On May 3 in Edmonton, candidates fighting to become the 21st Canadian prime minister meet in the first of a series of policy debates leading up to the summer selection of delegates to the November Liberal leadership convention.
It will be the first chance for farmers to find out if Paul Martin, Sheila Copps and John Manley have anything resembling an agricultural vision. Early evidence suggests it will be slim pickings.
All three are quick studies and no doubt will have been briefed well enough to be able to say they support farmers, believe that producers are efficient and should be allowed to compete in a fair marketplace and want to defend them against unfair foreign competition and subsidies.
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But those are the easy surface pledges to make. After all, it was Martin who added the pledge to move farmers “beyond crisis management” in his last budget speech.
There is little evidence he knew what that meant, other than accepting Agriculture Canada’s assurance it knew how to do it. There is no evidence that Martin became actively involved in the internal debate once it became clear that farmers were at odds with agriculture bureaucrats over the best way to design an effective safety net.
For his part, Manley used his first budget speech after replacing Martin to reaffirm the government commitment to the agriculture policy framework. He has offered no public evidence since that he knew anything more about the detail and controversy other than what he learned from Agriculture Canada officials who persuaded him to insert the reference.
Copps’ main incursion into farm country in recent years has been the less-than-inspiring performance of her Heritage Canada department in dealing with the elk tuberculosis problem in Manitoba’s Riding Mountain National Park. Elk have been spreading TB to nearby cattle.
So what are the chances that any of these candidates will have a working knowledge, a clue, about issues, problems and opportunities lurking within the agriculture sector, beyond the feel-good clichés of Agriculture Canada’s rhetoric about the APF?
One prairie Liberal says it is a question of whether the candidates can get outside the bubble imposed by their handlers, get off the message of the campaign and really listen to Canadians.
Camrose, Alta., farmer Adam Campbell, seven years here from Scotland, figures Paul Martin is the man for the job.
After spending time this spring telling Martin’s son David some of the prairie issues he should know, Campbell got a call from the candidate himself to talk about his ideas.
“I told him the APF is a waste of time,” Campbell said last week. “I think it was the first time he had heard the real
problem.”
Even more telling was a session with Martin that Campbell attended last winter in Leduc, Alta. It left the prairie Liberal thinking Martin is a bit informed.
“I told him there is a problem with the culture of Agriculture Canada around this APF business,” said Campbell. “He said right away ‘you mean (deputy minister) Samy Watson don’t you?’ I think Martin knows more than we might think. I don’t think Watson can count on promotions if he becomes prime minister.”
