OTTAWA – In the last years of Conservative rule, as the government worked feverishly to rewrite farm policies and programs, it was receiving evidence that Canadian farmers were growing more pessimistic and confused.
Several farmer opinion polls conducted for Agriculture Canada in 1989 and 1990 show farmers were living in growing despair.
The polls, paid for with tax dollars but kept private by the previous government, were released by the Liberal government last week. The new government says it will routinely make publicly financed opinion poll results public.
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“The majority of farmers are not optimistic about the prospects for Canadian agriculture,” according to a July 1990 Angus Reid Group report. “They indicated they would not encourage their children to enter the business and regard farming as a poor investment at the present time.”
Farmers saw their rural communities declining and most did not expect much relief in the immediate future.
Government major player
In interviews with 1,750 farmers across the country, Reid also found that most farmers expected the federal government to be the main player in delivering programs that ranged from income support and export promotion to sustainable agriculture and diversification incentives.
Only in Quebec were farmers likely to look to their provincial government as the main provider of service, aid and programs.
Yet farmers also saw governments at both levels trying to withdraw support from agriculture. And despite their high expectations for support from Ottawa, farmers often had a hard time distinguishing between federal and provincial programs.
The Winnipeg-based pollster saw this farmer confusion as the sign of a failure of federal communication, but also as an opportunity.
Federal or provincial?
“With the exception of isolated cases, most farmers could not distinguish between provincial or federal government policy efforts,” Reid reported in August, 1989 after running a series of farmer focus groups. “This represents both a critical need and an opportunity from a policy and communications perspective, for the federal government to demonstrate to the farm population that it is committed to and cares about the future of Canadian agriculture.”
He recommended the government give farmers a sense of “ownership” of future programs by involving them in the design.
It was advice the Conservatives heeded, with mixed results, when designing the first generation of income safety net programs.
Reid also reported most farmers in the focus groups had little knowledge of federal programs and policies.
Curiously, after reporting farmer demands for government action in a number of areas, Reid offered then-agriculture minister Don Mazankowski a somewhat contradictory message.
“The major constraint faced by the federal government is the fact that farmers in general dislike government intervention or involvement in agriculture,” he wrote.
