Bob Speller, newly minted federal agriculture minister and the second Ontario MP in a row to hold that position, plans to head west as soon as he can, possibly even for a few days during the Christmas week.
If that trip does not happen, his first trip as minister will be early in the new year. He has been west often as an MP on the agriculture committee and as chair of the prime minister’s task force on agriculture.
And he figures he has more in common with the West than many westerners may realize.
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“I plan to be out there as often as I can (because) no matter where they live, I think people are looking for someone willing to listen to them, to sit down and take the time to hear them,” Speller said in a Dec. 17 interview just days after being sworn in as Canada’s 29th agriculture minister. “I plan to do that.”
He said his southwestern Ontario riding “is not unlike the West.” It has farmers who produce most of the crops grown in Canada – “you name it, we grow it” – and is home for 70 percent of the country’s beleaguered tobacco farmers.
“I say come to southwest Ontario and I’ll show you an industry under duress and that helps me understand the industry,” said Speller. “I have one-industry towns, as they do in the West.”
He said some prairie farmers figure that everyone from Ontario comes from Toronto or has a Toronto outlook.
“There is a misperception in the West,” said Speller. “I have more in common in my riding with the West than I do with Toronto.”
Speller comes from a Progressive Conservative family and his first political job on Parliament Hill was with a Tory MP.
However, he spent time as an intern in the Ontario legislature working for MPP Sheila Copps, later federal deputy prime minister, and then for Liberal leader and later premier David Peterson, brother of current federal trade minister Jim Peterson.
The experience made him a Liberal and in 1988, he turned a traditional Conservative riding in a rural area of Ontario into a Liberal bastion that he has won in four consecutive elections.
Speller said one of his role models is former Liberal agriculture minister Eugene Whelan.
“I think he was able to project to Canadians and the prime minister at the time (Pierre Trudeau) the importance of agriculture to Canada,” said Speller. “I want to do that today in a context that is quite a bit different than it was then.”
