ACCORDING to the Vanclief calendar, this is Year 06.
After listening to countless recountings and accountings issued by agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief during the past four years, it is clear history began in 1995, Year 00. Important history, anyway, the history against which he would like to be judged.
It is always the minister’s starting point, recounting how much he has increased the farm safety net budget since then.
There is one obvious reason for this. Year 00, 1995, was the low point for government support of farmers in the modern era. Finance minister Paul Martin stripped more than $1 billion from farm-related supports that year, cutting by more than 50 percent the amount of money the previous Conservative government had spent. Farmers were conscripted into the war on the deficit.
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Still, grain prices were high. Then-agriculture minister Ralph Goodale got away with it.
Vanclief entered the scene in Year 02 and began, slowly, grudgingly, sometimes crankily, to build the farm budget again as commodity prices fell, other countries did not follow Canada’s subsidy-cutting lead and sectoral farm income crises began sprouting like potato stalks on a Prince Edward County farm.
But he is sensitive to reminders that Year 00 comparisons are a bit misleading. What’s the comparison to Year 00 minus five, 1990?
That’s not a fair point, Vanclief will respond.
The Conservative government that year was spending money it did not have.
Right, grumble the critics. And the Liberal government in Year 06 is refusing to spend money that it does have.
Stalemate.
But there may be another reason why the agriculture minister likes 1995 as a reference point: nostalgia.
It was a simpler time for the politician from Prince Edward County who had escaped farming and an unsustainable farm debt in 1988 only to see a political career launched as a Liberal MP.
By 1995, he was a government up-and-comer. He was parliamentary secretary to the agriculture minister. He was a political straight shooter, admired for his farm experience and practical approach.
His ambition was to be agriculture minister. Now, almost four years after attaining that goal, political life is not as simple as it once appeared.
Vanclief is agriculture minister in a government that does not appear to place a high priority on the industry.
He is a free trading, conservative Liberal who believes in markets rather than governments at a time when free trade agreements do not always live up to their rhetoric and many farm sector demands are for more liberal Liberal solutions.
And his tendency for straight talk wins him more criticism than praise these days, whether it is comments about potato growers or attempts to convince urban voters that the government has been more generous than farmers say it has.
In the months preceding an expected summer cabinet shuffle, Vanclief has found new ways to rile farmers.
For the beleaguered minister who so wanted the job, it must seem that the pursuit was more fun than the capture.
