OTTAWA – Leon Benoit, a Vegreville, Alta., Reform MP and an opponent of government involvement in agriculture, was in full rhetorical flight last week.
Government, he was telling the Commons agriculture committee, should have no role in determining how many farmers survive on the land.
Beside him, fellow Reformer Jake Hoeppner from Manitoba smiled across at Liberal MPs, pointed at Benoit and said: “Ask Mr. Benoit whether he’s ever taken any subsidies.”
Benoit paused and snapped: “Of course I have. I’ve taken lots of subsidies. I’m a grain farmer.” Then, he resumed his attack on government involvement in agriculture.
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The Liberals hooted with laughter, jokingly inviting Hoeppner to join them.
It was a vivid example of the several faces of Reform agriculture policy in Ottawa.
Six months after Western Canadian voters sent close to two dozen rural Reformers to Ottawa to promote their “new ideas for a new Canada”, the party’s agriculture message remains diverse.
Some of their MPs are beginning to recognize this jumbled message as a problem for their voters back home.
“I guess I’m hearing from some of my voters that they are hearing different messages from us,” said Moose Jaw MP Allan Kerpan, chair of the Reform caucus agriculture committee.
“That can potentially create problems for us.”
He insisted Reform MPs all are “reading off the same page and want to get to the same place. But I guess we have different ways of getting there.”
In part, the different messages are the result of the very different men who have emerged as the main Reform agricultural spokesmen.
They are: Benoit, a 43-year-old Alberta farmer, consultant and sometime teacher; Kerpan, a 39-year-old former Saskatchewan farmer; and Hoeppner, a 58-year-old semi-retired Manitoba farmer.
Let the market decide
For Benoit, it is a simple and hard-line message.
Reform’s job is to promote an agriculture in which the marketplace in most cases decides winners and losers, and in which government’s main job is to get out of the way.
“Government should not be a partner with farmers or agri-business because government has proven very clearly in the past that it is a partner that farmers cannot afford and one that cannot be trusted,” he has told the Commons.
He suggested in an interview that he is being most true to Reform philosophy. The others, he noted, have not been in Reform as long as he has.
Hoeppner sees it a different way. He said he has a more “practical” view of life, learned through 35 years of farming.
His main argument is that helping farmers and giving them more say over their businesses and their options is not a partisan affair.
Hoeppner is not as hard-line in his anti-government stance as is Benoit.
“I started farming in the late ’50s and without the help of the Farm Credit and the government, I wouldn’t have survived,” he said last week.
“Leon probably grew up with different circumstances. He may not have had to struggle as hard as I have.”
Kerpan, with a Saskatchewan background, falls somewhere in the middle. He thinks there is too much government involvement and too little real consultation with farmers.
But he also says some of his farmer constituents have read Benoit’s more radical positions, sensed his impatience for change and have expressed their unease.
“Farmers in Saskatchewan like to mull things over, have some sober second thought before deciding to rush into something,” he said last week.
“That probably is the difference between Saskatchewan and Alberta farmers. And I suppose we reflect those differences in approach.”
