The prairie provinces might as well forget about pleas for a $1.3 billion federal payment to compensate for damage done to farmers by foreign subsidies, agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief indicated last week.
“As I sit now, I don’t see it,” Vanclief said in an interview Dec. 17. “They see that money as what they refer to as a trade adjustment and if the government was to move in that direction, that’s a major policy decision that the government would have to make for all industries.”
Vanclief said a decision to compensate for damage caused by international trade rules and barriers would be a broad government policy that could not apply only to farmers.
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“That would be a major policy change for the government to say that the government is going to make a trade adjustment payment to every sector, in every commodity in all of our economy. That’s not a decision that I can make alone.”
His comments came after a week of opposition pressure to spend more money on prairie farmers.
In his first House of Commons speech since his November byelection victory, Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar MP Dennis Gruending said his party will continue to press Ottawa for the $1 billion that the Saskatchewan government has been demanding.
He said prime minister Jean ChrŽtien seems oblivious to the crisis and is dedicated to fiscal conservatism even as Ottawa is awash in surpluses.
“I join with my NDP colleagues in pleading for a change of heart,” he said.
Vanclief said the fastest way for the Saskatchewan NDP to get money to farmers would be to put up provincial money that would be matched by Ottawa.
“That $1.3 billion is not there in the short term,” said the minister.
