SOME OF the most grimly ideological critics of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government would have us believe that this is a crowd of Visigoths opposed to culture and the union movement.
As the satirical Frank Magazine would say, nothing could be further from the truth, apparently.
In fact, you could be excused for concluding that the Conservatives are supporting their cultured union brethren, the striking Hollywood scriptwriters, by hiring some of them to freelance lines to the government on its agriculture policy.
Unfortunately, it seems Conservatives turned to fiction writers to describe the government’s heroic response to the income meltdown in the livestock sector. Reality show writers need not apply.
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Worrisome drop in grain prices
Prices had been softening for most of the previous month, but heading into the Labour Day long weekend, the price drops were startling.
“Let me give you an example of how our aid is getting directly to farmers,” rural Ontario Conservative Guy Lauzon, parliamentary secretary to agriculture minister Gerry Ritz, told the House of Commons last week. “From late 2007 through 2008, nearly $1.5 billion in cash payments is expected to flow to livestock producers through existing and new programs. This is in addition to the $1 billion in additional loans available to the livestock sector under the advance payment program.”
Wow, that’s a heap of money, a line right off of Fantasy Island.
Ritz piled it on a few days later.
“We delivered more for Canadian farmers in the last short term than the Liberal government did over 13 years, $4.5 billion and climbing,” he said in the Commons.
Ritz reported he had met with livestock leaders including the Canadian Pork Council and all was well. His freelancing fiction scriptwriters did the rest.
“They are quite happy with the direction we are going,” he said of hog industry leaders. “They are all concerned with countervailability.”
There’s a reason we like great feel-good screen fiction. It is implausible and yet comforting in its implausibility. Perry Mason solves the case and Lassie makes it home.
Unfortunately for the livestock sector, they could only afford to hire the reality scriptwriters, so they were stuck with the facts when they appeared before MPs last week.
In Alberta, 15 percent of hog production is being shut down, said Canadian Pork Council director Stephen Moffett. It approaches the same levels in other provinces as hog prices fall and government dollars don’t flow.
“What have we heard from government?” Moffett’s reality show writers wrote. “Certainly right from the very start, they have been saying that we need to deal with existing programs. I can tell you that we don’t think that’s enough.”
Then the reality writers went right off the scale.
The government response has been a “cruel joke” to many producers, creating false hopes for real government help, said CPC president Clare Schlegel. “The dollars that are there are currently not available to help us through the process.”
Oh dear, there seems to be a disconnect between the Conservatives’ fiction writers: “times are tough but it will work out and farmers know we are helping,” and the message from the reality show writers that describes a bleak landscape and much less optimism.
Somewhere over the rainbow….
