WHEN Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Bob Friesen stood on Parliament Hill last week to talk about farm income problems, he said he was gratified by the journalistic turnout.
He understood that a key step in putting pressure on the government is getting media attention, and through that, taxpayer and political sympathy.
On this mid-week afternoon, a handful of reporters and three or four cameras were on hand. Not bad, in a town where Tory leader Joe Clark has joked that farm-related news conferences tend to attract more speakers than reporters.
Read Also
Visit to Ag in Motion reveals agriculture’s economic clout
Sometimes you forget about the scope and economic clout of the agriculture sector when you’re sitting at home in your tiny office with a couple of dogs licking your toes.
Friesen made his points about the need for more aid and he had reason to be pleased. He would have been less encouraged to hear an elevator conversation after the CFA news conference.
Two cameramen were aboard.
“Any news there?” one of them was asked. “That won’t make it tonight,” he said. “He didn’t say anything new and there are no good pictures.”
In an age when the political agenda often is set by nightly newscasts, it illustrates a problem for the farm lobby.
Last autumn as hog prices tanked and grain prices started their downward slide, the farm lobby was aided by television interest and images of dying pigs.
This year, the farm crisis is arguably deeper and more desperate but so far urban media have not picked up on it as an economic blight or a human interest drama.
Media have a notoriously short attention span and a sometimes brutal assessment of what is “news.” Are those farmers still complaining? Didn’t they get help already? Didn’t we already do this story?
The farm lobby does have a few factors working in its favor.
This year, politicians do not have to be convinced there is a farm income problem. They have their own income projection numbers that make the depth of the prairie problem clear.
The issue is convincing them, and their urban taxpayers, that they have not done enough to help. And government finances ARE in better shape.
The other major difference is that some farmers are more radical this year. While CFA continues its quiet lobbying, some prairie farmers are returning to the more dramatic tactics of old – tractor blockades, protests and threats of a march on Ottawa.
For the moment, that is catching media attention. It may work.
But farm lobby veterans know that public demonstrations are a high-risk, last card strategy that can easily backfire.
If farmers fill the streets and do not win their point, it exposes weakness. If it fails, what is the fall-back strategy?
What if urbanites watching demonstrating farmers on their TV screens tune them out as self-centred whiners?
In 1918 when Ontario farmers organized demonstrations against a Unionist government decision to conscript farm labor for war, the more moderate leaders of the Canadian Council of Agriculture were uneasy.
Secretary Norman Lambert worried that farmers would be stigmatized “as a narrow, selfish unpatriotic institution.”
That danger of alienating taxpayers remains an issue that farm lobby strategists cannot ignore.
