When former agriculture minister Eugene Whelan heard about the recent anti-marketing board confessions of a Canadian free trade negotiator, he had a quick response.
“I knew that,” said the free trade critic, bureaucracy basher and now Liberal Senator. “I knew those bastards would have sold farmers down the river if they could.”
And he warned that when the next round of world trade talks begin, the Liberal government should pick negotiators who are more sympathetic to farmer marketing boards.
They should not send the team that worked on North American Free Trade Agreement and the last World Trade Organization deal.
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“They’re the same ones who were involved before,” said Whelan, complaining that prime minister Jean ChrŽtien sent negotiators that former Tory prime minister Brian Mulroney had used. “I call them underground moles (working for the other side).”
In a recently published memoir, former trade negotiator Gordon Ritchie said during the 1986-87 free trade talks with the U.S., Canadian negotiators were reluctant defenders of supply management protections.
Ritchie wrote that he considered supply management marketing boards nothing more than “cozy little cartels” that protected inefficient farmers and gave them undue income at the expense of consumers.
“As a matter of national policy, I for one would welcome the removal of those restrictions,” he said. “As a negotiator, however, I did not feel the Americans had paid us enough (in concessions) to be entitled to their removal.”
Whelan said those words reminded him of the suspicion he had of the free trade negotiators at the time.
“I told farm leaders that these bastards were not to be trusted, they would sell us out if they could get the price they wanted,” fumed Whelan. “They (the farm leaders) wouldn’t listen to me. I was right.”
