Agriculture minister Gerry Ritz said last week that the Conservatives have restored agricultural research spending to levels not seen since the Liberals slashed the departmental budget in 1995.
One of the leaders of a farmer campaign to have research budgets returned to 1994 levels in real dollars quickly challenged the minister’s assertion.
“We would have to disagree with that,” Grain Growers of Canada executive director Richard Phillips said.
“There may be cases of research being done by Agriculture Canada, a specific component of work, where perhaps there is more money being spent than in 1994, but overall, the numbers speak for themselves. We are way behind where we were in 1994.”
Read Also
Going beyond “Resistant” on crop seed labels
Variety resistance is getting more specific on crop disease pathogens, but that information must be conveyed in a way that actually helps producers make rotation decisions.
Grain Growers and supportive farm groups argue that the base research budget would have to be doubled over a decade to return it to the 1994 equivalent.
Ritz insisted during a March 12 appearance before the House of Commons agriculture committee that the argument about 1994 levels compared to now involves miscommunication by the advocates.
“There’s a lot of talk of going back to 1994 levels of spending on research,” he said.
“I’m happy to tell you that when we do the comparison, even taking inflation into play, we’re actually spending about 15 percent more now than we were in 1994.”
Ritz also acknowledged that the research budget is tight and said the Conservative government has changed the focus from general research that might be useful to industry someday to more focused “science cluster” research into projects that industry says will be useful in the shorter term.
“We’ve been having great success with that,” said Ritz. “We’ve been able to make a lot more use of our scarce dollars.”
Phillips said that while industry supports the more focused science cluster investment, there also is a need for added resources in the basic departmental research budget to fund long-range research that may not provide quick results but can lead to innovative products in the future.
Advocates of a greater research commitment by government have argued that farmers still rely on varieties that came from basic research 30 or 40 years ago.
Part of the problem in the debate about funding levels now compared to 1994 is that the department says it is difficult if not impossible to compare budgets from the two periods.
Phillips argues it is difficult to believe the department cannot find a way to compare the two.
In 2009, Agriculture Canada science partnerships director general Stephen Morgan Jones prepared a chart that tracked research branch expenditures from 1998-99 to 2007-08. In the second year of the Conservative government, spending and staff positions in research were down from decade-earlier levels.
The chart did not go back to 1994-05, the year of the Liberal cuts.
After expenditures of close to $250 million in 1999-2000, spending fell back closer to $200 million by 2007-08. Between 2002-03 and 2008-09, funded positions in the research branch fell from almost 2,400 to fewer than 2,200.
Meanwhile, Grains Round Table co-chairs Phillips and Manitoba farmer Don Dewar met Agriculture Canada deputy minister John Knubley March 13 to discuss a one percent mandatory non-refundable national wheat check-off that would be matched by government to fund research.
Knubley told them such a scheme would require broad provincial and industry support before Ottawa would consider it.
