BELLEVILLE, Ont. – Of course, Anne McLellan knows it is not quite that simple.
If it was, agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief would not be facing the criticism he is getting from disgruntled prairie farmers these days.
And he would not be facing the prospect of farmer demonstrations when he is in Prince Albert, Sask., next week to meet provincial agriculture ministers.
Nor would he have prairie premiers trying to go over his head by appealing directly to prime minister Jean ChrŽtien for better farm aid.
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So what was McLellan talking about?
Last week, the justice minister was in Belleville as the featured speaker during Vanclief’s annual fund-raising dinner.
She told a story meant to illustrate why she thinks Vanclief is the man for the job.
McLellan said her brother runs a dairy farm in her native Nova Scotia and her sister-in-law raises pigs.
At Christmas, 1997, the two sisters-in-law talked politics and Vanclief’s appointment came up.
“She said he can’t be all bad,” McLellan told the partisan crowd in Vanclief country. “He was a farmer. He has to know what we go through every day.”
That is, of course, one way to measure a minister and it is a measure Vanclief himself seems to like. Has he been through it?
When under pressure, the criticism-sensitive minister often refers to the fact that he has first-hand experience in these
matters.
Clearly, Vanclief has been “through it.” During his years of farming, he knew some good years and bad, saw some crops flourish and others all but wiped out, lived through market and price fluctuations.
He diversified, watched his debt grow and eventually sold the farm in 1988 when debt became too high.
So it makes Vanclief bristle when his critics say he does not seem to understand their plight.
“I was a farmer long enough to know there’s mud down there,” he said in June when he heard criticism that he would fly over flooded farmland rather than drive to see it up close. “I don’t have to get it on my boots to know it is there.”
No one who knows him doubts he understands the risks of farming. Few would question that Vanclief means to be helpful when he advocates programs he thinks will make farmers more self-sufficient and less government-dependent.
But that does not automatically transfer to an image of a minister who understands the current problems. The government’s tepid and bureaucratic policy responses to the floods this year have done little to convey the image of a politician determined to do what has to be done to help.
And increasingly, farmer disgruntlement is taking on a regional tone. Like many of his eastern-based Liberal predecessors, Vanclief is being portrayed as someone who does not have a feel for prairie issues nor a particular empathy with prairie farmers.
The populist Lyle Vanclief filmed during the 1998 ice storm in Quebec and Ontario, touring farms and promising help, has been notably absent from the southern Prairies.
If this “out of touch” image takes root on the Prairies, it will be hard to shake.
