A private pre-parliamentary meeting of the Liberal caucus last month included a bruising debate about the lack of Liberal action on the farm income crisis.
Caucus sources, and some MPs speaking on the record, said that MPs facing farmer anger and disappointed in the enigmatic throne speech commitment to farm aid, used the Jan. 31 meeting as a chance to demand a more obvious Liberal commitment to farm support.
Some of the criticism was directed at prime minister Jean Chrétien. Some was aimed at agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief and his bureaucrats.
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“I told the prime minister that he has been very successful on the (Quebec) sovereignty issue,” Ontario rural MP Murray Calder told a farmer meeting Jan. 31. “Now, we have a new sovereignty issue in Canada. I call it food sovereignty.”
But without a federal commitment to help affected farmers survive the current low price-high cost period, what should farmers think, asked Calder, an Ontario chicken producer who is being elected this week as the influential chair of the Liberal rural caucus.
“Why the hell would I want to farm?” Calder said he asked the prime minister directly. “There is no money in it right now.”
Prince Edward Island Liberal MP Wayne Easter, former National Farmers Union president and regular critic of the bureaucracy, confronted agriculture minister Vanclief directly.
He complained that the agriculture department bureaucracy is spending too much time dreaming about “life sciences” as the key to future farm prosperity and too little understanding that farmers primarily produce food and many of them cannot make a living producing food these days.
“The biggest problem Canadian agriculture faces is the Sir John Carling building,” he said. It is the Ottawa headquarters of Agriculture Canada.
“I don’t think they like farmers out there,” Easter said later. “They like their salaries (as bureaucrats) but don’t like the idea that farmers have the same right to an income.”
A Liberal MP involved in debates about farm aid said the bureaucracies in Ottawa would thwart any attempt by Vanclief to win significant farm aid commitments from the government.
He said it is time for the prime minister to make it a priority.
“I’m not a big fan of top-down leadership but I think the only way to have this issue dealt with is to have the prime minister let it be known that he supports support,” he said.
An Ontario Liberal MP, concerned about the lack of government commitment to farm support in the throne speech, wondered about the political fallout.
“We won but we have little support in the West,” he said. “I raised the issue of whether the issue of farm support is part of the reason for that. There is a reason we don’t have a real presence there.”
A caucus source said that Chrétien has a recurring response to that political argument.
The last Conservative government spent billions of dollars to support western agriculture, he reminded Liberal MPs arguing that more support is needed to win western political favor. The result was no Progressive Conservative seats in the West in 1993.
