OTTAWA – Waiting for Ottawa and the provinces to haggle over new farm income forecasts will put more stress on Saskatchewan and Manitoba farmers, says Saskatchewan opposition leader Elwin Hermanson.
The federal government caught the provinces off guard last week when it introduced new preliminary income numbers.
The provincial delegation was in Ottawa to demand $1.3 billion in farm aid.
Federal and provincial agriculture ministers will now take a look at the new numbers and discuss them at the end of November.
Hermanson said he got “a very sick feeling in the bottom of my stomach” when he heard the federal government’s response to premier Roy Romanow and Gary Doer’s plea for farm aid.
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“I think (prime minister Jean ChrŽtien) is looking at this from a bureaucrat’s perspective rather than from a human perspective,” Hermanson said.
Progressive Conservative agriculture critic Rick Borotsik said the government should listen to farmers, not numbers.
“Why aren’t they getting the message?” he said. “We’ve had so many people telling them the same story.”
Reform agriculture critic Howard Hilstrom said the government is deceiving people who live in the cities by saying they already give farmers a lot of money.
“They use the $900 million figure,” he said, referring to the federal government’s commitment to the Agricultural Income Disaster Assistance program.
“That’s a figure over two years and it’s for Canadian farmers across the country. That’s not for Manitoba and Saskatchewan.”
Opposition leader Preston Manning said his party will have to change its tactics in the House of Commons to focus more on the human side of the crisis, in light of the government’s tactics.
“I don’t think it should be an argument over statistics,” he said in an interview.
“Up until now the minister has given the impression that they’ve accepted there is a crisis.”
But Manning also didn’t completely accept the delegation’s request for aid based at least in part on acreage, because of the trade implications.
He noted less than $300 million of the AIDA funds have been paid out.
“I think it’s extremely important to push the rest of that money through,” he said, and then look at some sort of trade equalization measure.
NDP agriculture critic Dick Proctor said he would be amazed if new numbers showed significant improvement, and he questioned why the government would wait until a large delegation showed up to release them.
“They’ve been disappointed and frustrated all year by this government and this is just one more nail in their coffin,” Proctor said.
“It’s a sad day.”
