Canada’s farm lobby is too underfunded and understaffed to do an adequate job keeping up with the growing complexity of farm-related political issues, says the top bureaucrat for Canada’s largest farm lobby, who is leaving soon for a government job.
Sally Rutherford, executive secretary of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture for 11 years, said the number and complexity of issues have grown during the past decade.
Yet the CFA remains a national organization with a small Ottawa staff, an annual budget of less than $1 million and officials who find it difficult to keep up to date on files ranging from farm income and trade policy to environmental issues, food safety and farm uses of the internet.
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“I think all farm groups feel it,” Rutherford said Nov. 1.
“It is one of the reasons farm groups co-operate, even if they are supposed to be on opposite sides of the fence. I think it is something farmers really have to come to grips with if they want to have a meaningful say into development of government policy.”
On Nov. 20, Rutherford will begin to find out what policy making is like on the other side of the fence.
The 46-year-old veteran of the farm lobby movement is joining Agriculture Canada as director general of the integrated policy and food safety branch.
She said her role will be to try to help the department begin to integrate its response to issues such as environmental impact and food safety.
“I think Agriculture Canada deals with environmental issues in one stovepipe and it deals with pesticide issues in another stovepipe,” said Rutherford, when asked to give an example of isolated policy making.
“In groups like the CFA, we are small, so we are forced to deal with them as part of the same continuum. Hopefully, I can help the department see it in the same way.”
The Montreal native is a respected player in the farm policy industry, representing farmer interests over the years in a number of key federal government consultations.
But she said the growing complexity of issues facing the industry has put a strain on the CFA and other general farm organizations.
“When I started, a big policy issue for us was the monthly cabinet decision on the FCC (Farm Credit Corp.) interest rate,” she said. “There are so many more issues now that require so much more expertise.”
Many of the issues that occupied CFA’s time in the late 1980s when Rutherford arrived, such as grain transportation, farm income and threats to supply management, continue to be felt, even as complexities of food safety, research, genetic modification and training pile on.
She said the cost of hiring experts to deal with specific issues is too much, because the small staffs hired by general farm organizations cannot be experts on all emerging issues.
“It is an issue that farmers will have to come to grips with,” she said.
“What kind of input do they want and what are they prepared to fund?”
