MONTREAL, Que. – The Liberal Party decided last week to embrace a new agricultural policy that would guarantee farmers sustainable incomes and to send an immediate $3.66 billion cash payment to producers.
At its biennial policy and leadership convention Nov. 30, delegates supported a proposal that the party endorse a new aggressive policy that acknowledged farmers will not be getting any short-term help from World Trade Organization talks.
It will be party advice to the new leader but not binding policy.
“The Liberal Party of Canada supports setting as a national priority the establishment of a fully funded and long-term national food security policy, which views the nation’s ability to produce safe and reliable agricultural products as an issue of national sovereignty and security,” said the resolution.
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When he introduced it to a policy workshop, rural Ontario MP Paul Steckle said the party must acknowledge it has lost the support of rural Canadians. As one indication, the five-term MP noted he is the only rural Liberal west of New Brunswick with a significant agricultural constituency.
“I’m an endangered species,” said the MP who in 2006 came close to losing the Huron-Bruce seat that had been strongly Liberal since 1993. “We (the Liberal Party) control the cities. Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver are owned by the Liberals but we need to reach out in the same way to rural Canada.”
He told delegates that food security is as important as military security.
Later, when the resolution was presented to the full convention as a priority item, Liberal agriculture critic Wayne Easter acknowledged that the delegates who were largely urban might question a promise to send $3.66 billion to the farm sector on top of other programs that regularly pay out billions of dollars.
He said the number comes from farm group analysis, particularly work done by the Canadian Federation of Agriculture.
“That dollar amount doesn’t get producers to profit levels,” said Easter. “It just gets them back to covering costs.”
The motion was overwhelmingly approved.
The convention also strongly endorsed maintaining the Canadian Wheat Board with its monopoly and retaining supply management.
In an agricultural issues policy workshop, both supply management and CWB resolutions were introduced by poultry, grains and oilseeds producer Wilfrid Whyte, a Bruce County, Ont. farmer who said at 63 he is old enough to remember life in the poultry industry before supply management was introduced 30 years ago.
In an interview, Whyte said he felt qualified to move a wheat board motion even though the prairie-based monopoly marketer does not affect him directly.
“I depend on supply management on my farm and I see them part of the same issue,” he said.
Whyte said his farm investment is evenly split between a poultry operation and 1,500 acres of grains and oilseeds.
“The investments are fairly balanced,” he said. “The returns are not balanced.”
Poultry revenues are the farm’s mainstay.
