OTTAWA – The federal government and the provinces have cobbled together a deal for a new national farm income safety net program.
However, it may last for no more than a year and enforcing the national standards written into the deal could prove difficult.
“At the most, I think this probably just delays the problems for a year,” said Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Jack Wilkinson. “I don’t think they actually have resolved any of the fundamental disagreements.”
Still, after more than a year of hard bargaining, federal officials were considering it an accomplishment to even get a deal on paper.
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Early this month, a memorandum outlining the principles of a three-tiered national program will be sent to provincial capitals.
By the end of January, Ottawa hopes they are all signed and back at Agriculture Canada.
“I think that is what will happen, although in this process, you never know,” said Roger Eyvindson, director of policy development at Agriculture Canada. “We think we have a deal.”
It will involve a federal cost-sharing agreement with each province. The principal elements of the new “whole farm” program will be:
- Three tiers of protection that include an income stabilization account, crop insurance and if needed, province-specific companion programs.
- A federal agreement to split its promised $600 million in annual safety net spending roughly equally between cost-sharing the three tiers.
- National rules that require prov-incial companion programs that will not lure production from one province to another, or trigger trade challenges as unfair production subsidies.
Eyvindson said Alberta is insisting on the right to announce withdrawal from the national program in late 1996 if its concerns about the richness of the scheme and the trigger level are not satisfied.
“That will be part of the agreement with Alberta,” said the federal official.
Compromise with Alberta
Alberta’s insistence on a high trigger level and a low level of support almost scuttled the deal. The one-year opt-out clause is the compromise which allowed a deal to develop.
Ottawa has said that if Alberta pulls out of the national program, the federal government may step in with a federal-producer scheme.
The national deal comes more than a year after federal and provincial ministers agreed on the principles of the next generation of safety nets at a meeting in Toronto.
It comes more than three months late, considering ministers in Newfoundland last summer promised to have a deal in place by September.
