Manitoba Conservative MP and cattle producer James Bezan had two reasons to smile after a Seattle appeals court overturned a lower court injunction that had kept the Canada-United States border closed.
The announcement would add a bit of value to his 70-head herd and the herds of his neighbours in Manitoba’s Interlake district.
And it vindicated his judgment, formed as he sat in the Seattle courtroom as one of two Conservative MPs at the hearing, that the judges had “done their homework, understood the issue and therefore would arrive at the right conclusion.”
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But like other politicians interviewed after the decision, Bezan said he will only be able to relax once the July 27 Montana hearing on an application for a permanent border closing order is complete.
“We are talking about a hearing before judge Richard Cebull, after all,” said the MP.
Wild card won’t prevail
Conservative agriculture critic Diane Finley called the Montana judge who granted the injunction a “real wild card …. But I’m confident in the end Cebull will not prevail.”
In the aftermath of the border opening, at least temporarily, the politicians began sifting through the landscape of the past 26 months to try to figure out some lessons learned.
Agriculture minister Andy Mitchell said in a July 18 interview the episode taught Canadians that they need more “flexibility” in the packing industry, including more domestic capacity and more diverse export markets.
“The American market is very important for us but the reality is that we cannot allow ourselves to be too dependent on it either for slaughter or for sales and I think that was a lesson learned,” he said.
Finley said the cattle industry also learned the “bitter” lesson that dollars of support announced by the Liberals do not always make it to producers.
And she called for the government to develop a cull cow program nationally that will return some balance to the national herd that has too many older cattle.
Bezan said a lesson he and fellow cattle producers have learned is that they need to support a domestic packing industry. He said he does not expect to see truckloads of Canadian cattle heading south past half empty Canadian plants.
“I think you will see cattle producers wanting to support their local plants,” he said. “They have seen the result of not having a local option.”
