WHEN former rural Ontario banker Andy Mitchell was appointed Canada’s 30th agriculture minister July 20, 2004, he also was assigned new Parliament Hill office space that has more than a little history in it.
Room 157 East Block was, in the early decades of Canada’s history, the office of Canada’s finance minister. The former banker revels in showing visitors the vault attached to the office where finance ministers under early prime ministers presumably stored important financial papers, who knows what.
Mitchell and that historic office likely will be players in a familiar drama that will unfold on Parliament Hill this spring.
Read Also
Crop insurance’s ability to help producers has its limitations
Farmers enrolled in crop insurance can do just as well financially when they have a horrible crop or no crop at all, compared to when they have a below average crop
A short walk west across the Hill sits the office of the current occupant of the finance minister’s chair, Saskatchewan MP Ralph Goodale, who also will be a player.
Goodale, a former agriculture minister and a lifelong fiscally conservative Liberal, has just presented a very fiscally liberal Liberal budget that promised to throw new money at almost every conceivable issue Ñ except agriculture.
The Regina MP is correct to tell critics that billions of dollars in statutory farm program spending is not noted in the budget but still, the optics were bad. Farmers in his own province are projected to lose close to half a billion dollars this year but the sector barely got mentioned in a $42 billion orgy of spending promises over five years.
To complete the triangle, several blocks south of Parliament Hill are the offices of two of the country’s major national farm lobbies, the Canadian Federation of Agriculture and Grain Growers of Canada, and they too will be part of the impending power play.
In particular, there is the Albert Street office of Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Bob Friesen, a Manitoba hog and turkey farmer starting his seventh year in the job. Because of the breadth and depth of the CFA and its affiliates within the politics of the farm community, he will be a key player.
The drama to unfold, of course, is the farmer plea to Ottawa to sweeten the farm support pot this spring in the face of a devastating income outlook that includes projected losses in four of the country’s most productive farming provinces Ñ Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Prince Edward Island.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
The agricultural policy framework, with its guaranteed demand-driven funding, was supposed to end this ritual of farm aid pleas.
Yet despite what governments say is record program spending, farm incomes remain at near record lows. Weather, politics and market failures have created an almost unprecedented income crisis exacerbated by record farm debt.
But Friesen, CFA president since the days of the hog income crisis that created the Agricultural Income Disaster Assistance program whose principles have tainted programs ever since, will have a few things on his side beyond the obvious need and a growing farm lobby.
He will have Goodale’s need to show he understands, despite the budget.
And he will have Mitchell’s promise at the CFA convention last week that his main job is to represent farmer needs inside the government.
Of course, Mitchell also knows how to gain entry to that vault in his office.
