CHARLOTTETOWN, P.E.I.- Canadian farm leaders and some senior Agriculture Canada officials are contradicting an implication by agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief that hundreds of millions of dollars in beef industry aid is ready now if only provinces would sign the agricultural policy framework.
When pressed during the past week over the need for more money, the minister has expressed frustration that not enough provinces have signed the APF to bring it into effect. It requires three more signatures involving substantial agricultural provinces.
“There’s $1.1 billion federal dollars available to Canadian farmers this year and beef producers could be drawing on that in the interim to help their income,” he told reporters in Ottawa after a July 23 cabinet meeting.”
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However, sufficient provinces haven’t signed on so we don’t have federal-provincial agreement in order to allow that to happen.”
Vanclief’s comments were part of a federal campaign to blame provinces, and their farm lobbies, for the lack of support.
Later, during a tour of Atlantic Canada, Vanclief repeated that if only provincial farm lobbies in provinces like Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Prince Edward Island told provincial governments to sign the APF, beef farmers would be better off now.
“It is not true,” Thad Trefiak of Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, co-chair of the CFA safety nets committee, said in a July 25 interview. “To suggest money could be flowing to beef farmers now if only just isn’t true.”
Earlier in the week, senior Agriculture Canada officials had briefed the CFA safety nets committee on APF issues.
They said that applications for interim withdrawals from the new safety net programs will not be ready until September or October at the earliest, with a month or more turn around on applications expected.
“Late in the year is the earliest there could be interim payments or advances and to suggest it could be earlier is wrong,” said Trefiak.
The federal strategy of turning up the pressure on provinces to sign the APF because of the cattle crisis hardened CFA resolve last week to continue to oppose the APF and to urge provinces that have not signed to press for changes before they do.
“Our concerns have not been addressed and so we will continue to point out that farmers want assurances this program is better than what they had before they sign,” CFA president Bob Friesen said after the CFA meeting. “They say we’re in a crisis and so provinces have to sign. If they have to use that blackmail, it simply shows that the program cannot be sold on its own merit. If provinces think they are forced to sign, they will be accountable for failures of the program.”
Trefiak said that the cattle crisis actually has proven the APF inadequate.
