The latest Statistics Canada report says almost half of Canadian
farmers have off-farm jobs. It stands to reason that a percentage of
the other half are looking for off-farm work so they can keep their
expensive farming “habit” afloat.
The Communications Security Establishment, the nation’s spy agency, has
provided an answer. It wants to increase its workforce of 1,000 by
about 300 people, reports the Globe and Mail.
About 13,000 have applied, but it should be obvious to CSE, as it is to
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the rest of us, that farmer applicants have the inside track.
Consider: The average farmer can keep machinery operational with little
more than baler twine, a grease gun and an old Agribition show guide.
If the CSE gets the same funding priority as the Canadian military,
such thrift is a job prerequisite.
It says in the Globe that the spy agency dates back to 1946. Most
farmers have worked on equipment from that era and some of it still
runs. Coincidence? Or serendipity?
Let the James Bond types gad about with high-tech gimmickry and
pristine BMWs. In the Canadian spy game, farmers will attract much less
attention by brandishing lock de-icer and driving used Ford pickups.
The average western Canadian farmer has a healthy suspicion of
government, both foreign and domestic, and an innate ability to
question government programs, tactics and policies. You can’t find that
everywhere, particularly not in the civil service.
As for CSE’s preference for people with engineering or mathematics
skills, sign up the farmers. They can turn swathers into sprayers,
jerry-rig balers to run behind combines and coach a bereaved mother cow
to accept a runty orphan calf.
They can calculate the necessary cubic feet of bin space required for a
bumper crop on 750 acres of No. 1 hard red spring (not that this is
often required) and figure the number of litres of spray per acre
needed to reduce grasshopper numbers from intolerable to merely
horrific.
By engaging the adversary in a discussion about weather until his eyes
glaze over, farmers could likely talk their way past any human sentry.
And of course spies must be covert and inconspicuous. Farmers have a
lock on that. How else to explain the way they are constantly ignored
by government whenever they ask for help?
Sign up those farmers, CSE. And when you do, please remember: they take
their beer unshaken and their coffee stirred.
