A government plan to shave $180 million off Agriculture Canada spending during the next five years is drawing fire from industry and political critics.
“This looks like a systematic pulling back from supporting agriculture in many ways, just at a time when the industry needs all the support it can get,” said Saskatchewan Conservative MP Gerry Ritz.
At the Ottawa offices of the Canadian Co-operative Association, government affairs director Olivia Enns said it was ironic that a budget that offered co-ops a tax break also took away a tool co-ops use, the Farm Improvement and Marketing Co-operatives Loan program.
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“It’s like they gave with one hand and took back with the other,” she said in a Feb. 25 interview.
It will save Ottawa $400,000 annually. The government said the program is no longer needed but existing loan guarantees will be honoured.
In Regina, Saskatchewan agriculture minister Mark Wartman, in a Feb. 28 conference call from Paris where he was attending an international agri-business show, agreed with the opposition Saskatchewan Party that the end to the loan program is inappropriate. It was “nothing short of cruel.”
He also criticized the cuts to research and development and the Canadian Agriculture and Food International program.
The cuts were announced in Ottawa as a sideshow to the federal government’s Feb. 23 budget, the result of a government-wide expenditure review aimed at dropping low priority programs.
As part of the overall expenditure cut announcement, Agriculture Canada appeared to get off lightly. It will lose $180 million out of total cuts of close to $11 billion over five years.
However, some of the items offered up by agriculture minister Andy Mitchell are sensitive, even though he said the services provided by the programs can be obtained from other sources.
The cuts include:
- The CAFI program cited by Wartman loses $7 million a year, ending government support for individual company export development work. Industry associations will continue to receive support.
- An end of support for the community pasture program over three years, forcing the program to cover all costs through fees. Ottawa has paid 25 percent of the costs.
- Funding for environmental farm plan development, saving $70 million over five years. The department says the funding will be found elsewhere in the budget.
- An end to Ottawa’s annual $2 million contribution to the Protein, Oil and Starch pilot plant in Sask-atoon. It stops next year.
- Closure of four labs at Agriculture Canada research stations in Winnipeg, Kapuskasing, Ont., Nappan, N.S. and St. John’s, Nfld. to save $2.8 million annually beginning in 2007-08.The alternative was spending $50 million to upgrade the labs, says the department.
Mitchell said the research will still be done but with four fewer sites to maintain, there will be more money for research. He said the Winnipeg research could move to a university lab.
- Closure of the Canadian Grain Commission office in Edmonton to save slightly less than $1 million annually.
- Orders that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency cut $69 million over the five years, heavily weighted to the latter years of the decade, through physical consolidation at an Ottawa site, a shrunken management structure, “efficiencies” in management and science-related work and improvements in inspection programs.
“One of the governing principles is that CFIA must not do anything that would jeopardize public or animal health,” Mitchell said in an interview.
“Towards the back end, we will do some modernization and harmonization of the regulatory process after consulting with industry and trading partners.”
While the government downplayed the service significance of the cuts, Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Bob Friesen was not so sure.
“The irony is that while they claim to be looking for tools to help the farm income situation, they are taking away tools already in place and that help farmers,” he said. “They seem to be backing off from support.”
