Ears should have been burning last week at Agriculture Canada and its affiliated agencies.
As farm leaders gathered in Thunder Bay for the annual summer Canadian Federation of Agriculture meeting, they were scathing in their assessment of the federal department that is supposed to be their window on the government.
They seemed in a surly, bitter mood about the government.
CFA executive director Sally Rutherford started it with a sharp review of the department.
Farmers are facing a host of new issues, from environmental criticism and child care concerns to biotechnology ramifications, questions of patenting biotech-created life forms and a swarm of new pathogens attacking the food supply.
Read Also
Crop insurance’s ability to help producers has its limitations
Farmers enrolled in crop insurance can do just as well financially when they have a horrible crop or no crop at all, compared to when they have a below average crop
Yet instead of finding leadership from Agriculture Canada bureaucrats, they appear to be out of the loop, always playing catch-up, missing meetings, focusing on trade goals while underlying problems of food safety and farm incomes are ignored.
Departmental bureaucrats seem isolated or uninterested in farmer pleas, she complained.
“The issues we have to deal with now are not the traditional agriculture issues and yet the department doesn’t seem to be following them closely,” she said. “We feel like we are out there on our own, trying to cope. If we are looking for leadership from the department, forget it.”
That seemed to open the floodgates. Around the CFA table, the complaints tumbled out.
There were complaints about cost recovery, bureaucratic insensitivity and a feeling that the department is out of touch with real concerns at the farm level.
CFA president Jack Wilkinson, never prone to quiet understatement, joined the chorus. “Their arrogance really is a core issue here.”
It was not supposed to be like this. When he became deputy agriculture minister less than two years ago, Frank Claydon met the CFA and promised them more access and “top to top” meetings.
Wilkinson said farmers think the department still is too prone to tell farmers what must happen, rather than asking them what should happen.
“There is a lot of quiet anger. The department is filled with people who talk about managing files rather than solving problems.” All this was said as the CFA leaders met among themselves to talk about conditions in the industry. They were frustrated, scornful, angry.
Typically, when agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief showed up the next day, he heard none of this.
The farmers so fierce and critical the day before were now all optimism and praise and please and thank you sir.
Still, Wilkinson said the frustration with the department and farmer alienation from its bureaucratic arrogance is real.
“I would think Mr. Claydon, as deputy minister, should be very concerned about the attitude in that room,” he said.
And the sweetness-and-light meeting with the new minister can be seen as simply Canadian politeness.
“He hasn’t been there long enough to make his own mistakes and he is inheriting the department.”
