IT WAS the kind of setup tailor-made for the urban “we love farmers” crowd.
Ontario CBC noon show host Dave Stephens made the issue of public support for farmers the topic of his Aug. 9 province-wide phone-in. “Our question today on the phone-in: why don’t we care about Canadian farmers?”
The phone lines lit up.
Then, Stephens gave the background, based on the results of a recent public opinion poll conducted for Agriculture Canada.
“Urban Canadians don’t know a great deal about how farms work,” he said. “For most of us, food is something that magically appears, shrink-wrapped, in the supermarket.”
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He suggested that while “people talk about support for farmers, few Canadians like the idea of a significant financial package to help them.”
Then, it was caller time and remarkably few disagreed with the premise. Instead, they tried to explain it or to suggest remedies.
The one prominent dissenter was Ontario Federation of Agriculture president Jack Wilkinson. We’ll get to him later.
Callers had various excuses: Most urbanites are too disconnected from the farm. Urbanites would feel closer to farmers if farmers posted signs telling drive-by traffic what crops are growing. City dwellers and politicians need more education.
In other words, the discussion produced a verbal stew of bromides, clichés and the commonplace, but little new.
But how could it have broken ground on the issue of how society and the body politic deal with the farm population?
What are voters and consumers to do? Hug a farmer? Call their local politician? Buy local and think they’ve done their bit?
Get real. The issue is bigger than whether consumers, voters and phone-in callers like or want to support farmers.
The issue is whether the governments they elect make a commitment to support and defend farmers as long as they are efficient, and as long as the products produced by farmers still are needed.
Is the Canadian government willing to make an open-ended commitment to maintaining the farm sector?
If not open ended, then where is the line? What is the level of Canada’s dependable commitment?
Of course, voters and consumers can put pressure on governments but in a modern complex political economy, few issues are large enough to produce a strong, simple and urgent demand for action.
It is inconceivable that public opinion could ever become as focused on farm aid as it has been on health funding.
Hospital wards close without funding, but the food supply doesn’t seem to vary by whether or not farmers receive enough support.
In this country, voters elect governments to govern, to compare resources to needs and then to decide on priorities. Don’t blame the consumer or the urban voter for government attitudes to the farm file.
Which brings us to Wilkinson, who called to suggest the poll really was a bit of Agriculture Canada mischief.
There is public support for farmers, said the OFA president. But the department hires a pollster to ask questions loaded to elicit negative or blasé responses and then uses that result to justify its decision to make agriculture a low policy priority.
In tough times, conspiracy theories abound. And just because we’re paranoid doesn’t mean we’re not being followed.
