In prairie farm politics these days, you don’t have to have a weather vane to know that the winds of change are blowing.
Manitoba agriculture minister Harry Enns has seen it from his vantage point as an MLA for almost three decades.
“These days, we have a whole new crop of young farmers who are not concerned about the buzz words that rang bells for us in the past,” he said. “They have a different outlook.”
It shows itself in different ways.
Opinion pollsters report a growing farmer yearning for more freedom of choice and less regulation.
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Institutions are under challenge like never before. Late last year, Bob Roehle of the Canadian Wheat Board told delegates to the Saskatchewan New Democratic Party convention that the board’s own polling shows no more than one-third of farmers are solidly behind retaining the CWB’s marketing monopoly.
Meanwhile, farm leaders and their organizations are feeling pressure to revise traditional policies.
They also face a growing indifference to traditional politics and policies among farmers, the young in particular. Groups as ideologically diverse as Western Canadian Wheat Growers and National Farmers Union report falling memberships.
The right of grain companies like United Grain Growers and the pools to act as policy spokesmen for their commercial customers is being challenged.
Increasingly, farmers are reporting they do not feel aligned with any group.
Ray Howe, vice-president of Sask-atchewan Wheat Pool, has been a witness to declining farmer loyalty toward farm organizations and traditional solutions.
“Farmers, until the last little while, thought that collectively their opinion was valued,” he said. “Now, they have become cynical about acting collectively. They don’t think anyone speaks for them. It is a younger breed of farmer, my son and people like that, who don’t like others speaking for them.”
Ted Allen, president of UGG, makes the same point. “If the question is whether or not farmers feel particularly well represented by most of the organizations out there, the answer clearly is no.”
Saskatchewan agriculture minister Darrel Cunningham, not often an ally of the UGG philosophy, agrees.
“I think it is an anti-establishment feeling,” he said. “It goes far beyond agriculture. People want participatory democracy, to be consulted themselves. There is a lack of credibility and trust in politicians, farm groups and special interest groups.”
Alberta deputy agriculture minister Doug Radke has a theory about what is happening.
“There are a lot of farmers that resent farm organizations speaking for them and look for ways to speak for themselves,” he said. “I would say that farmers are way ahead of both governments and farm organizations when it comes to changing attitudes, values and aspirations.”
This is the crux of the problem that politicians and governments face these days as they try to figure out farmer mood and willingness to accept policy changes.
Are consultations with traditional farm groups still the best way to gauge farm opinion?
Or, as Reform MP Leon Benoit insists, are governments that rely mainly on consultations with farm leaders receiving a “distorted, warped message” ?
Who speaks for farmers anyway?
Very early in his days as federal agriculture minister, Ralph Goodale received a private lecture about the value of farm groups for a politician like himself.
He seems to have taken the lesson to heart.
Jack Wilkinson, president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, told the new minister that the CFA represented the best effort of diverse farm groups to reach agreement on difficult trade issues.
“I told him that we can be a very valuable organization for a minister,” Wilk-inson recalled. “When we’ve got consensus, you should give that some weight. And when we’re split down the middle, you shouldn’t laugh at us. Take that seriously too. It will mean you have a hell of an issue on your plate.”
Since those days in late 1993, Goodale has developed a style that might be called “governing by consultation” – very traditional consultations with farm leaders.
“I have and will continue to have a great deal of regard for, and time for, the official spokesmen of organizations,” he said.
Goodale also uses one-on-one contacts with farmers to double-check the messages he receives. “If I find that individual representations are heading in a decidedly different direction from the groups who claim to represent them, then I start to ask some pretty basic questions about who has their finger on the button and who doesn’t.”
To critics of farm groups, this is a recipe for missing the upheaval in the farm community.
“These bodies, particularly the general organizations, really don’t represent farm opinion any more,” says Gary Bennewies, executive vice-president of the Winnipeg-based polling company Angus Reid Group and the son of an Ontario dairy farmer. “There are too many special interest groups and too much independent thinking.”
Fifteen years ago when he was trying to force changes to the Crow rate, then-transport minister Jean-Luc Pepin would joke that based on membership claims of farm groups that lobbied him on the issue, he had concluded there were 2.5 million farmers on the Prairies.
These days, politicians also must deal with the reality that many of the farmers being spoken for do not feel connected to their spokesmen.
How can governments tap into the opinions of these unattached farmers?
Critics contend that merely holding uncontrolled public meetings does not necessarily give an accurate glimpse of real farm opinion.
“I think public consultations are not effective because they can be taken over, opinion leaders tend to dominate,” said Olev Wain of the Calgary-based Dunvegan Group, which is promoting its own style of consultation through focus groups, questionnaires and opinion analysis.
Alberta Agriculture bureaucrats know exactly what he means.
Last year, as they organized controlled focus groups to discuss safety nets and then opened the process to public meetings, they were fearful that National Farmers Union partisans would attend and publicly dispute the farmer “consensus” that governments should increasingly get out of farm support programs.
“We didn’t invite the NFU and at the public meetings, we were afraid the NFU would show up and take over the meetings,” one Alberta official involved in the process said. “Thankfully, they didn’t. We were relieved.”
As an alternative, there are proposals for more use of public opinion polling, randomly-selected farmer focus groups and scientifically-organized probing.
Already, the Canadian Wheat Board, CN Rail, governments and some farm groups pay for organized farm opinion research.
The Reform party caucus in Ottawa is demanding that the federal government use an Alberta-developed consultation pro-cess to get beyond the “special interest” opinions of the farm groups. It also advocates more regular use of referenda to test farmer opinion.
CN Rail does regular farm opinion polling, hiring private firms to test farm opinion.
“Governments will only make changes that farmers will accept,” CN Winnipeg-based marketing communications manager Jim Feeny said. “We poll because we can better plan if we know what farmers will accept.”
CN executives say the change in farmer opinion has been greater during the past two years than in any time since the polling began. Farmers no longer believe government has the resources or the will to help, so farmers should be allowed to operate in the market without government interference.
It is a mood Goodale said he also has heard in echoes from farm consultations, but he is not willing to assume farm organizations are not hearing the same message and changing their own views.
“I would not be one of those who would dismiss traditional organizations as being out of touch or based on the past,” he said.
In Regina, a spokesman for one of the farm organizations most distrusted by advocates of open markets and change say the message is getting through.
Saskatchewan Wheat Pool will have to accommodate the growing open-market opinions of farmers, said Howe.
“It is not a passing thing. There are lots of farmers who feel that way and it is something we will have to accommodate in our frameworks. It may seem slow to some but we do change and I think we will one day be taking more moderate positions on questions like marketing.
“We have changed commercially to accommodate new realities. I don’t think we are so entrenched that we also can’t change politically.”
