PRIME minister Jean Chrétien stuck his foot in his mouth again when talking recently about agricultural subsidies. His comment was that farmers are better off without programs like the Crowsnest Pass grain transportation subsidy.
Though the prime minister apparently doesn’t realize it, Western Canada has been devastated by the loss of the Crow Benefit. It will take a long time for the Prairies to recover from that loss.
Subsidies by whatever name are national policies. They are designed to make a country stronger in some way. That was true of Crow Benefit and its predecessor. It helped Canada as a nation and it helped individual producers. It helped settle an underpopulated continent and keep the portion north of the 49th parallel in Canada.
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It helped to feed a hungry world – good business and humanitarian enterprise. It helped Canada build a strong economy by adding billions of dollars to our international trade balance.
By convention, international grain sales are effectively made at a port, from which the grain is picked up and taken to the buying country. The cost of getting the grain to the port is the seller’s responsibility. In a country where distances to port are relatively short and virtually the same for all producers, that isn’t much of a problem.
But Canadian farmers are not in that situation. Some of them are as much as 1,000 kilometres from the closest port; some are closer than 100 km.
Since the delivery costs are based on the distance the grain travels, those closest to port have an advantage, while those farther away have a disadvantage.
If the federal government wants people to grow grain in the national interest, and grow it a long way from port, it needs to act on behalf of all citizens to even out the domestic and international transportation inequalities. The Crow policies helped to do that.
In the 1980s and ’90s, Ottawa shifted the key grain transportation burden from the pocketbooks of all taxpayers to the pocketbooks of farmers. Through that change, the federal government said, in effect, that it’s no longer in the nation’s best interest to export grain.
Since then, millions of additional dollars have been sucked out of prairie farmers’ pockets. Grain production is now becoming a club for the rich – if you don’t have the money, get off the farm.
In a moral economy, those who receive a benefit, like a strong international trade balance, share the burdens including the costs related to that benefit.
For the prime minister to disregard the impact of his government’s actions and claim a disaster is really a blessing makes a just resolution of the problem difficult.
Instead, the federal government should clearly state what seems to be an obvious policy shift: that it no longer wants prairie people growing grain for export.
It should explain that uniting our nation, feeding the world and strengthening our international trade balance are no longer important for Canada.
Those comments would make about as much sense as the prime minister’s thinking on agricultural subsidies.
Rob Brown is a United Church minister now engaged in graduate studies on ethics. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Western Producer.
