Farm leaders are not expecting to be inside the room Feb. 5 when federal and provincial agriculture ministers meet but they will be in the hallways making their demands known.
The ministers gather in Toronto to review an officials’ assessment of how well existing business risk management programs are working and whether improvements are needed when the next generation of safety net programs is designed.
But Canadian Federation of Agriculture vice-president Ron Bonnett says ministers must look at more than long-term improvements. Existing programs should be fixed now to help livestock sectors in trouble.
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“There are no plans to invite us in but we’ll be in the halls and we never have a problem making sure our points are heard,” Bonnett said in a Jan. 29 interview.
“There are some long-term considerations but the system is not working now for people who need help and they can’t wait three years while they are having a heart attack trying to survive.”
He said ministers should use their one-day meeting to agree on some immediate changes, particularly to AgriStability.
Bonnett said money saved because of lower AgriStability payments to a healthier grain sector should be allocated to help a struggling livestock sector.
And he reiterated a longstanding farm lobby call for tweaking AgriStability rules to improve coverage of negative margins, end the viability test that limits payouts to farmers who have been profitable in two of the past three years and change the formula for years that can be used to calculate the historic margin against which current income is judged.
“These are things that can and should be done now,” said Bonnett. The industry is hurting and the programs are not working. A program based on historic margins fails sectors going through prolonged problems.”
In fact, it was one of the concerns that prompted then-Ontario agriculture minister Leona Dombrowsky to propose at last summer’s ministers’ meeting that the farm program system be reviewed.
“I think there’s a general consensus that we have heard from our stakeholders that AgriStability was not doing for them what it needed to do,” she said last July at the end of the summer ministers’ meeting in Ontario.
“We will be consulting with industry stakeholders because all of us agree that we want a tool that is going to work for the people it’s intended to work for.”
Farm leaders say there has not been as much consultation as she suggested there would be.
Dombrowsky is one of a number of experienced provincial agriculture ministers who will be missing from the meeting this week.
Since ministers last met, longtime Manitoba minister Rosann Wow-chuk moved to finance from agriculture after 10 years in that job.
Manitoba’s representative will be Stan Struthers for his first turn at the federal-provincial agriculture table.
Dombrowsky has been moved to education, replaced by rural MPP Carol Mitchell, once parliamentary assistant to a former provincial agriculture minister.
Alberta’s Jack Hayden, experienced rural municipal politician but relative provincial newcomer, will be at the meeting filling the chair held last year by George Groeneveld.
Quebec minister Claude Béchard is expected to miss the meeting because of health problems.
It makes federal minister Gerry Ritz, 30 months on the job, one of the veterans around the table.
