Wayne Easter

[Agriculture and Agri-Food, June 13th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the minister absolutely misrepresents the motion. The motion simply instructs the government to negotiate from a position of strength, a bottom line where the nation stands with our supply management sector.

Is the Prime Minister, by withdrawing the negotiator from sensitive industry discussions, ensuring the death of supply management? Is that his purpose? The government not only is trading our supply management system away, it is losing it by default.

Will the minister accept his responsibilities, support our producers, use the motion as leverage and get the job done?

[Agriculture and Agri-Food, June 13th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, on November 22, 2005 the current Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food supported a motion which stated that the government should instruct its negotiators at the WTO to work to “ensure that the supply management sectors are subject to no reduction in over-quota tariffs and no increase in tariff quotas”. The minister supported that motion.

Why then does the government not allow our trade negotiators to fully participate in WTO discussions with a mandate to support our supply management producers?

[Canadian Wheat Board, June 5th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister's ideological attack on the Canadian Wheat Board is having a negative impact on our commercial reputation globally.

With the Canadian malting industry being the second largest exporter of malt in the world, the minister fails to respond to any requests for answers. The industry's president, in a letter, states his request “to highlight the significant contractual financial liabilities and consequences...that they may face through no fault of their own”. The fault is the government's.

Why will the minister not respond to these questions?

[Employment Insurance Act, June 1st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, this is the first I was aware of that the member was not going to get the support from the government side of the House. This is absolutely cruel.

We all have had constituents come into our offices who happened to get sick through no fault of their own. If they are laid off they have the benefit of the EI system for a considerable length of time, but when they get sick, which is clearly beyond their control, they cannot acquire benefits. The hon. member's bill would create some humanity for those individuals who get sick.

I am wondering if the Conservative government gave any reasons for not allowing this royal assent. We know there is a surplus in the EI fund, which the government opposite tends to be using in other ways, such as buying military equipment and so on and so forth. It is using the surpluses from that workers' fund.

What reason is the heartless government on the other side giving for not supporting workers who happen to get sick on the job?

[Petitions, June 1st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am presenting a petition signed by over 600 petitioners.

As a result of recent events relating to friendly fire incidents in Afghanistan and because of the nature of these unfortunate incidents, the integrity, professionalism and reputation of members of the Canadian Forces has been called into question.

The petitioners call upon the Minister of National Defence and the Prime Minister to take immediate action to ensure that members of our Canadian Forces be given the full respect they deserve, that they are not treated as common criminals and that all efforts be made by the Canadian government to protect the reputation, livelihoods and mental health of those individuals when such incidents occur.

[May 31st, 2007]

Let us keep it simple, Mr. Speaker. The Conservative government is developing a pattern of breaking trust.

On April 20, 110 days after the fact, the minister shut down the Canadian farm family options program and left thousands of farm families without financial means under the program that their financial advisers had told them to plan on. The Conservative government broke its word. It is that simple.

On this issue, the minister is now changing the rules of marketing barley under the Canadian Wheat Board in a timeframe that makes it impossible for the Wheat Board to live up to its contractual obligations. Its own task force told it so. The minister has caused potential legal liabilities to farmers, to companies, to the Canadian Wheat Board, and indeed to Canada's international reputation abroad. This is outrageous.

The Conservative government cannot be trusted, either in terms of democratic principles or in terms--

[May 31st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the question I raised in question period relates to the Government of Canada using a fraudulent vote, manipulated by the government itself to get the results it wanted. The minister, although he misinterpreted those results, used the results that he achieved to violate the spirit of the Canadian Wheat Board Act itself. The government failed to abide by democratic principles and put its proposed changes to the House where those changes could be fully debated and the consequences carefully examined. The consequences are increasingly seen to be extremely serious to farmers, to the Canadian Wheat Board and to Canada's international reputation.

The minister proposed regulations that will undermine the single desk selling authority of the Canadian Wheat Board and has proposed that those regulations take effect on August 1 of this year and, in so doing, has disregarded the threat this action has on the integrity of the contracts the Canadian Wheat Board has with its customers around the world. These are serious consequences in terms of the consequences on producers, on the Wheat Board and on Canada's international reputation.

Even the minister's own task force, appointed to undermine the Canadian Wheat Board, did not recommend the actions the minister is taking.

The task force report indicated that the Canadian Wheat Board could find itself in a legally liable position for contract violation. The report states:

The existing CWB may have to exercise restraint in entering into contracts that make commitments beyond the date of termination of the monopoly, to avoid a liability for the CWB II that it is unable to fulfil in the choice environment.

The point being that even the task force stated:

The Government, at an early date, announce its intention to end the monopoly for barley and start marketing choice for barley....

The reason for that being that the Canadian Wheat Board is a marketing institution that makes long term contracts and, hence, gained respect in the world as a reliable supplier, both in quality and on delivery.

As well, all reliable studies show that the Canadian Wheat Board has maximized returns back to primary producers.

Regardless of the facts, the government is taking marketing power away from producers and is putting the Wheat Board in jeopardy, the producers in jeopardy and the domestic and international companies in jeopardy, and we need some answers.

With the government's intent to end the monopoly on August 1, 2007, what will be the cost to the Wheat Board, both in dollars and in reputation? Has the government done any studies in terms of that? Is the government and the minister willing to compensate the Canadian Wheat Board and producers for losses as a result of the government's action?

[Election in Prince Edward Island, May 31st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to outline breaches of protocol by the federal Conservative government in its attempt to influence the P.E.I. election. Canadians know how the Conservative government tried to influence the Quebec election through the budget, but the Prime Minister took a different tack to influence voters in P.E.I.

Jason Lee, the Prime Minister's senior appointee for P.E.I., who operates the ACOA minister's regional office, ran as a Conservative candidate, stating on his website, “Lee currently works as a senior aide” to the minister. There are questions about if or when he took a leave of absence without pay.

Further, the Conservative premier's campaign director was appointed to the ACOA advisory board and continued to actively campaign in violation of public service guidelines. Worse, ACOA's computers were used to bolster the Binns blog campaign.

It is time the Prime Minister stopped using federal resources for partisan purposes.

[May 29th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am absolutely amazed that the parliamentary secretary continues to perpetuate misinformation. The minister who has really taken an oath to uphold the agencies that he is responsible for also continues to perpetuate that myth.

It is absolutely wrong for the minister to hide behind the cloak of confidentiality. We are not asking him to table the figures in the House in terms of those confidential agreements. We understand that. That is commercial confidentiality, but the minister has a responsibility to look at those figures and tell Canadians the truth. He can look at them and we would respect what he said in the House if he would give us the information on the facts that the Canadian Wheat Board actually sold at a premium into those markets.

When the CEO was before the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food, he made it very clear that the Canadian Wheat Board is yes, a respected seller, but it sold at a premium into those markets, returning back to Canadian farmers--

[May 29th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the question we are debating in the adjournment debate tonight was asked of the minister on February 28 and it stemmed from the minister and his government's deliberate effort to undermine and malign the reputation of not only the Canadian Wheat Board, but of the minister's own hand-picked president and CEO of the Canadian Wheat Board.

The issue was and remains the minister's complete refusal to acknowledge that an Algerian news story, which implied that the CWB had undersold grain into the Algerian market, was factually incorrect and that it perpetuated what in effect was a misleading and false story.

However, that is not unusual for the government opposite in its drive to the ideological agenda that it is on which is that its members take the position to not let the facts get in the way of a good story.

It is a government that has demonstrated a willingness to use tactics to undermine the CWB, which violates the very democratic principles that any government worthy of respect should adhere to. Not only has the government intentionally assaulted the character of the president and CEO, it has engaged in the use of intimidation, it has fired Wheat Board directors and it has tampered with voters' lists and directors' elections. It used marked ballots in the recent barley plebiscite and has absolutely refused to respect the will of Parliament, not once but twice.

Since that time, we now have regulations, which the government has brought forward to undermine the Canadian Wheat Board by removing barley from the board, which are of questionable legality. The Canadian Wheat Board, in its response to the minister's backdoor effort to undermine the Wheat Board, stated:

The CWB's legal liability as it relates to broken contracts is by no means distinct from farmers' liability.

It is a government that has no interest in the harm it inflicts on western grain farmers or on farmers generally or in terms of the international reputation of the Canadian Wheat Board. When a Canadian marketing agency is respected to the extent that the Canadian Wheat Board is around the world and it violates its contracts as a result of government orders, that hurts the reputation of every Canadian institution and agency.

The government made this move by basically acting retroactively and injuring those contracts and that reputation. All of this is part of the same ideological thinking of the Conservative regime. It has demonstrated a complete contempt for western grain farmers by not allowing for a free, open and honest plebiscite based on questions drafted by farmers and farm organizations themselves. It has demonstrated a contempt for Parliament by ignoring the will of the majority of this House.

However, the question really relates to the fact that the government continues to perpetuate false information that it alleges was in an Algerian news story.