Gerry Ritz, a fast-talking, wisecracking veteran Saskatchewan MP and former grain and ostrich farmer from the Rosetown area became Canada’s 32nd agriculture minister as part of a major cabinet shuffle Aug. 14.
He will immediately have to plunge into tense federal-provincial negotiations over key details of the next generation of farm programs. The current Agricultural Policy Framework and its programs expire March 31, 2008 and there still is no agreement on how to cost-share disaster programs and how to design province-specific programs under the new plan.
Some acrimony has crept into the negotiations.
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Ritz will have to decide quickly whether to proceed with a scheduled federal-provincial ministers’ meeting in the first week of September to continue discussions. It would be a chance to meet his provincial counterparts.
He also will have to decide what role Canada should play in keeping World Trade Organization agricultural negotiations alive.
And the former chair of the House of Commons agriculture committee who sponsored an unsuccessful private member’s bill in 2006 that would have been the first step in dismantling the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly for sales to farmer-owned processing plants also inherits a Conservative government anti-CWB monopoly strategy that is in tatters. A Calgary judge ruled July 31 that the government could not end the barley single desk by regulation.
Prime minister Stephen Harper, who promoted Ritz from a junior minister position, has made it clear he still wants to find a way to break the monopoly. Ritz will be the point person.
Both sides of the debate see his appointment as a signal from Harper that the anti-CWB fight continues.
The 10-year veteran of the House of Commons turns 57 Aug. 19. He replaces former revenue minister Carol Skelton as Saskatchewan’s cabinet representative. She was dropped after announcing she will not stand for re-election.
Ritz replaces B.C. MP Chuck Strahl as agriculture minister. Strahl, who led the charge against the CWB monopoly and reform of farm safety net programs, became the minister in charge of Indian affairs and northern development.
Outside of opposition critics and wheat board monopoly supporters, Strahl was well liked within the industry and Agriculture Canada.
““Minister Strahl has made some real progress for our industry and I want to offer my thanks for that,” Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Bob Friesen said in an Aug. 14 statement. “We may not always have seen eye-to-eye on all issues, but I think he was always willing to listen to industry.”
He said the CFA wants to work with Ritz and had good relations with him as agriculture committee chair.
Western anti-CWB monopoly groups welcomed Ritz as a brother-in-arms in the fight.
National Farmers Union president Stewart Wells said Ritz has held “anti-farmer” views as an MP.
“While we’re hopeful we can work with Mr. Ritz on a wide range of issues, his record illustrates a disappointing lack of understanding on some very basic agricultural issues, particularly the operations of the Canadian Wheat Board and other orderly marketing agencies.” Wells said in a statement issued after the announcement. “We hope he will start working with farmers instead of against them.”
Ritz becomes the second Conservative MP from the Battlefords—Lloydminster riding of west central Saskatchewan to become federal agriculture minister. In the early 1990s, Bill McKnight had the same job.
As agriculture committee chair, he often defused tense debates with humour.
In his website biography, Ritz notes that he farmed from the mid-1990s until his 1997 election when he rented out the farm.
He had a stake in a community newspaper for almost a decade and owned a general contracting business “to help pay for his farming habit.”
Ritz will sit on three cabinet committees — operations that oversee government business and agenda, economic growth and long-term prosperity, and environment and energy.
