REGINA – He quickly dismisses the message from federal finance minister Jim Flaherty as typical political bumph, but farm policy gadfly and perennial critic Lloyd Pletz seems pleased that he at least got a response.
It was a form letter e-mail sent Sept. 13 in response to a July missive from Pletz complaining about a government plot to destroy farm programming.
“Thank you for communicating your concerns,” the finance minister or a staff member wrote after reciting all the great things the Conservatives believe they have done for farmers since February 2006.
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“He is spouting political garbage,” Pletz groused in late September.
“But at least he responded. One of my disappointments over the years is that no one wants to talk to me. No one ever responds.”
From the other side of the fence, government officials and farm politicians will ruefully recount the barrage of subsequent Pletz missives they received after they responded to one.
“He takes a response as encouragement,” said one who has been on the receiving end.
Pletz is a relentless messager to politicians, bureaucrats, farm groups and media.
He is a former southern Saskatchewan farmer who is a farm policy e-mail machine, churning out widely distributed verbal assaults that denounce politicians and bureaucrats who design farm policies he thinks inadequate. Mainstream farm leaders who co-operate in the process are quislings.
He believes anyone who wants to be a farmer should be subsidized to survive. He believes governments deliberately undersupport farmers and sees impending changes to how Canadian Agricultural Income Stabilization (CAIS) reference margins are calculated as part of the plot.
Pletz, 53, walked away from his small farm near Regina five years ago for lack of economic prospects and now lives in a small downtown Regina apartment, existing mainly on a disability pension because of a bad back and making a career of fighting perceived flaws in farm policy and the conspiracies of those who design them.
A large computer screen with a photo of a tractor as a screen-saver dominates his apartment and is his lifeline.
After playing key roles in organizing 1990s tractor rallies, a sit-in at the Saskatchewan legislature and a short-lived “Saskatchewan embassy” in Ottawa, Pletz these days rages at the system through e-mails and letters to the editor.
“This is my hobby and it takes my mind off my back pain.”
He believes the establishment works against farmer interests with the acquiescence of mainstream farm leaders who want to be included.
“Farmers will never be able to exist without subsidies because the market is set up to give the middle men all the profits,” he said.
“I have seen that over my life. Yet farm programs like CAIS are designed to reduce farm income, to get rid of farmers.”
He believes impending changes to CAIS reference margin calculations are the latest example of the plot.
And Pletz has The Answer. If governments gave farmers a one-year incentive to transfer to the accrual accounting system for calculating taxable income, the problems of the sector would be solved.
Farmers would file income tax claims that reflect profits and losses and governments would be obligated to pay the portion of declared losses that they considered appropriate.
The unprofitability of the farm sector would be visible for all to see.
“Accrual tax filing would eliminate the need for other farm programs,” he said.
“Farm losses finally would be calculated and recorded as the basis for support. It is simple.”
Pletz considers federal and provincial politicians complicit in a conspiracy to eliminate farmers and Canada’s ability to feed itself. He believes there was a 1993 Canadian commitment in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to join other countries in deliberately reducing the number of farmers.
Yet the subjects of his scorn are reluctant to reciprocate.
“I really have no comment about Mr. Pletz but I recognize he has a point of view and has promoted better farm policies and that is commendable,” Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Bob Friesen said. Friesen is frequently a target of Pletz charges that farm leaders are complicit.
Saskatchewan agriculture minister Mark Wartman said critics like Pletz are important because they challenge conventional thinking. As a one-time NDP delegate, Pletz once confronted then-premier Roy Romanow over his agriculture policy.
Pletz said he now has given up on political parties.
However, Wartman said the Pletz promotion of accrual accounting as the answer to farm income problems simply doesn’t hold up.
“Our economists have looked at it and it isn’t the solution he believes it to be. Repeating the claim doesn’t make it so.”
University of Saskatchewan farm economist Murray Fulton said the idea that there is a simple one-stop answer to farm income problems is naïve.
“I can say that while I am not familiar with all the details of his idea, there is no single simple answer or someone somewhere would have tried it.”
Pletz remains determined to be a gadfly, annoying as some may find it, until politicians adopt his ideas and reverse proposals to change CAIS rules this fall that he says will destroy it.
He bristles when it is suggested some people consider him obsessed.
“Those politicians who think I am obsessed with agr (sic) lobbying now know what I want,” he wrote in late September.
“Until I get what I want, I will continue to holler, scream and lobby against any one of them who thinks they can refuse to govern and share Canada’s wealth back to the farmgate.”
