OTTAWA (Staff) – With their February budget, the Liberals betrayed an election promise they made to farmers, opposition critics have charged.
In 1993, the Liberals promised to reduce farm input costs, Reform and NDP MPs noted.
Instead, the budget increased the tax on fuel and eliminated the Crow Benefit subsidy, sharply increasing grain farmer costs.
“The government has increased the input costs for farmers, increased the cost of getting the product to market and offered no hope of tax reduction in the future,” said Reform party house leader Elwin Hermanson during budget debate in the Commons.
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The next day, Saskatchewan New Democrat Len Taylor made the same point.
“Our goal is reducing input costs to make farming more viable,” Taylor quoted from Liberal election promises. “What have the Liberals done? They have increased costs, not reduced them as promised in the red book.”
Both MPs hammered the Liberals for their agricultural cuts.
Hermanson said Reform supports cuts in spending, but agriculture was hit unfairly: “If everyone had been hit as hard as agriculture, the budget would have been balanced.”
Agriculture, farmers hit
While agriculture minister Ralph Goodale has insisted that 19 percent cuts in the agriculture budget mean the sector is in line with the sacrifice made by other departments, his critics note that farmers are also hit by cuts to transportation subsidies.
Taylor said the impact of killing the Crow Benefit will be devastating for Saskatchewan farmers, an average annual increase of $1 million in costs to farmers at each grain delivery point.
The legislation implementing the budget should be called “an act to kill the Crow or an act to pour unfairness onto the prairie economy,” he said.
Winnipeg Liberal MP David Walker did not see it that way.
The parliamentary secretary to the finance minister told the Commons the end of the Crow Benefit is good news for prairie agriculture.
“The elimination of the subsidy will encourage the development of value-added processing and the production of higher-value goods,” he told the Commons. “It will result in a more efficient grain-handling and transportation system.”
Taylor thought that was too optimistic.
“How many more cows or pigs can we produce? How many new flour mills, ethanol plants, breakfast cereal plants can we build by this time next year to replace the one million dollars per community that is being taken out of our province by this single move in the budget?”
