Quick now, how many Prairie voters remember Liberals campaigning in 1993 on a promise to kill the Crow Benefit grain transportation subsidy?
No one? Perhaps voters will more readily remember the Liberals in Opposition condemning the Conservatives for eroding the value of the Crow.
Okay, but surely killing the Crow was at least hinted at in their famous Red Book of promises? No?
That’s strange, because last week as Liberals gathered in Ottawa to celebrate three years in power, the party included that decision in its list of agricultural promises kept, sort of.
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Actually, it was not the end of the Crow that the Liberals bragged about last week. It was their later efforts to pick up the pieces. In a booklet prepared to show Liberal convention delegates that in office, the party has kept most promises made in the Red Book, there was a small section on agriculture.
Prominent among the items was the following claim:
“… helped farmers adjust and diversify their crops after the end of subsidies under the Western Grain transportation Act, through $1.6 billion in compensation to prairie farmland owners.”
The uninitiated might imagine the “end of subsidies under the WGTA” was an act of God, inherited by the government.
Of course, God was not at the cabinet table. Finance minister Paul Martin and transport minister Doug Young were.
Agriculture minister Ralph Goodale’s role was to battle in cabinet to win a compensation package.
Ottawa reporters Edward Greenspon and Anthony Wilson-Smith wrote in the recently-published Double Vision: the inside story of the Liberals in Power that Goodale “understood he could not save the Crow Rate.”
Still, claiming credit for helping farmers adjust to the Crow’s demise is a bit like hearing Jack the Ripper use a parole board hearing to demand that he be given credit for offering to patch up his victim’s wounds.
To be fair, the Liberals did not claim the death of the Crow as a Red Book promise kept. It was included in a section called “beyond the Red Book.”
That was true of all the party’s claims of agricultural successes, from creation of the rural adaptation fund to an increase in exports. All of them were in the section, as if the Liberals had made no agricultural promises in 1993.
In truth, the Red Book promises were vague bromides promising all things to almost all people, but they were there.
Curiously, when the Liberals prepared their 1996 update, they skipped specific mention of those 1993 promises, moving “beyond the Red Book” to promises kept that were not really made.
It is odd, because they could have claimed some credit for fulfilling promises to pursue export markets and to develop a new farm income safety net system. The vow to “reduce input costs” would be more problematic.
Except for lower interest rates, the Liberals have all but washed their hands of that promise. In fact, government cost-recovery has added significant new costs.
Some promises are best unremembered.
