This week’s agricultural debate pitted the Conservative rule of the present against the Liberal record of the past.
It went something like this:
You were worse than we are.
No, you are worse than we were. 
Liberal agriculture critic Wayne Easter and agriculture minister Gerry Ritz squared off in Ottawa during the Sept. 29 debate over the food safety issue and allegations that a fatal listeriosis outbreak was in part the result of Conservative cuts to food safety budgets.
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The federal government leans heavily on producers to “take one for the team” and risk their livelihoods without any reassurance of support.
“This should be a defining issue in this election,” Easter said during a two-hour debate on agricultural issues organized by the Canadian Federation of Agriculture. He accused the Conservatives of cutting government food inspectors because of an anti-regulation ideology.
Deaths and illness from tainted meat sold by a Maple Leaf plant in Toronto “should be a shot across the bow not to go this way.”
Ritz, making his first public appearance in almost two weeks, noted that the Conservatives have added $113 million to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency budget and hired 200 new inspectors with 58 more to come.
As well, he hauled out evidence that in the mid-1990s during the fight against the federal deficit, a previous Liberal government cut hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of inspector positions from the food inspection program.
“They are getting a lot of mileage out of blaming each other,” said Green party representative Kate Storey, the party candidate in Manitoba’s Dauphin – Swan River riding.
She and New Democrat Tony Martin said both Liberals and Conservatives have been guilty of allowing a concentration of the packing and meat processing industries that puts many Canadians at risk when tainted product is produced and widely distributed. And both have given the industry more responsibility to regulate itself.
“Industry self-regulation doesn’t work,” said Storey. “If it did, maybe we should self-regulate income tax.”
The Green party is proposing a focus on smaller family farms and local plants.
The agriculture debate also became a forum for opposition attacks on the Conservative party determination to end the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly on barley export and domestic malt sales.
Ritz said it is a matter of responding to the majority of prairie barley producers who want marketing choice.
He said there is no connection between the CWB policy and Conservative support for supply management single desk selling, which affected farmers overwhelmingly support.
Easter insisted that in the light of prime minister Stephen Harper’s “vicious vicious attack against the Canadian Wheat Board,” the claim of support for supply management is suspect.
Conservative support for single desk dairy, poultry and egg marketing is “smoke and mirrors,” he said. “Choice in marketing in supply management is where the prime minister wants to go.”
Ritz said farmers should judge the Conservatives on what they have done – defending supply management at WTO talks, strengthening protection against imports and imposing new standards about the amount of Canadian dairy product that must be part of Canadian cheese – rather than what the critics say.
Storey said an end to the CWB monopoly would mean smaller farms would not be able to produce the quantities necessary to attract marketers or shippers.
The CFA-organized agricultural issues debate marked a coming out event for Ritz, shielded from media for several weeks after reports about private jokes during a listeriosis crisis briefing. At one point, he joked that he hoped a reported Prince Edward Island death involved Easter.
The Liberal critic joked Sept. 29 that he and Ritz disagreed on whether “I should be above or below ground.”
At the end of the debate as media swarmed to speak to Ritz, the agriculture minister slipped out a back door and avoided questioning.
