In a major mid-campaign policy reversal, prime minister Paul Martin has promised that a re-elected Liberal government would try to incorporate a price-related, commodity specific and timely payment component into a redesigned Canadian Agricultural Income Stabilization program.
As proposed by an Ontario grains and oilseeds safety net committee, the program would act as a new form of provincial companion program offering twice-yearly payments to producers who see prices fall below a level of price protection purchased through premiums. Payouts would be based on historical yields and actual seeded acreage.
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Last summer, the Ontario government rejected the proposal, projecting it could cost as much as $450 million in Ontario during a year of price collapses such as 2005. Martin suggested the model could be extended across Canada.
“Our commitment to the agricultural community was to accelerate our review of the CAIS program and to do it in accordance with Wayne Easter’s report, which has been very well accepted by the farm organizations in Ontario and in Canada,” Martin said Jan. 6.
“The fundamental principle of his report was to get more money into producers’ pockets. Now, the grain and oilseeds producers have proposed a way to do just that and we agree and so our review will be conducted with exactly their proposal in mind. And I think that that statement will go a long way to setting out the government’s position.”
Easter, who was consulted by Martin about the statement while he toured southern Ontario promoting Liberal agriculture policy, agreed it was a reversal.
“It may be true that this does not technically line up with trade rules but look it, we can’t have our producers sitting out there getting hammered by competition from farmers across the line who receive much more and more effective help,” the MP said. “The reality is our producers cannot survive in the present unfair marketplace.”
On July 28, federal agriculture minister Andy Mitchell rejected the proposal as contrary to international trade rules and Canada’s trend to whole-farm supports rather than commodity specific programs.
“The proposed program moves in the opposite direction from the evolution of the Canadian farm income stabilization over the past decade,” he wrote to the plan’s authors. “Programs that are linked to production and prices increase the risk of trade actions, particularly countervail action from the U.S.”
Easter said Martin’s comments do not mean the exact details of the Ontario proposal will be added to a revised CAIS, “but we will be looking to see how those principles of price-related and timely payments can be incorporated.”
The Ontario proposal once rejected as impractical suggests that farmers buying price protection would have to buy crop insurance and be enrolled in CAIS to be eligible.
It is unclear how the principles could be extended across Canada but Martin’s comments are a clear blow to the original concept of the agricultural policy framework that province or commodity-specific companion programs would end.
“We said right from the beginning of the APF debate that there should be some provision for programs designed for specific problems and so we welcome this,” Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Bob Friesen said. “If it means more money, so be it. There is a need.”
Ontario Federation of Agriculture president Ron Bonnett was more cautious.
He said incorporating the principles of the Ontario grains and oilseeds safety net proposal into a new CAIS would mean “a lot more money” and more timely payments.
“That would be good,” he said. “But saying you are looking at it does not mean it will happen so we will be looking for a specific commitment to actually do this.”
Meanwhile, rural Liberal and Conservative candidates complained last week that major agricultural policy announcements by Martin and Conservative leader Stephen Harper days before Christmas have largely been ignored.
They attracted little media attention and many farmers are complaining to candidates that agriculture is not being discussed.
“The local papers didn’t pick it up,” said Don Dewar, a Liberal candidate in the Manitoba riding of Dauphin-Swan River. “I’m going to have to re-announce it here just to try to get some coverage so farmers know what we are proposing.”
Ted Menzies, the Conservative MP and candidate from the Macleod constituency in Alberta, did the same thing, reannouncing the Conservative platform that had received almost no local notice.
“It kind of got lost in the wrapping paper at Christmas.”
