Eastern subsidy
To the Editor:
Letter to Lyle Vanclief: I received the new bilingual AIDA brochure that you say you are proud to send me. I get very angry when you continue to tell eastern media and myself that the program is there for me to take advantage of if only I would get over my laziness and apply.
You say that this program was designed in close consultation with farm organizations and provincial governments.
No farm organization or provincial agriculture department would have had anything to do with this stupidity. This program was designed by and for bureaucrats and accountants. Modern farmers have to be an expert on many things today, one of which is farm accounting, but these forms go far beyond general knowledge.
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Because the tax system is so complicated in Canada, most farmers keep their own financial records, but pay accountants to file income tax.
My accountant would charge $500-$900 to fill out the forms. If it takes a chartered accountant that long to fill them out correctly, how long would it take me?
You have told eastern media that maybe grain farmers do not require any assistance since they are not withdrawing money from NISA. I for one have not been able to withdraw from NISA. I am attempting to take an interim withdrawal for the year 2000, and juggle the numbers this fall to avoid having to repay it next summer.
What you could and should have done is what (Saskatchewan agriculture minister) Eric Upshall asked: allow a one-time, unlimited, no penalty withdrawal from NISA.
When the income and allowed expenses are tallied up, this program is designed for hog farmers, of which the vast majority are in Quebec, of course. It has no relation to the circumstances on western Canadian grain farms.
If my gross income, according to your calculations, has gone down to 67 percent (with NISA deducted) of the previous three years, I would be finished farming. Even if my gross income has gone down, most of my expenses remain the same. Consequently, I would have a negative margin, which your program does not cover.
Most of my responsibility as a farmer is to decipher which crops to seed in a year, how to market them, and how to make use of crop insurance programs to ensure an even flow of cash from year to year. Barring total crop failures, which we have not had, a farm manager can usually predict whether a coming year will be a high or a low-income year and adjust expenses accordingly. In effect, a lot of farm managers are being penalized for doing a good job in difficult times.
Is this what your bureaucrats want? To create a subsidy/welfare mentality in Canadian farmers such as in Europe? I admit it is much easier to control a group of people, animals or whatever, once you get them used to coming to the watering hole.
The only sector of agriculture in Canada that has had three good years, followed by one terrible year, are hog farmers. And since most of the hogs in Canada are produced in Quebec and Ontario, why don’t you call it what it is? A subsidy for eastern Canadian hog farmers.
– Tom Reay,
Watson, Sask.
Great place
To the Editor:
I would like to reply to the letter from Walter M. Opperman in the July 1 issue of The Western Producer.
We are in agreement about the provincial debt and the $2 per day per person that is piling up. The sooner this is paid off, the better. About one half of the debt can be blamed on the previous government and the other half was hidden in the crown corporations from the government before them. The trap that “it is easier to borrow money than it is to pay it off” has happened to a lot of governments. The NDP government is to be commended for stopping the borrowing and actually paying back about $3 billion of the $15 billion owed. Unfortunately, at this rate it will take 32 years to pay off this debt.
I think Saskatchewan is a great place to live. When I get tired of working on my farm I get in my truck and drive around looking at crops and scenery. I like looking at Saskatchewan.
If I sound like I am critical of the NDP government, it’s because I am. Saskatchewan has so many opportunities and resources, yet all we seem to be getting is bigger, greedier, more intrusive government. More taxes and larger government is not the answer. I know we can do better.
You, Walter M. Opperman, seemed to have missed the point of my first letter. What are Janice McKinnon and our provincial government doing, $12 billion in debt, unable to maintain essential services, giving taxpayers’ money to a company like AgrEvo?
AgrEvo is a wealthy multi-national company with 1998 sales of 4.2 billion deutschmarks ($5.48 billion Cdn) and profits of 353 million deutschmarks ($460 million Cdn). I got this information off its website.
Good lord man, their budget is larger than our provincial government’s.
How can you defend giving $450,000 of taxpayers’ money to this company? Give your head a shake.
– Victor Hult,
Waseca, Sask.
