Mr. PERLEY (Qu'Appelle):

How much is that?

Mr. GARDINER:

If there was a difference of eight cents instead of ten cents, do you know what would happen? The farmers of western Canada would not be in a single cent, because every farmer in western Canada

who delivered wheat to the wheat board last year obtained, because of the set price of 874 cents a bushel which was paid by all people in the Dominion of Canada, 7 13-15 cents a bushel more for his wheat than it actually brought on the market. So, in so far as the farmer himself is concerned, even on the statement of the representative of Mr. Ranke, he could not have lost more than two cents a bushel in price during that period of time. Those are some of the things I wanted to say in answer to what the hon. member said.

Then he said 63,000,000 bushels of wheat was sold by the board in July of 1936. He made that statement, Mr. Speaker, while he was dealing with the amount of money which the farmers lost on the 1935 crop. One would infer from the statement he made under those circumstances, that 63,000,000 bushels of the 1935 crop was sold in July, 1936. As a matter of fact, only 9,800,000 bushels of the 1935 crop was sold during that month. The other

53.000. 000 and some odd bushels was old wheat that had been carried over from the McFarland stocks of a previous time. Only 9,800,000 bushels was sold from the crop of that particular year.

Mr. PERLEY (Qu'Appelle):

Mr. Speaker,

I think the hon. member-

Order.

Mr. PERLEY (Qu'Appelle):

I never said

that at all.

Mr. GARDINER:

I have only forty

minutes, or the hon. member could interrupt me as often as he wishes.

Mr. PERLEY (Qu'Appelle):

On a point

of order-

Can't take it.

Sit down.

Mr. PERLEY (Qu'Appelle):

On a point

of order: I did not make any statement to the effect that it was the 1935 crop that was sold. I said it was in the neighbourhood of

63.000. 000 bushels in all, both McFarland wheat and the 1935 crop.

No point of order

about that.

Mr. GARDINER:

I made it very plain

that he had not said that. But I said he did say it in the midst of his discussion of what the farmer had lost on the 1935 crop. That is when it was made, as Hansard will show. Now, let us look at the situation in connection with that.

Mr. PERLEY (Qu'Appelle):

Stick to the

facts.

The Budget-Mr. Gardiner

Mr. GARDINER. The hon. member went on to argue that that 63,000,000 bushels should not have been sold at a time when everyone knew we were going to have a light crop in western Canada. On June 24, 1936, no less an authority on wheat than Mr. J. I. McFarland announced to Canada that the wheat crop of Canada would be over

400,000,000 bushels. That was on June 24- not at the beginning of the month. In the week following, no less an authority than Mr. Gordon Brown, who reports to all the people about whom the hon. member for Qu'Appelle has spoken, said that we would have 380,000,000 bushels of wheat. I was in London at the end of July and the beginning of August, and during that period of time I interviewed all the leading grain dealers in the British Isles, and discussed the question with them.

What I want to tell the hon. member for Qu'Appelle is this: If at the end of June

he knew what the price of wheat was going to be, or if he knew what it was going to be at the beginning of July, or even in the middle of July, there were very few people who considered themselves authorities on the question who really thought they knew. As a matter of fact, in September, 1936, not even the wheat pool in western Canada considered the price was going to be very high. I have in my hand a resolution passed with regard to the formation of a pool in western Canada. In giving their reasons for not forming the pool they said:

Further in order to operate a voluntary pool in the best interests of its members, it should have been possible to take advantage of the higher prices in the early part of the season, and a substantial amount of grain should have been sold for future delivery at these prices in order to ensure the average price throughout the season.

That was on September 5.

Mr. DUNNING:

An absolute endorsement.

Mr. GARDINER:

That is an organization which at that time had over fifty per cent of the wheat delivered in western Canada. Apparently they did not consult the hon. member for Qu'Appelle. They did not know at that time that wheat was going to go up.

They did not consult the minister.

Mr. GARDINER:

The record of every wheat board we have had in Canada, the record of every marketing organization we have ever had, and the record of every grain dealer has proven that when any man gets the idea that he knows what the price of wheat is going to be six months hence, he

winds up by losing millions of dollars for his principals. That is true of all cooperative organization officials; this is true of the gentleman who made a great reputation as the head of the first wheat board in Canada; it is true of the gentleman who was in control of the stabilization operations, and it will be true of every man who thinks he can guess what the price of wheat is going to be six months hence. Why? Because wheat is not produced just on the northern hemisphere; it is also produced on the southern hemisphere. Any man who drives through the wheat fields of western Canada and thinks he knows what the price of wheat will be the following February takes for granted something which any grain dealer who knows anything about dealing in wheat would not take for granted.

The result is that these men do not speculate. When the leader of the opposition (Mr. Bennett) stands in his place and says that he met someone on a street comer somewhere who told him that he had made half a million dollars speculating in wheat, he was not talking about the same brand of business man as he is himself. I remember the right hon. gentleman saying in this house, I think it was last June, that he had never speculated in grain, but I know that he had a very large interest in an elevator concern.

Oh.

Mr. DUNNING:

He said that himself.

Mr. GARDINER:

The right hon. gentleman was a good enough business man to sell that elevator business at a profit. I do not blame any business man for doing that. Any profit out of the business I presume he made through conducting a legitimate elevator business, first by buying an interest in it, then by seeing that the business was properly conducted, and then by selling to advantage his interest in that particular concern. That is the way in which any legitimate grain dealer is going to make a profit; he is not going to make it by stating he has a paper profit of half a million dollars. Mr. John I. McFarland announced in 1933, when wheat was at 95 cents a bushel, that if he sold all the wheat he had at that price he would be able to pay off the $25,000,000 that stood against the three western provinces because they had guaranteed advances to that amount. A week or two later he had to admit that wheat had dropped so far that he could not pay any of it off, and as a matter of fact none of it has been paid off through the sale of the stocks then held up to the present time. A legitimate grain dealer avoids speculation because if he attempts speculation he usually runs into trouble.

The Budget-Mr. Gardiner