WELLAND, Ont. — Malcolm Allen was a little surprised when then-NDP leader Jack Layton asked him to be deputy agriculture critic after his election to Parliament in 2008.
Allen is an electrician by trade with a background in union work. It made sense that Layton asked him to be the critic for skills training. But agriculture?
He comes from the riding of Niagara Centre, previously known as Welland, where agriculture generally means horticulture, poultry and a little dairy. The riding is located along the Welland Canal and between the Great Lakes of Erie and Ontario.
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Welland is known as the Rose City, and the cut flower industry is big here. Allen said the scale is small from a land mass perspective, but its dollar value is big, thanks to the New York market.
However, he took his appointment to heart and discovered he liked going to the agriculture and international trade committee meetings and learning about the sector’s diversity across the country.
“I kept seeing the same people,” he said.
“They were talking about the same things. A lot of folks don’t understand how big the agriculture sector is when it comes to the economy.”
He could have counted himself among those folks before he immersed himself in his duties.
In 2009, he sat on the sub-committee looking into listeriosis after the outbreak at Maple Leaf Foods and learned more about food inspection and safety.
He became his party’s agriculture critic after the 2011 election and spent three years traveling the country to develop its national food strategy.
“I went from someone who had a reasonable interest and knowledge to someone who said, ‘this is fascinating,’ ” Allen said.
“I never thought I would be this enthralled.”
He said jobs are the main issue in his riding, but agriculture is also a concern in the region.
For example, dairy farmers were worried about the Trans-Pacific Partnership long before the campaign began.
People here are just a 20-minute drive from the United States, where gas is cheaper, turkeys can be purchased at 39 cents a pound and cheese is 60 percent of the cost in Canada.
Similarly, the Americans have a market of 4.5 million Canadians a three-hour drive away.
“I guess we’ll find out,” Allen said of how the recently signed TPP will play out.
He said agriculture should have had a higher profile during the campaign, considering how many people have a stake in it. He would like to see more awareness among voters.
“There seems to be no tie between agriculture, agribusiness and food processing, which they see as something different,” he said.
“We need to work on that.”
karen.briere@producer.com
