One of Manitoba’s farm leaders says Canada’s agriculture sector will need to adapt rapidly to less support from provincial and federal governments.
Owen McAuley, who farms with his son-in-law near McAuley, Man., told the audience at the Manitoba Rural Adaptation Council (MRAC) annual meeting in Portage la Prairie March 17 that farmers should expect substantial change over the next several years.
“We will see more change in the next five years than we’ve seen in the last 15,” said McAuley, the keynote speaker at the MRAC event.
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Specifically, producers shouldn’t expect the same level of support from financially strapped provincial and federal governments, he noted.
“If you look at B.C., 70 percent of its budget, within a few years, is going to be consumed by its health-care budget. What does that leave?” he said, adding other provinces are facing similar health-care dilemmas.
During his talk, McAuley highlighted statistics showing that Canadian agricultural producers, as a whole, have lost money seven of the last 10 years. If production agriculture in Canada was a stand-alone business, he noted, the company would have gone bankrupt without the backing of the provincial and federal governments.
“I think that backer is going to reduce its level of support to us,” said McAuley, who sat on the MRAC board from the council’s inception in 1997 until 2002. He has also been vice-chair of the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute, chaired the Western Agri- Food Institute, was vice-chair of Keystone Agricultural Producers, helped design the Gross Revenue Insurance Plan and Net Income Stabilization Account programs and is a member of the Manitoba Agricultural Hall of Fame.
Even though investment in agriculture and agri-food is likely to decrease, McAuley offered a solution to the problem: more emphasis and money on research and development.
In other words, Canadian agriculture policy should focus less on what happened last summer and more on the summer of 2025. For instance, the Growing Forward program, despite its name, isn’t a forward-looking policy, he said.
“In the Growing Forward document about 92 percent is spent dealing with what happened yesterday,” he said, citing the Agri-Stability programs. “We’re spending about eight percent of the money (on) research and development…. Somehow we need to reverse that thought process. We need to be thinking about how we can promote innovation.”
Canada spends less on agriculture and agri-food research and development than Great Britain, France, Japan and the U.S., he said. Canadian agriculture needs to catch up and that begins by funding an organization like MRAC, which supports grassroots innovation in Manitoba.
Following his talk, Karin Wittenberg, the University of Manitoba’s agriculture faculty associate dean of research, said governments tend to throw money at problems and calamities, rather than funding opportunities. She asked McAuley how the agriculture community could shift policies toward the positive.
While that won’t be easy, Canada’s agriculture and agri-food industry can make the argument that it deserves additional funds for research and development, McAuley said.
Approximately 12 percent of Canadians work in the agriculture and agri-food industry, which makes up nine percent of Canada’s gross domestic product.
“It’s bigger than the auto sector,” McAuley said. “It’s the third largest (industry) in Canada.”
