This week, federal agriculture minister Gerry Ritz is abroad on another sales mission, preparing to announce another market access breakthrough for Canadian agricultural products.
Last week, Ontario agriculture minister Carol Mitchell was signalling that her government will continue to argue that Ottawa should pay its traditional 60 percent share of the government cost of running province- specific farmer income support programs, since the national AgriStability program is not working for many farmers.
In November, when federal, provincial and territorial agriculture ministers meet by telephone to continue discussions about farm programs to take effect in 2013, there will be calls for changes to make the programs more responsive to farmer needs – more prompt, predictable and reliable.
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This is a clash of argument about the future of agricultural policy and potential new philosophy – a view that government’s role is to create market access and regulatory conditions that give farmers an opportunity to compete, rather than to backstop farm incomes when the market or management practices fail.
It would turn the last three decades of a farm support ideology on its head, mimicking the Australia and New Zealand model rather than the American and European cradle-to-grave farm support system.
Since the 1980s, Canadian governments have poured tens of billions of dollars into agriculture. Analysis by former National Farmers Union research director Darrin Qualman suggests that without massive government support, Canadian agriculture in the past quarter century would have had zero or negative income. The market consistently returned prices that did not reflect production costs.
If this Conservative government is around for a few more years, history may show that without making a dramatic policy announcement about a new direction, the Conservatives charted a new policy course.
It is a future where market opportunity trumps government safety nets, where farmers who cannot make it in the market should consider alternate employment, where research spending is aimed at short-term projects that produce marketable products quickly rather than long-term “what if” research that creates knowledge that may be commercialized.
The Liberals in opposition say they will change that strategy, creating farmer-supportive policy.
Don’t bet on it. If the Liberals take office and discover a farm community conditioned to accept less from government, no future finance minister is going to insist that the clock be turned back to spend more.
So the fight for more predictable and richer programs or research budgets from provinces or farm groups may someday be seen as the last gasp of an ancien regime that ceased to exist in the second decade of the 21st century.
Farmers, like other small and medium-size businesspeople, will make a living from the market they are trying to supply or move on.
The evidence is not definitive but it feels like a sea change is happening in government attitudes about its relationship with and obligation to the farm economy and farmers.
