IT WAS Jeffrey Simpson’s bad luck that the organizers of the annual premiers’ meeting at the end of July in St. John’s, Nfld., booked accredited media into the same downtown hotel that was the site of the annual Canadian Federation of Agriculture summer board meeting.
Well, that’s not entirely accurate. It was his misfortune that the day he was checking in, July 26, was the very day the well-regarded and recognizable columnist for the Globe and Mail newspaper had published what he calls his annual assault on Canada’s supply management system.
Read Also
Agriculture needs to prepare for government spending cuts
As government makes necessary cuts to spending, what can be reduced or restructured in the budgets for agriculture?
A stranger spotted him in the lobby and offered the friendly suggestion that he might want to avoid wandering into the CFA meeting room by mistake. “We have a lot of supply management guys there.”
He managed to avoid contact.
Simpson’s arguments were familiar to anyone who reads his column regularly.
The tariffs that protect dairy, poultry and egg sectors could be abolished without the collapse of rural Canada that defenders predict, he wrote. Just look at the example of Australia and New Zealand.
Recently stalled World Trade Organization talks were a chance to do it but agricultural protectionism blocked progress.
And Canadian governments of all political stripes are too politically timid to confront the agriculture protectionism lobby, Simpson wrote in his latest lament.
“In agricultural politics, in Canada and at the WTO, rationality long ago yielded to political fear, lobbying muscle and inertia.”
At least his hook was topical and contemporary. That isn’t always the case with the urban critics of farm policy.
The Globe’s Ottawa-based business columnist Neil Reynolds last week devoted two full columns to a denunciation of agricultural subsidies and protectionism but he did so by recycling details of free trade debates in Britain in the 1820s and then a century ago. To make his 2006 argument, he reverted to anti-tariff speeches of a young Winston Churchill.
To be fair, his point was that the anti-protection argument is timeless: “When you tax food, you move people at the margins toward hunger and malnutrition.”
These days, there seems to be an onslaught of urban economic think tank, columnist and newspaper editorial attacks on farm programs and government support for the sector.
Ironically, CFA delegates approved at their board meeting a plan to better educate city dwellers about the realities of modern farm life.
If urban Canadians read their newspapers, that education process has a high mountain to climb.
Consider this editorial in Quebec’s premier English newspaper, the Montreal Gazette, published in the heart of the province with the most effective farm lobby and most farmer-friendly government policy in the country.
On Aug. 2, Gazette editorial writers reacted to the $550 million government announcement for low-income farm families by arguing that the family-operated farm is a relic. Large-scale farms, presumably of a corporate nature, are the future.
“There’s no more ‘national interest’ in propping up family farms than there is subsidizing backyard auto-parts production,” opined the editorial writers who duly note that food is cheap but if you add the taxes spent to support farmers, it isn’t.
The planned farmer education campaign has a challenge.
Should we now be bracing for the Gazette prescription Part Two: Inefficient Family Farmers – Learning to Love the Suburbs?
