John Masswohl, director of international relations for the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association, figures he is beginning to see a shift in the way Americans view the closed BSE border.
Well, at least he is beginning to see a shift in how American journalists and opinion-makers view it.
Masswohl has travelled thousands of kilometres the past several months in a blitz of key American agricultural states to tell Canada’s side of the BSE story and to argue the Americans are hurting themselves with their protectionism.
“I’m starting to see the shift,” he said in an interview at his Ottawa CCA office last week. “When I talk to reporters down there, increasingly they seem to be getting it. They are asking more about how it is affecting the U.S. economy and less about our beef and our safety rules.”
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Masswohl is fronting an extensive and expensive CCA effort to balance the information the American public is getting on the issue.
“In the early months of the year before the March 2 court decision (that extended the border closing), what we were hearing is that R-CALF was out there giving their side but the other side wasn’t really there,” he said. “We decided it was up to us to make the case.”
Masswohl is well suited to the job.
He was hired late last year to run the Ottawa CCA office, replacing Jim Caldwell, a former Progressive Conservative MP who staffed the office for more than 15 years. During the previous 15 years, Masswohl was a federal trade bureaucrat in the customs department, the foreign affairs department and finally at the Canadian embassy in Washington.
While he uses the Ottawa office as a base for his CCA trade work, a second staff member will be hired to deal with domestic political and policy issues.
Masswohl said his core message to Americans is three-fold:
- Canada’s meat inspection system is credible and enforced and the health risk is “as close to zero as you can get.”
- Canada’s packing capacity will have increased to 77,000 head per week by the end of the year from 61,000 before BSE. The longer the border stays closed, the bigger Canada’s industry will be and the stronger a competitor it will be.
- More cattle being processed in Canada means fewer packing jobs in the United States, fewer options for American cattle producers and eventually lower cattle prices in the U.S.
“We want to be sure the American public understands there is a downside to all of this for them, for their cattle industry, for their economy,” he said.
Masswohl said the CCA goal in its American information blitz is that it wants the border open because having the option of shipping live cattle south will create more competition and keep Canadian cattle prices higher. It does not mean the new packing capacity in Canada will go unused.
He said there is a better chance American politicians and perhaps even judges will make more balanced decisions if public opinion is more sympathetic to and knowledgeable about Canada’s arguments.
Masswohl said one factor in the CCA decision to launch its American public relations campaign is that its American counterpart, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, has become “tentative” in its support for a border opening because some of its members believe it is in their interest to keep the border closed.
“I believe the leadership is solid,” he said. “They have trouble with some of their followership and that makes them sometimes more tentative than we’d wish. In the end, it is up to us to deliver our own message.”