Wayne Easter

[Federal Accountability Act, November 21st, 2006]

The member asks, what about the potato board? I ask members to look at my history. In terms of my time, we proposed a national beef commission for Canada, and the government of the day would not exercise a vote on it. I believe Prime Minister Trudeau was the prime minister at the time. We proposed, and in fact have had in place for some time in Prince Edward Island, a Canadian potato commission, which farmers voted on. That is their right.

The difference between the party on this side and that party is that we believe in the democratic rights of farmers. The party opposite believes in dictatorial positions taken by the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food and Minister for the Canadian Wheat Board and the Prime Minister, and it will not allow western farmers their say on a clear question.

[Federal Accountability Act, November 21st, 2006]

Yes indeed, Mr. Speaker, I am from Prince Edward Island and I am very proud of it, but my history is that I spent 10 years as president of the National Farmers Union, which has its head office in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. There are hardly any communities in Saskatchewan, Alberta and the Peace River country that I have not been in, talking to farmers. I know on the ground in western Canada how those producers support the Canadian Wheat Board. The government opposite will not allow those producers a fair vote and a fair question to let farmers decide.

[Federal Accountability Act, November 21st, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I would be pleased to answer that question. Although I doubt the tactics of the government to undermine the authority of and to disadvantage the Canadian Wheat Board, members of our party are very much strongly in favour of accountability. I know that the member opposite likes to attack the Senate from time to time, but thank goodness that the Senate did have some sober second thought in terms of many of the issues in this bill.

Yes, the senators proposed amendments. I would submit that most of the amendments they proposed are in fact good ones. I think we would find that most of us in the House are in favour of accountability, but we want to do it in a sensible way. The difficulty is that the government made this one of its priorities. The bill was hastily prepared and poorly worded. The government tried to leave the impression that the new government, as it calls itself, is in favour of accountability.

Let us look at some of its patronage appointments. It is not very accountable in that regard. Let us look at some of the things the Minister of Justice is trying to do in terms of judges. The government is not very accountable in that regard. It is all smoke and mirrors on the government side.

We will analyze the bill from our side of the House. We will debate it and we will vote accordingly. At the end of the day, what the official opposition wants to see is a good piece of legislation that makes sense to Canadians and holds the federal bureaucracy and the Government of Canada to account.

[Federal Accountability Act, November 21st, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to complete my remarks on Bill C-2, the so-called accountability act. I have a couple of quotes that I was not quite finished with that I will get to in a moment.

It is ironic that the government by devious means, and that is the Prime Minister working with the leader of the separatist party, is attempting to disadvantage the Canadian Wheat Board, a prairie grain farmer marketing institution. In disadvantaging farmers in western Canada, the Prime Minister is really allowing the opportunity for the international grain trade, our competitors in the international market, to gain marketing advantage over Canadian farmers. It is ironic that we are talking about an accountability act and the Prime Minister is using these tactics.

It is devious because the move has nothing to do with accountability at all but, instead, shows that the Prime Minister will go to almost any length to get his way in his ideological drive to undermine the Canadian Wheat Board. This is not just a Canadian Wheat Board issue. This is about the Prime Minister's tactics, his willingness to cut a deal with the leader of the separatist party, and his ideological obsession with trying to destroy the Canadian Wheat Board, a board now controlled by farmers themselves.

Let us look for a moment at this access to information and how it will disadvantage the Canadian Wheat Board. I turn to a letter that the chair of the Canadian Wheat Board tabled with the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs. It stated:

Therefore, the true beneficiaries of adding the CWB to ATIA will primarily be non-farmers such as competitors and foreign antagonists that would be able to make information requests.

Subjecting the CWB to ATIA will put it at a disadvantage to its commercial competitors. These competitors could gain access to types of information about the CWB that the CWB could not obtain from them. It would also open up sensitive information to access by its international antagonists (primarily, the United States). By way of example, since the implementation of the Canada-U.S. Trade Agreement the CWB has been subject to no fewer than 14 U.S.-led trade challenges or investigations. All of these actions have been groundless as the CWB has not once been found to be acting outside of its international trade obligations. Yet, through the CWB, western Canadian farmers have been forced to spend in excess of $15 million to defend itself against these actions. The use of access to information requests by foreign parties is certain to become another vehicle to harass western Canadian farmers.

That is in fact what will happen. The Wheat Board will end up having to pay the costs for nuisance requests from people who are opposed to the board and farmers will have to bear those costs in western Canada. The Canadian Wheat Board again is being disadvantaged.

The parliamentary secretary is one of the key people trying to get the Canadian Wheat Board under access to information and he knows full well that the government never put forward the amendment. Why? It is because its legal advice said, as the Canadian Wheat Board Act states, that the Canadian Wheat Board is not a crown corporation or a government entity. Yes, it guarantees loans, but so does the government in other circles. That is important but it is not reason enough to have the Canadian Wheat Board under access to information.

The bottom line, which the government knows full well, is that the government had legal advice stating that the board should not be under these rules. The Canadian Wheat Board will be in the unique position of being the only non-government entity that has to abide by access to information rules and the people who will be disadvantaged are the grain farmers of western Canada. The people who will be advantaged are the international grain trade competitors that we compete against, mainly stationed in the United States.

What is happening here with the Bloc proposing the amendment to bring in access to information clearly shows that the Prime Minister is willing to cut a deal with almost anyone, even separatists, to get his way and disadvantage prairie farmers in the process.

[Federal Accountability Act, November 20th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by commenting on a point the member made in his remarks. The fact is that the Government of Canada does not in any way subsidize the Canadian Wheat Board.

What the Government of Canada does, from time to time, by order in council, is it provides guarantees to the wheat pools in terms of the marketing of grain. I will give an analogy. It would almost be the same as acting like a bank. If the government were to provide a loan guarantee to a manufacturer, it would not be reasonable to expect that the manufacturer should then become subject to access to information. On the contrary. A person interested in the issue would make an access to information request to the government that provided the money.

It therefore is wrong to suggest that the Government of Canada is providing billions to the Canadian Wheat Board because it is not. An incident occurred five or six years ago where it had to provide some millions of dollars to back up the government guarantee on initial prices but that money went to producers, which was a good thing. I would hope that the Bloc Québécois reconsiders its motion to put the Canadian Wheat Board under access to information.

I am pleased to speak to the accountability act and amendments made thereto. Specifically I will address the amendment made to put the Canadian Wheat Board under the Access to Information Act. It was interesting earlier listening to the Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board as he tried to justify putting the Canadian Wheat Board under access to information but he failed miserably in terms of his argument.

When I asked the parliamentary secretary to justify his statement that farmers wanted access to information to apply, he failed to answer the question and went on a bit of a rant by saying that anyone who would oppose access to information must not want any crown corporation to fall under access. He knows that is not true. We believe that, yes, government agencies and government departments should fall under access to information, but let us be clear, the Canadian Wheat Board is not a government agency and that is the bottom line.

However, even the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food has tried to imply the same thing many times. In fact, in a letter to the chair of the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs who was looking at this bill, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food said:

Mr. Ritter argued that the CWB is not considered a Crown corporation. However, it is a government entity that was established by the Government of Canada through legislation and regulation. The CWB is therefore accountable to the Government of Canada and access to information rules should apply.

It is also important to note that the Government of Canada does [not] have [any] involvement in the operations of the Canadian Wheat Board.

That parliamentary secretary is wrong also. The Canadian Wheat Board does provide basically the same as access to information but does not need to deal with the nuisance requests that we get through access to information. It provides an annual report. It has elected directors and those directors hold meetings with their constituents, the same as we do. That is a way of providing access. They hold annual meetings at which financial officers of the Canadian Wheat Board are there to answer questions. They have full access through the audited report. The Auditor General also is a possibility, as well as the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food.

In many ways, the government opposite does remind us of a government in the 1800s in terms of some of the policies it brings forward. Maybe it is thinking back to the time prior to 1998, when in fact the Canadian Wheat Board was seen as an agency of the Government of Canada, but that changed legislatively in 1998. Amendments to the Canadian Wheat Board Act were made and control of the corporation was given over to farmers. What it says in the act itself about whether it is an agency or not is found in subsection 4(2) of the Canadian Wheat Board Act, which states:

The Corporation is not an agent of Her Majesty and is not a Crown corporation within the meaning of the Financial Administration Act.

Simply put, this amendment is back in here by the Bloc at the behest of the Prime Minister, who will do almost anything to undermine the board's competitiveness. The parliamentary secretary and the President of the Treasury Board are basically allowing it to happen.

Let us look at a little history. Initially, the government and the President of the Treasury Board himself did not bring forward a government amendment to put the Canadian Wheat Board under access to information in the first instance. There is a reason for that. The minister knows and he knows full well that the legal advice from within the Government of Canada from the Department of Justice was not to put the Canadian Wheat Board under access to information, because it is not a government entity and it is not a government agency. That is why. To this day we have not seen an amendment from the government itself to put the Canadian Wheat Board under access to information.

When the bill was at committee, it was really the NDP member for Winnipeg Centre, in his brief love affair with the Conservative government as they worked on the accountability act together, who was trying to do things. I do not know why or for what. For a favour? Certainly we often see the leader of the NDP getting up to support the Prime Minister time after time. They are certainly in bed together on the environmental issues and in terms of destroying Kyoto, but I digress.

Clearly the member for Winnipeg Centre made an amendment in haste to put the Canadian Wheat Board under access to information and the government was overjoyed to accept it. When the bill came back to the House, the NDP had seen the error of its ways and agreed to vote in favour of another amendment that would have taken access to information out of the bill.

However, in the meantime, something happened. We really do not know what. We do know that the Prime Minister had a little chat with the leader of the separatists and suddenly the Bloc Québécois voted against the amendment to take the Wheat Board out from under access to information.

Was a deal cut? I do not know, but it seems awfully strange to me that a discussion between the Prime Minister of Canada and the leader of a separatist party would create a deal to put the Canadian Wheat Board under access to information. It is awfully suspicious.

We do know what the end result of this will be. The Prime Minister will do anything to undermine the Canadian Wheat Board. What for? The Americans have challenged us 11 times and we have won every time. The people who will gain if the Canadian Wheat Board is destroyed are those in the international grain trade, mostly centred in the United States. Is the Prime Minister doing favours for them? Or who? In any event, we know that the Bloc sold out western farmers in that amendment by putting access to information up against the Canadian Wheat Board.

When the bill got to the Senate, the place of sober second thought, the Senate did in fact amend it and got it out again.

When the bill got to the Senate, the place of sober second thought, the Senate amended it and sent it out again. Now we have the Bloc bringing forward the amendment again. What is happening is interesting. Something is going on between the Prime Minister and the leader of the separatist party but it will be the farmers in western Canada who will be paying a price for the Prime Minister's little arrangement with the leader of the separatist party.

Now we have this deal for the third time to weaken the board by access requests. The government has only one agenda with respect to the Canadian Wheat Board and that is its destruction through any means, which it will take right up to the very line of legality.

The parliamentary secretary told the western producer, which was quoted in an April 20 article of this year after the bill had been introduced and the provision of the Canadian Wheat Board was not included, and keep in mind that I said the President of the Treasury Board and the government did not include it, that “The minister”, meaning the President of the Treasury Board, “told me that there is every intention to make the change (to include the Canadian Wheat Board) but there just wasn't time to get it into the bill”.

He went on to say that the real problem was trying to “get the wording right” in order to find a way to prevent the loss of commercially sensitive information. Given that the government never introduced the amendment, we can only conclude that it never found the right wording to protect the commercially sensitive information and the government accepted the NDP amendments to include the Canadian Wheat Board because it no longer cared if that information was protected.

Hartley Furtan, a noted agriculture economist, in a recent report on the Canadian Wheat Board, stated:

The cost of CWB services varies from year to year depending upon the volume handled. The actual costs are reported each year in the annual report. Comparable marketing costs for large private grain trading firms are not publicly available.

What we are really seeing here is that the Canadian Wheat Board is being put at a disadvantage. We must keep in mind that the Canadian Wheat Board is for farmers. It maximizes returns back to primary producers and farmers pay the full cost. The cost of access to information and these nuisance requests coming from the likes of Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, friends of the Prime Minister obviously, will be a cost that farmers bear. No other commercial grain organization is under that kind of requirement. Why is the Government of Canada imposing that kind of prohibitive cost on primary producers in western Canada?

In a letter from the president of the Canadian Wheat Board to the standing committee on legal and constitutional affairs had this to say:

Farmers already have access to the sorts of information that ATIA could provide for them through the information policy instituted by the board of directors. If the CWB becomes subject to ATIA the administrative costs to farmers will increase with no incremental benefit in increased transparency. The cost of responding to such requests is not insignificant. Therefore, the true beneficiaries of adding the CWB to the ATIA will primarily be non-farmers such as competitors and foreign antagonists that would be able to make information requests.

Subjecting the CWB to ATIA will put it at a disadvantage to its commercial competitors. These competitors could gain access to types of information about the CWB that the CWB could not obtain from them. It would also open up sensitive information to access by its international antagonists (primarily, the United States).

[Federal Accountability Act, November 20th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, my sincere apologies.

The president of the Canadian Wheat Board, in his letter to the Senate committee, not the House committee, said that this is what the impact would be:

The cost of responding to such requests is not insignificant...Therefore, the true beneficiaries of adding the [Canadian Wheat Board] to [Access to Information Act] will primarily be non-farmers such as competitors and foreign antagonists that would be able to make information requests.

In other words, these are nuisance requests.

There are several single desk selling agencies in Quebec quite similar to the Canadian Wheat Board, without, of course, appointed directors, but they are not entities of the government of Quebec either. Why would the Bloc Québécois be willing to impose, desirous of imposing, additional costs on primary producers? It is the producers who pay all the costs to the Canadian Wheat Board, not the Government of Canada. Why would the Bloc be willing to get in bed with the Prime Minister and disadvantage western Canadian grain farmers in terms of competing with the rest of the world? Why?

[Federal Accountability Act, November 20th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the member. I am still really baffled by the Bloc's position on the Canadian Wheat Board. In the member's remarks, her information was inaccurate on several points as it related to the Canadian Wheat Board. I know that the committee was rushed. I know the Conservative government tried to rush the bill through so as not to give members on the committee time to really review the act properly.

The member indicated that there are three directors appointed by the government. There are actually five directors appointed by the government. There are 10 members elected by producers. According to the legal definition under the act, and by the government's own legal advice, it is not an agency of the government. In fact, subsection 4(2) of the Canadian Wheat Board Act states:

The Corporation is not an agency of Her Majesty and is not a Crown corporation within the meaning of the Financial Administration Act.

The fact of the matter is that what will be the net impact by the Bloc amendment putting the Canadian Wheat Board under access to information and doing Prime Minister Harper's bidding for him is--

[Federal Accountability Act, November 20th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Peterborough asked about the amendments that were made by unelected senators, as he called them, but I think the evidence that this was a hastily drafted bill, poorly worded and requiring a lot of amendments, probably comes from the government itself.

I know the member for Charlottetown has spent considerable time studying this bill. When I go through the amendments, I have not counted them up yet, there seems to be certainly in excess of 40 amendments from the government itself. Could the member explain to me why that is the case? Is it poorly drafted? How many amendments are there and why did the government not do it at least half right in the first place? It was so anxious to try and make an issue of accountability, we know that, but without really dealing with accountability in a concrete way.

I might ask him, as well, is there anything in this bill to do about political patronage from the Government of Canada? We have seen some terrible appointments from the government and I wonder if this is addressed in any way by Bill C-2.

[Federal Accountability Act, November 20th, 2006]

The member opposite wants to know what I am hiding. The one thing he knows about the Wheat Board is that it is transparent. It is out there and it provides the information. The member wants access to information to apply to the Canadian Wheat Board because he wants the nuisance requests coming in from its competition, the big grain trade, so it can undermine the Wheat Board and not allow it to do its job in terms of representing primary producers and maximizing returns to primary producers. That is what that party is all about.

What I am absolutely surprised at is that the Bloc would fall for that endeavour of the government because within the province of Quebec there are other agencies similar to this. Does the same principle hold true?

The act itself states that the Canadian Wheat Board is not an agency of the Crown. It is not a government institution. It is a marketing institution of farmers. Does the Bloc not fear that by allowing access to information to apply to a farmer marketing institution it is running the risk of the same thing happening to some other agencies within Canada that operate in the interests of Quebec farmers?

I sincerely believe that the Bloc is making a tragic error as it relates to the farm community and I would ask the Bloc to reconsider its position on this amendment.

[Federal Accountability Act, November 20th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I listened closely to the hon. member's remarks and I noticed she did not mention the Canadian Wheat Board and the amendment the Bloc has put forward relative to that.

However, I want to raise a question with her because it is her party, the Bloc Québécois, that has put forward an amendment to bring the Canadian Wheat Board under access to information at, no doubt, the behest of the Prime Minister. I am absolutely amazed that the Bloc Québécois would follow the endeavours of the Prime Minister to put the Canadian Wheat Board under access to information.