Doug and Ralph rock’n’roll while Jean is away

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Published: June 23, 1994

Western Producer staff

To try to explain the recent political fiasco over government intentions on the Crow Benefit subsidy, I am driven to remember one of my favorite mother-in-law sayings: “When the cat is away, the mice will dance.”

I never really knew if this was a poor French-Canadian translation of the rhyming English saying, or if the French just have better imaginations about what mice will do when the cat is away.

No matter.

The point is the same – without someone to ride herd, all hell is apt to break loose. So it was in Liberal Ottawa recently when Jean ChrŽtien was out of the country to attend D-Day celebrations in Europe.

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Transport minister Doug Young took the opportunity to very bluntly lay his subsidy-cutting agenda before the Canadian people.

Then it was agriculture minister Ralph Goodale’s turn to dance – squirm, really – as he tried to explain away Young’s comments that transportation subsidies to the railways would end next year.

Without ChrŽtien to rein the two of them in and to create some order out of the chaos, the government squirmed in the spotlight for three full days – an eternity in politics.

When the dust had cleared, Goodale had managed to contain the damage somewhat with solemn promises that no final decisions had been made.

He even resorted at times to the traditional political fib of insisting that all the confusion came not from government but from reporters who misunderstood or misquoted ministers.

But the incident left a strong sense of unease in the affected industry, both about the future of the subsidy and about the credibility of the government’s “consultation” process.

In fact, Reform MP Elwin Hermanson’s conclusion has a ring of logic to it.

He figures the government has decided to change the method of payment, opting for some sort of safety-net status for the subsidy while arranging the various processes and arguments to guarantee that the industry is led to conclude there is no other option.

This certainly is the scenario that bureaucrats at Transport Canada and some of the economists at Agriculture Canada have been promoting for years.

For the bureaucrats, one of the side blessings of the new international trade rules deal is that it gives their decade-long domestic policy wish list an international push.

There can be little doubt that Young has been given a mandate by the prime minister to, as he put it, “get Transport Canada out of the subsidy business.”

The main political question left open is whether Goodale is being totally honest when he insists that all options remain on the table, including Agriculture Canada paying the Crow Benefit to the railways.

Does this really sound credible, especially considering that Goodale has said farmers face a choice of changing the way the subsidy is structured or seeing the benefit shrink even more?

Sounds like you can choose any color you want, as long as it’s a shade of blue.

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