A number of agriculture-related bills will be lost and some promised spending will at least be delayed if the government, as expected, is defeated in a Nov. 28 confidence vote in the House of Commons.
Voting day, to be decided by prime minister Paul Martin after the defeat, likely would be Jan. 16 or 23.
When the 38th Parliament is dissolved, all legislation still in the parliamentary pipeline dies.
It will include:
- Bill C-27, Canadian Food Inspection Agency legislation that consumed months of public hearings and hundreds of hours of agriculture committee time as MPs tried to write a bill that would set out clearly defined rules for CFIA and some controls over its power.
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The bill also contains dairy labelling rules called for by the dairy farmer lobby but denounced by the food industry and consumers as a back-door way to keep dairy competitor products off the market.
The controversy helped persuade the minority Liberals not to call the bill for further debate this autumn.
- Bill C-69, a proposal to expand the advance payments program to include livestock and storable crops, to increase the maximum advance payment to $300,000 from $250,000 and to increase the interest-free portion to $60,000 from $50,000.
- Bill C-50, cruelty-to-animals legislation, will die. It will be the fifth time since 1999 that attempts to modernize 112-year-old legislation will have been killed by the end of a parliamentary session.
The looming election campaign also throws into doubt whether the government will send ministers to lead the Canadian delegation at crucial World Trade Organization negotiations in Hong Kong Dec. 13-18.
Government critics and farm leaders say it is essential that political leadership be present at a meeting where Canadian support programs, the future of supply management tariff protections and the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly could be affected.
“If the government is not fully represented at Hong Kong and if we do not have ministerial representation at those meetings, we will be on the sidelines, unable to properly defend those policies that farmers need,” National Farmers Union president Stewart Wells said in Ottawa last week.
Conservative trade critic Ted Menzies said Canadian ministers should spend the five days in Hong Kong defending Canadian farmers.
“If the ministers of international trade and agriculture are not interested in taking the time to defend the interests of Canada’s exporters and entrepreneurs, I am prepared to travel in their place and stand for Canada at the WTO,” the Alberta MP said Nov. 18 in a statement issued from his Ottawa office.
An early election call also would mean that supplementary spending estimates tabled in Parliament in late October would not be approved. They included $138 million in new expenditures for Agriculture Canada, including $23.5 million assigned to the BSE file.
That gave the Liberals a chance to accuse the opposition of denying aid to farmers.
In his Liberal-paid weekly weekend radio address Nov. 20, Martin raised the point when arguing against an early election call. If the election is delayed until his preferred spring date “we can make sure our cattle farmers get government relief related to the BSE crisis,” said the prime minister.
However, the BSE money included in the estimates is not direct funding to cattle producers for BSE losses.
Most of it, $20 million, is budgeted to fund government matching contributions to new packing plants and to help farmers preserve, enhance and document their livestock genetics.
