After more than five years as the leader of Canada’s largest national farm organization, Jack Wilkinson has six months left to make his mark.
He has set himself an ambitious work program before he steps down in February. To hear him talk, the president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture figures he has half a year to:
- Rouse the farm lobby from its discouraged and demoralized silence.
- Re-assert farmer political clout.
- Try to inject agricultural issues back into the national political debate.
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“It is my job for the next six months to crank farmers up past the point of grumbling,” he says. “Politicians have to know that there are real problems, real frustrations out there.”
Since he become CFA leader in 1993 at an Ottawa convention, Wilkinson has been an outspoken, articulate and sometimes abrasive farm leader.
More than once, he has verged on becoming persona non grata around the Sir John Carling building, headquarters of Agriculture Canada. It is not a bureaucracy known for welcoming criticism.
In these strange political times, as domestic politics are increasingly neutered by the imperatives of global economics and trade agreements, dissent and disagreement are sometimes viewed almost as treason. Government much prefers lobbyists who keep their complaints private, hoping to work something out behind the scenes.
But that is not always Wilkinson’s style.
The former air force pilot is a graduate of Ontario’s school of tough-talking farm politics. He speaks his mind, at times accusing bureaucrats of having a hidden agenda and politicians of forgetting who they are supposed to be helping.
His job description is not keeping farmers quiet.
He sees his role as reminding politicians and their hired hands, sometimes loudly, that farmers have grievances.
In a country where the confident Liberals face a largely ineffective and divided political Opposition, Wilkinson figures it is up to farm leaders to fill the critical void. Think of it as “unofficial Leader of the Agricultural Opposition”.
There is reason for it. Wilkinson seems to despair of the current political scene. As he sees it, farmers with a grievance have few places to go for a hearing.
There is:
- An agriculture minister, Lyle Vanclief, who is reluctant to be politically decisive and who tries to minimize the impact of politics on decision-making.
- A Liberal caucus devoid of mavericks willing to challenge government farm policy. “It’s as if someone snapped the whip in Ottawa and you cannot get a renegade Liberal MP anywhere on any topic.”
- A Commons agriculture committee which reinforces rather than challenges government decisions.
- An Opposition unsympathetic to farmer requests for help.
“Why go to the Reform Party which wants to cut more than the Liberals do?”
So Wilkinson figures it is up to him.
“I don’t think the farm lobby has gone away but it has dozed off,” he says.
“It’s my job to try to wake it up, to keep the government accountable.”
