CONTENTS

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Telecommunications Act
The House resumed from October 19 consideration of Bill C-37, An Act to amend the Telecommunications Act,
as reported (with amendments) from the committee; and of the motions in Group No. 1.

Mr. Garry Breitkreuz (Yorkton—Melville, CPC): Madam Speaker, I have sat here for a couple of days now and listened to the debate. I support Bill C-37 in principle. It protects the privacy of Canadians and prevents them from harassment.

However, when I hear the Liberals mention the word “registry”, a red flag is immediately raised. I have not heard very much discussion on what it will cost.

The Liberal member who just spoke is absolving himself of responsibility in this area. He is in a sense almost blaming the opposition if this thing does not turn out right, if a bloated bureaucracy develops that is not effective while the opposition had a chance to correct it. The government administers these programs. The government's own bureaucracy will be responsible for the program. The minister has to take responsibility for it.

I have seen a gun registry that was supposed to have good intentions and results spin out of control and become so flawed as to be completely unusable. It ultimately became a big joke and a sinkhole for our tax dollars.

The Liberal MP has said that he has confidence that the costs will not spin out of control. I do not have that same confidence. I saw the government try to quietly sneak by a $273 million contract on the gun registry in March of this year. It did not even follow its own rules as to where these things should be listed and accounted for. I am a bit concerned.

I want to move on to something else. This is the main point of what I have to say today. In a sense this is putting the whole discussion in perspective from the average Canadian living outside of the Ottawa bubble.

Canadians look at what we are doing here today and they are asking me if this is all we have right now or if this is all we have in the agenda.

I just returned from a tour of my riding last week. Agriculture producers in the northern part of my riding are struggling with a harvest that is almost impossible to bring in. Imagine 17 inches of rain falling on the prairie in just a couple of weeks and the water has no place to go. The water sits on crops that were supposed to be the salvation of farmers who have struggled through a year of drought in 2003 and a killer frost in 2004. They had a nice crop coming along and suddenly they had rains that far surpassed what Katrina dumped on Louisiana and Texas. This rain has devastated what they had.

If we want to put a perspective on what we are debating here today, if we were to stand where these farmers are standing and look at what we are doing today, we might have a very different perspective. If we were surrounded by water that made it almost impossible to maintain our livelihood, this discussion today would seem quite irrelevant.

I do not have many opportunities to bring issues such as the flooding forward. The government dismisses the livelihood of farmers and agriculture producers as not a big factor with which it wants to deal. That is extremely unfortunate.

The people of my riding say that it is nice to pass this kind of legislation. It will allow people to sit on their couches and not be annoyed by someone phoning them to sell some vacation in Florida. However, when a farmer is losing his farm that has taken generations to build because the government has inadequate disaster relief available for grain producers, what we are doing today seems quite trite to them.

My constituents are asking me why Parliament is not dealing with issues that are of a higher priority to them. There are issues such as forcing a farmer to try to salvage a crop because he is trying to comply with some government imposed rules for crop insurance or a farm support program, such as the CAIS program. This is a problem which makes getting off the sofa to answer the phone look pretty insignificant.

That is the perspective in relation to which I want us to see this debate. We have spent so much time in the past two years blowing a lot of hot air past our teeth discussing nuances in legislation which for most Canadians is not a great priority. As they see us here today, they are thinking that it would be nice to have a do not call registry, and I support it, but they would rather have lower taxes so they could spend their money on their priorities, stay on their farms and not have more government programs imposed on them. That is their fear with another big registry. They quiver when they hear the word registry.

Farmers may also have some difficulties, but when they look at what we do here they ask why we cannot debate how our farm programs could be designed to be effective, because right now they are not working. The farmer sees government make big announcements about money flowing to agriculture, but he is frustrated by the fact that it just fuels a load of bureaucracy. It takes 50% to administer the government assistance programs. The farmer sees very little of the money coming in assistance to him.

I witnessed some unbelievable events this past week. Craig and Sharon Stegeman took me on a tour of their farm. We are not allowed to use props so I will just have to describe the pictures that they gave me. Standing on a bridge, as far as one can see there is water. The bridge happens to be the highest point of land. In another picture of their farm, the only things that show up are a few power and telephone poles sticking up through the water and maybe a few blades of grass that are a little longer than most. As far as one can see there is water, a high grid road with water covering it, or fields of grain standing in water. There is picture after picture of water. Then there is a place with trees and it looks as if the beavers have a built a dam, but they have not. That is just the natural result of 17 inches of rain. Swaths of grain have been washed into the ditches. There is no more swathed grain left in the fields.

A month after the rains, farmers tried to harvest their fields with their combines. They had to fit their combines with dual wheels. It cost them more than $20,000 to adapt their combines to drive through the water to cut the heads off the grain that was standing in the water. That is what these people are faced with and they have to do it. The farmers cannot even access any of the crop insurance or farm assistance if they do not make an attempt to harvest. They are ruining their land when they do this. It is unbelievable. I rode on one of the combines. The farmers do not want to scoop up water in case it gets into the grain they are harvesting. The grain is reasonably dry standing in the water.

The average city person probably does not even understand. These are not pictures from Louisiana and Texas. These are pictures from an area north of Yorkton.

When I went there last week there were 30 farmers waiting to talk to me. Every farmer in that area was there. We had a tailgate meeting. They poured their hearts out to me. It would have made members weep to hear the young farmers, their wives, and the older farmers tell the stories of how they have been working so hard. They have been killed by fuel costs. They have been hurt by fertilizer and chemical costs.

The Liberals have 40 pieces of legislation before the House. They have given the impression that we are really busy here. All these committees are working, but where the rubber hits the road, where the average person is trying to make a living, this seems to be quite irrelevant. The government sweeps agriculture problems under the rug. It gives the impression that CAIS and crop insurance are helping, but the claims for the year 2003 have not even been filled. The assistance that should have been coming is not there.

We need our city cousins to realize what is happening in rural areas, because what is happening is going to impact on them. The cheap food, the good quality food they have been enjoying will no longer be there when corporations take over because farmers cannot make a living supplying our city cousins with good quality food.

Let us take note of this. Let us put this whole debate in perspective because I am concerned for my constituents.