Mr. Speaker, my topic of discussion today is supply management.
On June 7, I questioned the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food with a view to ascertaining how he planned to protect the supply management system in Canada.
Last week, like colleagues, I was in my riding and had a chance to speak to a lot of people, in particular to poultry and dairy farmers who are concerned about supply management and how we will protect them going forward in the future. One of the interesting questions they asked me was about how we saw the government's position on the Wheat Board and how the government was reacting to the Wheat Board. This is very interesting. This is the barometer that the Atlantic supply management people are watching, because it shows them how the federal government is going to--if it will--protect supply management.
Dairy farmers, chicken farmers and egg producers in Atlantic Canada do not want to tell western wheat producers how they should market their wheat and whether they should have a single desk or multi-desk system. That is not their intention. What they are concerned about is how the government is dealing with the western wheat producers.
They want to know if the government is listening to the producers or if it is starting with the preconceived idea of what it is going to do. These farmers see this as their barometer of how supply management will be dealt with. They remember the terms of the leader of the Conservative Party in 1998, the current Prime Minister, the terms denouncing the supply management model as a “government sponsored, price fixing cartel”.
What these farmers would like to know with respect to the Wheat Board is whether the Prime Minister is going to let each farmer vote. Is he going to follow the laws of our country and give a free vote to each farmer, not weighted in accordance with protection but everybody with a permit book having one vote in a democratic system? We know there is 73% support for the Wheat Board across the western prairies. Is the Prime Minister going to test that?
The second question they asked me was whether the government is committed and ready to use article 28 of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Members will remember this question coming to the House before, under the previous government, and the answer at the time was that we were not ready to use article 28 to protect against blended dairy products, sugar, all sorts of products, because we were negotiating at the WTO through the Doha round.
The discussion at that time was that it was probably dangerous to do this while we were in negotiations. The agricultural community agreed. However, those negotiations have failed. The current government and the international community have not been able to level the playing field around the world. The current government has not been able to protect supply management in Canada as it sought to do. The G-6 countries could not agree. The gaps were too wide. The discussions were called off.
Now is the time to step up and protect our supply management system by using article 28 and making sure that all definitions of the import of dairy products are covered. Now is the time to step up and protect our supply management industry. Our communities depend on it. Rural communities depend on dairy producers, feather farmers, chicken producers and egg producers as the economic base of their communities. They will not survive without them.
If we go with what the Conservative leader always has said in the past--that we should have a competitive model, no “government sponsored, price fixing cartel”--then the industry will certainly fail and consumers will lose, because now supply management protects consumers as well.
My two-part question is simple. Is the government committed to using article 28 to protect supply management? Will it give all wheat producers equal votes and all of them a vote before making any changes to the single desk marketing system?