Four years ago, Ted Menzies was a southern Alberta farm leader best known as a free trade advocate and critic of the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly.
Then he became a rural Conservative MP and that career change became a crash course in Canadian public policy.
During the past three months, he has become one of the most visible faces of the Conservative government as it tries to convince Canadians it knows how to steer the country through and out of a recession.
As parliamentary secretary to finance minister Jim Flaherty, Menzies has crisscrossed the country organizing pre-budget consultations and now is a key player in the government’s full court press to sell the high-spending deficit budget.
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“I have been home just 14 days since the 17th of November,” he said Jan. 29.
“It’s certainly long hours, like the hours I used to put in on the farm, but I stay cleaner.”
In the House of Commons, he often is on his feet when Flaherty is not there, defending and explaining the need for deficit spending, the complications of the equalization formula or the byzantine world of credit instruments and arcane tax policies.
“I don’t know all of the intricacies in all of the policies, but I’ll defend them anyway,” he said jokingly.
“There is a lot to learn and I have a good mentor in minister Flaherty. He is very inclusive.”
It is a world away from his farm at Claresholm, Alta., where he last took off a crop in 2004 before renting the farm out after winning a House of Commons seat.
Coming to Ottawa as the former president of the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association and the Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance, Menzies’ experience appeared to point him toward specializing in either agriculture or trade issues.
Instead, party leader Stephen Harper first appointed him critic for the Canadian International Development Agency. Once in government, Harper appointed him parliamentary secretary to the minister responsible for international co-operation and then in 2007 moved him to assist the finance minister.
Menzies said he doesn’t consider it a major stretch to move from farming to the government finance portfolio.
“I understand a lot of it, and a great part of this job is that I get to learn a bit about every industry and what its needs and potentials are,” he said.
“I ran a large farm operation for 30 years and know about market swings, years of losses, the repercussions of making bad decisions and managing debt. I know what it takes to run a business so issues at finance are not foreign to me.”
Still, understanding the complexities of the department and the wide variety of financial programs and policies has taken a lot of briefings and hard work.
“I enjoy learning new things and that’s a good thing because there are a lot of new things to learn.”
