REGINA – When Quebec government hearings on the future of agriculture in the province began in late summer, one of the early witnesses was a University of Regina teacher with a dim view of Quebec’s popular supply management base.
Associate marketing professor Sylvain Charlebois also has a dim view of the agricultural establishment in Quebec represented by the legislated single farm voice, l’Union des Producteurs Agricoles.
“It is ironic that criticism of the Quebec orthodoxy came from someone who works in Regina,” he said in a recent interview. “There are other academics in Quebec who agree with me but they are afraid to speak out. Their access, their grants could be affected.”
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These are the words of a 37-year-old Quebec academic who sounds like a man living in a self-imposed exile from his homeland.
He is conservative, part of the Conservative revolution that right wing premier Mike Harris brought to Ontario and a skeptic about collectivism in farm policy.
It makes him a critic of supply management and its protectionism, a supporter of choice for prairie grain farmers in the face of the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly and an increasingly visible farm policy analyst on the Prairies.
Charlebois said he ended up in Saskatchewan because of UPA suspicions about him.
He was researching a PhD on the impact of BSE and the border closing on cattle producers. The UPA, uncertain of the results this conservative researcher would produce, effectively cut off his access to Quebec beef producers, according to Charlebois.
An invitation from the U of R gave him a chance to base his BSE research on Saskatchewan producers.
“People outside Quebec really don’t understand the power that UPA has and the lack of choice farmers have,” he said. “Before policy is made, before decisions are announced, they go through UPA. It is amazing power.”
Meanwhile, he and his family have embraced Regina.
“I feel very welcome and at home here.”
Charlebois said Western Canada was a shock because of the difference in farmer organization and farmer influence. Although a critic of UPA power and farmer collective organization, he also sees some benefits.
“In Quebec, there is a debate, agriculture is part of the discussion and there is an attempt to create consensus,” he said. “I find in Saskatchewan there is little debate, little dialogue and little attempt to create consensus around issues like GMO or marketing.”
