Alberta’s Macleod riding | Exiting MP mentions Marketing Freedom for Grain Farmers Act as career highlight
As Ted Menzies reflects on special moments in his career as a Conservative MP from southern Alberta, the first choice is predictable: the night he voted to end the CWB monopoly.
As a longtime crusader against the CWB single desk, the Claresholm farmer rose with the rest of the Conservative caucus last year to approve the Marketing Freedom for Grain Farmers Act.
“That was pretty exciting,” he said Nov. 7 after announcing that he was resigning after nine years as the MP for the Macleod riding south of Calgary.
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The moment was made more special because Jim Chatenay, a farmer from Penhold, Alta., and fellow anti-CWB campaigner, was in the visitors’ gallery. He illegally shipped grain across the U.S. border in protest and went to jail briefly in 2002 over the issue.
“To look up in the gallery that night and see Jim Chatenay crying, I knew we had done the right thing,” Menzies said in an interview.
“I’m very confident we did the right thing.”
The second highlight reel moment is less obvious: the Conservative government’s decision several years ago to untie Canadian foreign food aid, which allowed it to be bought locally rather than being shipped from Canada.
It was an issue Menzies said he worked on with both Liberal and Conservative governments after he was elected in 2004.
Two years ago, then-international development minister Bev Oda announced that all Canadian aid would be untied from the requirement that donations be bought in Canada.
Menzies was not at the announcement, but he had been working behind the scenes on the issue for years.
“Why would we think we had to ship wheat from central Saskatchewan to Mozambique to feed hungry people when we could actually buy it from people producing wheat a lot closer?” he said.
The prime example for him came in 2004 when a killer tsunami hit Sri Lanka.
The United States, the prime holdout in the move to untie food aid, shipped rice to the devastated country.
However, local farmers were beginning their rice harvest inland where the ocean water did not reach.
“Farmers there were just going into harvest,” he said.
“It (U.S. shipments) destroyed the local food economy for local farmers. As a food producer, I just think that is wrong.”
When the four-term MP announced his decision to retire effective Nov. 8, there were tributes from all sides of the House including a statement from prime minister Stephen Harper.
Menzies has been minister of state for finance but was dropped from cabinet in the summer when he indicated he would not contest the 2015 election.
He said he will take a private sector job, although he was coy about what and where the job will be.
“I’ve had some very interesting offers in the private sector, one interesting enough that I took it very seriously and they want me fairly soon,” he said in explaining his decision to resign.
His Twitter account immediately lit up with suggestions that he run provincially or maybe become the mayor of Toronto in the wake of mayor Rob Ford’s drunkenness and crack cocaine-smoking exploits.
But while his years in Ottawa led to some advances in his policy agenda, there is one issue on which Menzies admits Ottawa changed him.
He arrived as an adamant opponent of agricultural tariffs, including supply management.
“There’s a protectionist under every rock,” he once said.
However, exposure to supply management and its dairy and poultry farmers has led him to support the system and its protectionist tariffs.
“When you come to Ottawa, you have a lot of views and opinions based on knowledge you have gained so far,” said Menzies.
“And when you come down here you get a much broader view of what happens across the country and what works across the country. I guess I have mellowed, to put it bluntly. I have a broader perspective.”
