WINNIPEG – Federal Liberals have promised that if the party regains power, it will trash the farm safety nets it created while in government and design more farmer-friendly support programs.
When he announced the Liberal food policy election commitment in late April, leader Michael Ignatieff said it would include an emphasis on local, healthy and safer food and a revamping of farm safety nets.
Liberal MP Wayne Easter said the party is willing to acknowledge the farm policy model it developed in the 1990s does not work for many farmers. It bases payments on current year returns compared to historic margins.
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“What the party is saying is we have to take an extremely critical look at it,” said Easter, who is the party’s agriculture critic. “We’ve got to get it more to cost of production. What’s been proven over the years is that margin based programs don’t work on multi-commodity operations or in a commodity that has a long period of declining prices.”
Easter said a Liberal government would talk to farmers and put all aspects of farm policy on the table.
In a food policy statement, the party said Liberals would conduct “a complete review of agriculture programming and remake Canadian agriculture policy” within a year of taking government.
“Let’s go with a clean slate,” Easter said. “We’re willing as a Liberal party to look at the money that’s in the programming or what should be in the programming, somewhere in the $4 billion range, and ask how do we build a program that actually works for farmers?”
He said a serious flaw in the existing margin-based program is that farmers must wait several years for unpredictable payments to cover bills they incur in the present.
“Safety nets should be there as a secure bottom line but not two years after you need the money and not with a trigger mechanism that doesn’t trigger.”
Easter said previous Liberal governments understood the program was flawed.
“When we were in government, we recognized that margin-based programs were not working and every year we had an ad hoc on top of it, sometimes in the billions of dollars.”
