel it. They changed the name and replaced it with AgriStability. The only problem is that last year they changed how the calculations would be done and the cheques are now rolling out. They are 60% of what CAIS would have paid. How can people have confidence in the government? The fact of the matter is they cannot.

In Prince Edward Island, producers were promised by the government $12.4 million for weather-damaged crops. However, that money did not come out until it finally got delivered a year later. It was promised at the height of an election. As a result, a number of farmers did not get their crop in this spring. Worse yet, the government promised $6 million for the Atlantic beef plant for all of Atlantic Canada, and that money has not been delivered yet.

How can Canadians, how can farmers, have faith in a government like that? I say vote no confidence in the government.

[Agriculture and Agri-Food, September 30th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, as you know, one of the defining characteristics of the government is to announce but never deliver.

The Minister of Agriculture announced in the spring he was going to challenge U.S. COOL; however, there is still no investigation. October 9 is a crucial date that must be met in order to achieve a WTO investigation. While the minister dilly-dallies, farmers go broke.

I have a simple question: Will the minister act before October 9, or by default, is he just admitting that he has an absolute record of failure when it comes to farmers?

[September 29th, 2009]

The only action, Mr. Speaker, to be blunt about it that the government is taking action on, is covering the minister's butt and that is the fact. The minister went into hiding when the issue happened in the summer of 2008. The parliamentary secretary can talk all he likes about money, but we are not talking about money here. We are talking about confidence in Canada's food safety system and we are talking about Canadian lives.

The government had no qualms at all about calling an inquiry into the Mulroney-Schreiber dealings, an issue of some 24 years ago, but gosh no, the Prime Minister would not dare call an inquiry into what took 22 lives in this country, because his minister or his government might have been implicated in the result. What we needed was an open and earnest inquiry so we could get to the bottom of this matter with sound recommendations. Those are the facts. This is about cover-up by the government, and about hiding its responsibility and using an investigator under the guise of an inquiry to cover the minister.

[September 29th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, unfortunately, I am compelled to raise the matter of the public inquiry and the government's mishandling of the listeriosis crisis once again. It might have helped if the parliamentary secretary had answered my questions the last time we had an adjournment debate rather than reading a prepared statement without substance. However, it is not unusual for the government to read a prepared statement out of the PMO.

The government has consistently and desperately avoided the one means by which to fully clarify and adequately resolve the crisis of confidence that has surrounded the government since the outbreak of the listeriosis crisis that claimed 22 lives last year. It refuses to hold a full public inquiry.

The minister has made a great deal about the Weatherill investigation, an investigation for which there are no transcripts. We cannot see the evidence. It is not available to us. We do not even know who she met with. We do not even know what questions she raised. The report, according to the terms of reference of the investigator, was to be made available for editing or revising by those who were interviewed.

We do not know if that happened but we do know, according to the terms of reference, that the investigator who was supposedly doing the inquiry was to pass over the document before it was released to the people she was supposed to be investigating and then ask them if they wanted to edit it before it went to the minister who would then decide if it would be made public. It has been made public but we do not know what revisions were made.

After this report was released to the public, it failed the test of even one of the government's own advisers to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. The University of Manitoba's food microbiologist, Rick Holley, a member of the academic advisory panel on food safety at the inspection agency, said that the “lack of knowledge about food-borne illness--how it happens and its cost to society in terms of death and illness--is a weak spot in the Canadian food safety system that none of the recommendations addressed adequately”.

And worse, he went on to say, “if all 57 recommendations are implemented--will ignore this very, very large issue of food-borne illness surveillance”

That was in the Toronto Star on September 12 of this year.

Professor Holley went even further when he was asked: Are we better off today than in the summer of 2008 with respect to food safety? He said, “Oh, hell no”.

If scientists, who have had a role in advising CFIA, have so little confidence in the government's efforts to improve the food safety system, then why should Canadians? Canadians deserve some answers.

As a member of the standing committee, the problem I have with the report concerns the discrepancies between her report and what she gave as evidence in her report and what we were told at the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food. That is a very serious matter but the parliamentary secretary and his group prevented her from coming before the committee. We need answers.

[Points of Order, September 29th, 2009]

--difference with this one is that the Canadian Cattlemen's Association held the barbecue and the minister was not allowed to set up a photo op like he did at the Canada Pork Council barbecue in which he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and Agriculture and Agri-Food time to put on a photo op, and he was worried about how he looked rather than address the crisis.

[Points of Order, September 29th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, during question period the minister admitted he attended a barbecue with the Canadian Cattlemen's Association, but he must have selective hearing because what I heard was not what he said. I heard concerns about these provisions and the--

[Agriculture and Agri-Food, September 29th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, illegal U.S. country of origin labelling continues to financially ruin Canadian hog and beef producers, yet the minister remains confused, thinking a press release accounts for action.

In May, the minister announced that he was going to take the fight on COOL to the United States administration. It never really happened. What do livestock producers have to show for his illusory work? Hog exports to the United States are down 60%, cattle exports are down 20%, farmers are going broke.

When is the minister actually going to challenge COOL and stand up for Canadian farmers?

[Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, September 29th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I made it quite clear in my remarks that we, too, are concerned about the human rights issue in Colombia. We are also concerned about the fact that the president may be thinking of changing the constitution to go another term.

However, we also know that the NDP is opposed to any kind of free trade agreement, no matter what. The NDP members are philosophically opposed.

There has been this debate in the House. It should go to committee where some of the issues the hon. member raised could be addressed directly. The trade unionists could come before the committee so that we could hear them, either on the ground in Colombia or on the ground here, in order to make a balanced decision based on the actual facts rather than the rhetoric of the NDP.