The Trans-Pacific Partnership will survive Justin Trudeau’s election victory. It might not have survived a Thomas Mulcair win.
That’s the biggest result of the recently completed federal election for western Canadian farmers, who either rely on access to foreign markets or make their money from the supply management system.
The surprising election result will have an impact across the board, considering that Liberals, Conservatives and the New Democratic Party all have significant differences in the way they are likely to approach farming, agriculture and food issues. However, the TPP has an overarching importance for prairie farmers.
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Trudeau hasn’t sworn to support the Conservative-negotiated TPP deal, but it’s hard to imagine him not finding a way to get it approved once he has settled in.
As he noted in the campaign, the Liberal party supports trade, and it’s hard to see him walking away from it if supply managed farmers accept that the TPP does indeed preserve supply management and is the best deal they will ever get.
There’s always a chance that Ontario and Quebec manufacturing workers will rise up against the deal, but it’s quiet so far. Spending on heavy infrastructure in those provinces might dilute resistance.
Mulcair had said he wasn’t going to feel bound to implement TPP, and the NDP was far from a historically trade-friendly party. That meant their winning could have posed TPP problems.
Trudeau’s victory was so overwhelming that it’s hard to remember that the NDP was ahead of the other parties just three months ago and TPP approval was in peril.
On other issues, it will take weeks and months to get a sense of how western Canadian farmers will be affected.
The new agriculture minister is unlikely to be a prairie-focused politician as was Gerry Ritz, but that didn’t always give prairie farmers what they wanted. For example, 62 percent of them had at one time voted to preserve the Canadian Wheat Board’s export monopoly, but Ritz got rid of it anyway.
What western Canadian farmers are likely to see is the preservation of Statistics Canada’s vital data collection and reporting, which was being weakened under the Conservative government.
Prime minister Stephen Harper hadn’t seemed to target agriculture reports for elimination in the same way that he did with the mandatory long-form census. However, the general drive to shrink the size of government and squeeze costs out of the system had been creating pressure to pull back from traditional reporting services.
Farmers and the agricultural commodity markets rely on good data, so a reinforced Statistics Canada would be a good thing.
Agriculture policy might become a quiet area for the new federal government, considering that the CWB is gone, the railways disciplined and supply management maintained.
Prairie farmers probably need to focus on a handful of issues they want to see addressed rather than assume agricultural issues will be top of mind within the Trudeau cabinet and caucus.
With any luck, the Liberal regime will find western Canadian farmers good to work with.
A number of farmer organizations seemed to become very, very attached to the Harper government and almost subordinate to its demands. Hopefully, the Liberal government will be less domineering and more open to farmer independence, while not punishing western Canadian farmers for their seeming attachment to the Conservative machine.
We know Trudeau has nice hair. Let’s hope he also has a warm heart. With the Harper sweater vest shuffling off into history, a few things are likely to be different.
