Roger Gaudet is a rookie Bloc Québecois MP who could not understand the concept.
He had listened to senior Agriculture Canada officials explain that Canada cannot change its farm support programs to compensate for damage done by large foreign subsidies because it would violate international trade rules.
Excuse me, Gaudet said at a June 7 meeting of the House of Commons agriculture committee.
When other jurisdictions like the European Union and the United States can pay billions of dollars to their producers, why can’t Canadian programs reflect the damage those payments do to prices and therefore incomes?
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The BQ has been campaigning for domestic programs that take production costs into account when calculating payments and triggers.
Agriculture Canada official Danny Foster said any adjustment of payment rules for the Canadian Agricultural Income Stabilization program to add a cost-of-production factor would risk changing the World Trade Organization status of CAIS from non-trade-distorting green to trade-distorting amber and it would face future cuts.
He said WTO has a tight definition of what factors can be used to determine farmer need. Chronic income decline because of world prices depressed by rich-country subsidies is not one of the criteria.
“If we want to adjust the reference margin or offer more support under the CAIS program to deal with long-term farm income decline in certain sectors, then we risk that trade status for the CAIS program,” said Foster.
“I’m not saying that we don’t have, potentially, a long-term farm income decline in certain sectors, but we want to be able to report green the triggered disaster payments from the CAIS program.”
Gaudet continued to express puzzlement about a program that cannot legally respond to subsidies other countries seem to get away with paying.
Assistant deputy agriculture minister Mary Komarynsky joined the fray, arguing that limits to how CAIS can pay out are the reason the government does not see the program as the only farm support program.
“Our minister very much recognizes that the farm income situation is much more serious and needs answers other than our current programs,” she said.
“On the subsidy issue, we’ve tried our best to reply to the committee in terms of what CAIS will or will not do, but we are bound by certain rules and we want to protect our programs as much as possible from any kind of challenge under WTO.”
Committee chair and Liberal MP Paul Steckle seemed sympathetic to the critical and quizzical MP.
“I know where you’re coming from, Mr. Gaudet,” he said. “If we take another 15 minutes we still won’t be able to answer that question.”
