Western Producer staff
For many key players in the food policy business, the Christmas holiday was probably the last relaxing time they will have for awhile.
The new year is shaping up to be one of the most intense and pivotal years of policy change in decades. After more than a year of consultations and delays, federal agriculture minister Ralph Goodale finally will have to start making some tough decisions.
At the same time, the chickens unleashed by free trade agreements and past deficit spending will start to come home to roost.
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The politicians, bureaucrats, farm leaders and lobbyists who want a hand in shaping the inevitable changes to flow from these built-up pressures will have to run full speed ahead just to keep up.
It will be a year for slaughtering sacred cows.
Tens of thousands of farmers who have considered their cost-of-production-based supply management systems untouchable will discover that the new version of “orderly marketing” will pay homage to COP pricing but will be unable to deliver the goods.
Tens of thousands of Prairie grain farmers who have spent all their lives considering the Crow rate and its off-spring, the Crow Benefit, a Confederation birthright, will see the subsidy diminished again and its pay-out basis changed.
In normal times, these would have been a policy plateful. In 1995, that will merely be the beginning.
A new farmer safety net program will be designed. The Canadian Wheat Board will be under review and debate about continental dual marketing will come to a head.
Canada will face tough negotiations with the United States over supply management, the wheat board and anything else the Americans decide to throw into the soup.
Constantly in the background will be spending cuts. Federal and provincial budgets in 1995 will concentrate on deficit slashing with farm supports a likely target.
The ebb and flow of events around the mid-December agriculture ministers’ meeting in Toronto gave a glimpse of the frantic year ahead.
By their nature, meetings of political somebodies are surrounded by an aura of importance and activity.
While ministers meet privately, flunkies, lobbyists and bureaucrats bustle around, carry papers, have hurried hallway huddles and slip in an out of the meeting room.
The Toronto meeting had that atmosphere and then some. A dizzying array of farm leaders was on hand.
Here, a group was offering advice on a new national safety net system. There, a clutch of supply management lobbyists was delivering their report on needed changes to the system.
Also visible was Leroy Larsen, Saskatchewan Wheat Pool president and one of a group of prairie farm leaders in town to try to forge a western front on transportation changes. He said pool members might be willing to support a Crow Benefit buy-out if the offer was big enough, say $5 billion or $6 billion.
And there were leaders of the pork industry, pleading for a special government payment to help them through a period of low prices and no safety nets.
Many of the themes were old. The direction of most of the debates was new, almost revolutionary.
Welcome to the new year.
