SASKATOON – There is early evidence that the Conservative party was not serious about the agricultural policy it put before farmers and Canadian voters in the last election, says the president of the National Farmers Union.
Agriculture minister Chuck Strahl’s apparent retreat from a campaign promise to replace the Canadian Agricultural Income Stabilization program is one indication, said Swift Current, Sask., farmer Stewart Wells.
On March 20, Strahl agreed with provincial agriculture ministers that the principles of CAIS should be at the heart of any new program.
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And Wells said that Strahl, in their first meeting, had denied the Conservatives ever promised to include cost-of-production factors in a new program although the party’s platform explicitly said a new stabilization replacement for CAIS must “properly address the cost of production.”
“Mr. Strahl flatly denied there was a commitment to cost of production,” said Wells. “I don’t want to be overly negative early in a mandate, but what these comments tell me is they were very, very shallow on agriculture policy going into the election. It really looks like they never put a pen to paper to see how these promises they were making would work in real life.”
Wells said Strahl would not have been involved in creating the agricultural promises because he was not an agricultural player in the Conservative opposition.
“Still, he should know what the party promised,” said the NFU president. “It makes me think they never really thought it out, just offered policies they thought their supporters wanted to hear.”
Meanwhile, the NFU has a policy proposal for federal and provincial ministers as they begin studying potential change, and that is to reduce the $3 million cap on CAIS payments to individual operations.
The farm leader said he was outraged that a CAIS payment of $4.9 million to Saskatchewan Wheat Pool for a now-defunct hog operation was the difference between profit and loss for the grain company in the second quarter.
“No one can believe that the CAIS program is designed to save family farms when we see million-dollar payments to agribusiness corporations,” he said. “The government must correct its error and implement appropriate caps to ensure taxpayer money is spent responsibly.”
When the CAIS cap was increased in 2004 to $3 million from less than $1 million, the NFU was the loudest critic. It said this was a policy change meant strictly to benefit corporate farms and agribusiness and insisted a $400,000 cap would be more appropriate.
Wells said the CAIS cap and the payments to Sask Pool illustrate a flaw in Canadian farm policy that tilts it too much to agribusiness.
