CALGARY Ñ Prairie “fish cops,” environmentalist pressures, marketing restrictions and endless government rules all played starring roles last week as Alberta farm representatives tried to identify causes of perennial low farm incomes.
It is a problem of burdensome regulation they said, during a four-hour session hosted Jan. 19 by Liberal MP Wayne Easter. If the federal government is serious in its promise to try to find solutions to low farm income, it must look at its rules.
“I think regulation contributes to 70 percent of our problems,” said Doug Robertson, chair of the Alberta Barley Commission. “The market is really not allowed to work. The government seems to think it can create a marketplace. It cannot create a marketplace. The big problem is regulations that get made up by people who are not in the industry, they are not industry driven. They have a tendency to come back and bite producers pretty well without fail.”
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Complaints during the meeting, part of a cross-country series of consultations by Easter to investigate causes and solutions to chronic farm income problems, ranged from the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly and new nutrient management demands to Canadian Grain Commission rules and trade restrictions.
Bob Church, an Alberta ranching and research icon and a director of the newly created Canadian Agri-food Policy Institute, told the meeting that regulation is “the hidden hand in all our pockets.”
In a later interview, he said the influx of new regulations and restrictions cost producers money that cannot be retrieved from the market. He used the example of fisheries and oceans department officers who have decided prairie waterways are fish habitat under their jurisdiction.
“Near our ranch, they’re putting in a new culvert,” he said. “It would have cost about $25,000 to put that new culvert in this run-off creek. When fisheries and oceans fish cops came in, it’s going to cost over $100,000. That’s a local cost.”
Robertson said regulations that impose restrictions and add costs to entrepreneurial opportunities are a major part of the farm income issue.
Debate during the session also included criticism of supply management and Canada’s decision to defend the CWB monopoly, but both those institutions also had their defenders.
Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Bob Friesen said that while regulatory inefficiencies in government institutions are a problem, Canadian farmers should not become divided between supporting supply management and export interests.
“I think the government’s balanced position is a solid one.”
Easter said the demand for “smart regulation” will be considered in finding solutions to the income problem.
