TEULON, Man. – Here in Conservative James Bezan’s campaign office the phones are ringing, keeping a worker running from room to room to answer the various lines.
In the Selkirk office a campaign worker spent a frustrating morning trying to get internet service quickly installed – election campaigns last only a few weeks.
“I don’t know if we’re a home or a business customer. We’re a political party,” he explained on the phone, before being put on hold again by the internet provider.
It was a rushed and busy week across the sprawling Selkirk-Interlake riding, with candidates opening campaign offices and volunteers quickly spreading out with lawn signs and leaflets.
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It also should be a busy time for the thousands of farmers who live in the riding, which spreads from the cattle country of the Interlake to the rich cropland of the Beausejour area.
But farmers there are frustrated with cold and wet weather slowing and stopping seeding. During a tour of the area last week, not one farm machine was seen in action in over 400 kilometres of farmland.
Producers here have struggled through a long winter, hobbled by short hay and feed crops caused by a two-year drought and hammered by slumping cattle prices caused by the BSE border closure.
With warmer weather, diesel engines will fire up en masse as farmers take to the fields, hoping to get their crops in on time and hoping to get enough rain to break the drought.
Local Liberal candidate Bruce Benson is also getting ready to fire up his machine’s engine – and go harvesting. He’s a commercial fisherman and this week is the start of the pickerel season. He’d rather put off the fishing until after the election campaign, but that isn’t how fishing works.
“It’s how I make my livelihood. It’s got to be done,” said Benson in his campaign office in Selkirk. “It’s like I’m a farmer at harvest time.”
Tory candidate Bezan is the only farmer in the Selkirk-Interlake race, but Benson thinks he can make an equal pitch to farmers.
“I’m a primary food producer, just like a farmer,” said Benson, who is president of the harbour authority in Arnes and chair of the Freshwater Harbour Authority Advisory Council.
He said that just like a farmer, he is suffering from high fuel prices and input costs.
But his main pitch for farmer support will be that they need a Liberal member of Parliament to be heard.
“If you don’t have a member of Parliament on the side of the government, you just don’t get as much done,” said Benson.
“If you don’t have someone knocking on (treasury board president Reg) Alcock’s door saying, ‘hey Reg, we’ve got a problem here,’ … he’s the guy with the purse strings,” said Benson.
“He’ll open the door to me. He may not open the door to a Conservative or an NDP.”
And Benson is directly targeting the record of retiring MP Howard Hilstrom, a Reform-Canadian Alliance politician who represented the riding and was once the opposition critic for agriculture.
“Howard was very prominent but Howard didn’t accomplish very much because he was on the wrong side of the House,” said Benson.
“Howard wasn’t in the arena. He was standing outside.”
That’s a claim that infuriates Bezan.
“People know Howard worked hard and spoke strong on behalf of the constituents,” said Bezan.
“The Liberal candidate is completely off mark and out of touch with the facts and it just shows his inexperience and inability.”
The sparks flying between Bezan and Benson reveal that both Conservatives and Liberals think they can win the riding.
In the last election Hilstrom received almost double the Liberal vote, but a Liberal was elected here in 1993.
NDP candidate Duane Nicol is a young Selkirk town councillor whose signs line roads in the Selkirk and Gimli areas, as well as sporadically throughout the riding.
Bezan thinks he has the edge with cattle producers and farmers in the Interlake area because he knows many from his days working for the Manitoba Cattle Producers Association and from his present job with Manitoba’s crop insurance program.
He’s also a cow-calf producer, with 70 cows right now. He reduced his herd from 110 cows because of the drought and BSE and his background means a lot to some producers, he said.
“A lot of farmers who have voted NDP are voting for me this time because they want to keep a strong farm voice,” Bezan said.
But he admits he is weaker in Gimli, Selkirk and on the Winnipeg fringe because he is not well known there. But with farmers, he’s sure he can tap into outrage over the Liberal government’s inadequate BSE relief package.
“That last compensation program completely missed the mark,” said Bezan.
“The people who need it are the cow-calf producers. The money went to the feedlots and the packers.”He, like many local farmers afflicted by drought, had to sell their calves early last fall and “they’re not seeing one red cent out of the program.”He thinks only the Conservatives can claim farm credibility.
“This is a ranching riding and we are definitely in touch with the farmer and at the farmgate,” said Bezan.
