SAMY Watson’s tenure as Agriculture Canada’s chief bureaucrat likely will fizzle out with a whimper next month, not with the fiery assertions of arrogant ambition that marked his entry to the job four years ago.
Then, as the newly minted 42-year-old deputy minister fresh off the turnip truck of Big Idea academia and central bureaucracies in Ottawa, Watson used a visit to Manitoba farm leaders in April 2000 to announce there was a vacuum in Canadian agricultural policies.
He was the man to fill it, to give agriculture a long-term vision, to move beyond short-term crises.
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Four years later, Watson is on his way to a May 10 appointment as Environment Canada deputy minister. In his wake, the five-year Agricultural Policy Framework is in place with a commitment of $5.2 billion in stable funding to 2008.
So the brash young neophyte was as good as his word, right? Agricultural policy has been transformed, Watsonized.
Well, yes and no.
Even farm leaders who fought his take-no-prisoners style and the design and implementation details of the APF credit Watson for introducing a measure of stability to policy – what critic Bob Friesen, president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, calls a “Canadian farm bill.”
But Watson never seemed to figure out that the best way to make progress is to convince others to come along, rather than to tell them they had no choice.
He was brash, arrogant and abusive with staff and industry representatives with whom he disagreed. Temper tantrums and abusive language were widely reported to be Watson weapons.
The exodus of senior and experienced Agriculture Canada management during his tenure was striking.
The absence of farm leaders offering him credit for his vision and tenacity is telling.
And he certainly did not succeed in moving agriculture “beyond crisis management,” a phrase of his that even made it into a throne speech as an apparent criticism of the “if-it’s-spring-there-must-be-farmers-in-Ottawa-asking-for-money” syndrome.
Agriculture in 2004 is as much crisis driven as it ever has been and the depth of the current crisis raises questions about whether Watson’s vision of an agricultural industry free of demands for more government resources was anything more than Samy-in-Wonderland.
Assuming the future unfolds as a reflection of the past, the idea that APF funding will preclude farmer pressure for ad hoc assistance is laughable. Watson’s vision of a thriving, profitable food sector free of the welfare instinct seemed not to consider that within the profitable food chain, farmers are the bargaining weak link, faced with price setting by suppliers and buyers without having bargaining power of their own.
He listened too much to those few producers who could score a profit on an individual contract in a niche situation and missed the point that it is an anomaly not available to the majority.
Of course, all this is hearsay, since Watson would never agree to an interview, the only deputy minister in at least a quarter century to take the high ground against media intrusion.
Perhaps in his final month he will agree to tell Canadian farmers his version of the real story.
