In the hours after Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff spoke and fielded questions at the Canadian Federation of Agriculture annual meeting in late February, the hallway buzz was positive.
He was well briefed, comfortably handled questions, appeared to know the nuance and detail of issues raised, and neatly made the connection between farmers and his Toronto riding where a majority of jobs are food industry related.
Considering he had appeared in 2009 just weeks after becoming leader and gave a somewhat wooden performance, Ignatieff seems to have disproved the adage that you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
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However, the promises the Liberal leader was making and presumably will campaign on when the election breaks out are another matter.
Farmers who liked what they heard should carefully weigh whether prime minister Ignatieff or agriculture minister Wayne Easter could actually do much of what is being promised.
Key to the Liberal promises is a new national food policy that includes federal funding for provincially designed programs aimed to meet specific local farmer needs.
Key to the Liberal promises is a pledge that government will rewrite national farm policy based on farmer instructions through consultations.
Beyond agriculture policy, Ignatieff also is promising money for rural high-speed broadband, student loan forgiveness to attract more medical professionals to rural areas and a tax break for rural volunteer fight fires.
The latter non-agricultural promises are eminently achievable if in government, Liberals are as pro-rural Canada as they are in opposition.
The promise to rewrite agriculture policy is more problematic.
For more than two decades since Don Mazankowski was Progressive Conservative agriculture minister and blanched at Ottawa’s massive share of agricultural spending despite it being a shared federal-provincial jurisdiction, the emphasis in Ottawa has been making sure shared jurisdiction translates into shared responsibility.
Liberal minister Ralph Goodale in the 1990s established the 60-40 federal- provincial funding split.
Liberal minister Lyle Vanclief in the early years of the new century wrote the principle in stone by negotiating the first Agricultural Policy Framework with provinces.
Conservative Gerry Ritz reaffirmed the principle of federal-provincial sharing with the 2008 launch of Growing Forward.
The bottom line of these two decades of federal-provincial evolution is that Ottawa can no longer announce a new agriculture policy.
It has to be painstakingly negotiated with ministers from 10 provinces and three territories, many of whom consider any proposal to build in richer farm supports as a non-starter.
The rules of the federal-provincial deal is that any change must be approved by Ottawa and at least seven provinces representing more than 50 percent of Canadian agricultural production.
So the Liberals can promise the moon.
They will be able to deliver exactly what the provinces will let them.
That is not to say that a prime minister or a federal agriculture minister is powerless to promote change.
But the days are long gone when Ottawa can announce unilaterally a new farmer-friendly, costly agricultural policy and expect provinces to go along.
