HERE’S an item from the file folder titled “recurring news:” Parliament Hill is awash in another Liberal Quebec funding scandal.
The auditor general reported that a $250 million, four-year scheme to spend tax dollars raising Canada’s profile in Quebec after near loss of the 1995 referendum worked something like this: Liberal-connected firms got to act as middlemen in distributing the money and worked on the principle of three for them and two for us.
For transferring a net $150 million taxpayer dollars to designated recipients, they kept $100 million in “fees.”
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Worrisome drop in grain prices
Prices had been softening for most of the previous month, but heading into the Labour Day long weekend, the price drops were startling.
As a result, Parliament is in turmoil. Paul Martin’s two-month prime ministership hangs in the balance if he can’t find some way to blame it entirely on former prime minister Jean Chrétien while offering a plausible excuse for why the finance minister and senior Quebec minister at the time (him) heard the rumours of misspending but never thought to get to the bottom of it.
Question Period has been all scandal all the time since the Feb. 10 report.
A parliamentary committee is investigating, a public inquiry has been launched, an ambassador has been fired and the opposition is in full voice.
So far, the only known agricultural connection is that Pierre Tremblay was fired as vice-president of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. He was given the job in 2002 after his Public Works Canada job as chief shoveler of money to Quebec became a bit too exposed to the glare of new minister Ralph Goodale.
That was mentioned in the House of Commons last week.
Due to political and media fixation on the scandal, one of the biggest agricultural stories in years received barely passing attention. In 2003, Agriculture Canada expects that Canadian farmers in general will have a negative net income after depreciation for the first time in history.
In Saskatchewan, it is expected to be close to a half billion dollar loss and in Alberta, a quarter of a billion.
It drew hardly a political word, even though those losses came despite $5 billion in taxpayer-supported program payments. The news is almost unfathomable, directly touching nearly half the ridings represented in Parliament.
The National Farmers Union demanded an emergency Commons debate, convinced that corporate concentration is more to blame for falling farm incomes than BSE, drought and a high Canadian dollar.
Whether the NFU analysis is correct or not, its demand for a political debate was obvious common sense. The numbers are worse than the standard for bad in the farm community, the Great Depression.
The response from Parliament Hill was silence. There have been speeches on BSE, but this is much bigger than BSE.
Perhaps for the Liberals, trying to be all things to all people, a debate would shine too bright a light on their program failures. Remember the definition of insanity – someone who keeps doing the same thing, expecting a different outcome.
Perhaps for opposition MPs, a debate would show them demanding the Liberals “do something” without offering any bright ideas about what “something” would be.
And perhaps in the back of all their minds is the uneasy suspicion that the farm income situation is so desperate it is beyond the capacity of politicians and governments to fix. No politician would ever admit that.
