OTTAWA (Staff) – More than $7 million of the government’s Crow buyout money went to foreign residents, even though some Canadian farmers were denied access to the program, a Reform MP complained last week.
Federal agriculture minister Ralph Goodale said he had no option and he considers the payout fair.
The issue was raised by Reform agriculture spokesperson Elwin Hermanson, who obtained documents indicating that as much as $7.4 million of the $1.6 billion Crow buyout, designed to compensate landowners and farmers for the end of the rail freight subsidies on grain, was sent to more than 1,100 people in foreign countries.
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More than 1,000 live in the United States but own farmland on the Canadian Prairies.
Hermanson said the government should have made sure all deserving Canadian farmers were compensated before money was sent out of the country.
The MP said it is not primarily an issue of property rights. It is an issue of equity for Canadian farmers.
The Liberal government played favorites by excluding some farmers so it should not have played favorites with foreigners.
Not fair to all
“Not everybody got the Crow benefit so we’re saying maybe they got their priorities wrong and maybe they should have made sure the money stays in Canada and covered all landowners in Canada before they started to compensate owners from outside the country,” he said in an interview.
Goodale disagreed.
He said under the North American Free Trade Agreement, Canada is supposed to treat foreign investors the same as it treats nationals. Discriminating against foreign investors and landowners could be challenged under NAFTA.
He also argued that if foreign landowners had been excluded, their prairie tenants would have been denied any benefit from the government program.
“I don’t think it’s a problem and I think we would have created a problem if we had excluded foreign owners,” he said in an interview.
A departmental official also said many of those identified as foreign could be Canadians living, perhaps retired, in the United States.
