Late last year when researchers hired by Agriculture Canada checked out the voter mood in farming country, they found an undercurrent of pessimism.
The pessimism Earnscliffe Research reported was more fundamental than fears of falling incomes.
Farmers were worried that their chosen business and lifestyle was falling out of favor. There were “undercurrents of fear among some that it is an industry of the past,” Earnscliffe reported back to the government.
Undoubtedly, a bundle of issues led to the pessimism, including economic uncertainty.
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But the federal government must share some of the blame for agriculture’s falling self-image. New minister Lyle Vanclief should consider the messages his government transmits to farmers.
For years, Ottawa has been sending two distinct messages, neither guaranteed to make farmers feel better about themselves. The first message comes from those in government who see themselves as agriculture’s friends.
In trying to be helpful, these boosters have been telling farmers they are inadequate. They’ll survive and prosper only if they change their ways and adapt.
Growing food is no longer enough. They must value-add. They must diversify. They should have an off-farm trade.
All this is supposed to be encouragement but the underlying message is anything but encouraging: what you have been is not good enough. Get with it.
With friends like this, who needs critics? Yet there also is a government group we might call critics, or at least skeptics. Their even more discouraging message, issued through actions and neglect rather than explicit words, is that agriculture is scarcely important.
Most government heavy hitters do not consider agriculture a key part of modern Canada. They consider it a backwater, a one-time sinkhole for public subsidies that now is more or less on its own and off the political agenda.
No minister would say this out loud, of course. But it was illustrated in the book Double Vision, an analysis of the first ChrŽtien government by Ottawa reporters Ed Greenspon and Anthony Wilson-Smith.
In 1994, the finance department was trying to figure out a strategy for selling tough deficit-cutting. The first problem was what they considered “economic illiteracy” among Canadians. Many did not know the difference between deficit and debt or where agriculture fits into a modern economy. “A perplexingly large number of Canadians considered agriculture an industry of the future.”
My God. How dumb can Canadians be? Don’t they realize that aerospace, information technologies, tourism and low-wage service jobs are the industries of the future? Prime minister Jean ChrŽtien (a rich lawyer), finance minister Paul Martin (a millionaire businessman who dabbles in farming) and industry minister John Manley (an Ottawa lawyer who presumably eats) certainly know that. Their priorities have shown it.
Some farmers apparently have picked up the signal and taken it to heart.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise.
