When the federal Conservatives made the surprise announcement in the April budget that there would be a program for low income farmers, many Conservatives were surprised and Liberals had their suspicions.
When agriculture minister Chuck Strahl rolled out the details of the Canadian Farm Families Options program in the summer, those suspicions were confirmed.
They had seen this movie before and were quick to react.
“This is a blame-the-victim approach and it is based on a wrong analysis of the problem of low farm incomes,” Liberal agriculture critic Wayne Easter complained.
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He was quick off the mark because the Liberals had analyzed and rejected the Options model months before it was announced.
Liberal sources, who asked not to be identified because it involves confidential advice to ministers, say Agriculture Canada bureaucrats prepared a similar program for the last Liberal government.
The thesis was that the government offer short-term help to low income farmers with the stipulation that they either improve their management skills to enhance the chance of profit, or consider depending on non-farm income for a living.
The party sources said then minister Andy Mitchell rejected the idea, leaning more to the view that market dysfunction rather than farm management was the problem.
“He saw that this was the same line the bureaucrats over there have been peddling for years, that if only farmers became more efficient, they could be profitable,” said one Liberal. “And if they can’t, they should get out.”
When Strahl and the Conservatives took office in February with a campaign promise to improve farm programing, the officials tried the plan out a second time.
By budget time, the new government expressed interest.
“In recognition of their unique challenge, the government will also put in place measures to help low income farm families,” the finance department said in one sentence in budget background papers.
Many rural Conservative MPs were caught unaware. In the ensuing months, many have complained privately and publicly that the Options program is not politically popular among their rural constituents.
Several weeks ago, while grilling officials running the Options program, Liberal rural caucus chair and Thunder Bay MP Ken Boshcoff queried the real intent of the program and made the first public allusion to the fact that the Liberals had rejected the approach while in government.
Recently, the George Morris Centre in Guelph, Ont., gave some comfort to the Conservatives and the departmental officials who designed the program by concluding that even many farmers who operate in the chronically low-revenue grains and oilseeds sector are making money.
The implication of the study is that management skills are an issue even in low-price sectors.
“While farm income in the aggregate has not been increasing, there are farm operations that are increasing their profitability and size is not the only means to be profitable,” it said.
“The study concluded that differences in farm management skills appear to explain variability in farm household income and operating profitability and that renewed investment in management training could improve the farm income situation.”
