It is an autumn of upheaval in Ottawa’s agricultural lobby establishment as key executives in three of the most influential organizations move on.
The Canadian Federation of Agriculture is looking for a new executive director to replace Brigid Rivoire, who is leaving for the Canadian Child Care Federation after more than five years as the CFA’s senior staff official.
Grain Growers of Canada is losing executive director Christine Moran after only a year in charge of the national office. She moves to Agriculture Canada to work as a policy analyst involved in design of new farm business risk management programs.
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And at the Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance, a farmer and agri-business lobby for trade liberalization, longtime executive director Patty Townsend left in the summer. CAFTA members also expect president Liam McCreery to step down this autumn.
It represents a major shuffle of key personnel in Ottawa at a time when farm sector income problems remain, national policies are changing under a new government, world trade talks are stalled and farm lobby groups are working to establish relationships with and to understand the style of new Conservative agriculture minister Chuck Strahl.
Wayne Easter, a Liberal MP and former National Farmers Union president, said the wholesale changing of the guard could cause short-term problems.
“We meet the political leadership of the farm organizations on a regular basis but when our offices want detail or daily consultations, we deal with the national staff,” Easter said.
“You build relationships with these people and when they move on, at least for a while until we establish new relationships, it’s a loss to the effectiveness of the communications.”
However, Easter said it is not surprising there is a regular change in personnel.
“From the perspective of the farm lobby, it is a frustrating game dealing with a bureaucracy that too often is a problem, dealing with a mainstream media that usually seems numb to the issues and dealing with a vast array of issues,” he said from his Prince Edward Island constituency. “”It’s a tough job.”
Moran, who came to Grain Growers in 2005 from the federal government trade bureaucracy, said her greatest surprise as a farm bureaucrat dealing with government was that officials inside government often see agriculture as a different kind of business sector and it sometimes leads to policy creation “that doesn’t always serve producers of the industry well.”
She said policy maker views of the industry often are sentimental, which can confuse the policy making process.
“Often there is a view that it is mainly a way of life but it is also an occupation,” she said.
It leads government to treat the sector differently, often asking different food industry sectors and farmers of different sizes and interests to get together to agree on a policy direction.
Moran said that does not happen in other sectors. In the services sector, insurance executives are not asked to get together with their banking, medical and other client sectors to hammer out policy.
“They see agriculture as different that way and in some cases it can lead to agriculture policy that is less visionary and less ambitious than it might be for producers,” she said. “In some cases, it leads to policies that have more of a social bent than a business emphasis.”
At the CFA, Rivoire also came from the federal bureaucracy in 2001. She said one of the high points of her time as a farm lobbyist came early on in Whitehorse just months after her appointment, when federal and provincial ministers and farm leaders joined together to embrace farm policy principles that became the agricultural policy framework.
“We worked together there.”
That led to what she described as one of the low points – the later realization that having won farmer agreement in principle, ministers then went on to make decisions that farmers often opposed.
“The low point was the realization of their definition of consultation,” she said. “A great example was the nonsense around the CAIS (Canadian Agricultural Income Stabilization) deposit. Everyone was agreed it was a bad idea but the governments just couldn’t give it up.”
