It's only words - and words are all we have - Opinion

IT WAS the great British author, political analyst, socialist and wordsmith George Orwell who most cogently made the argument that a key political tactic is to capture the language.

In part, he based his analysis on the language of the Russian Revolution.

In the pre-revolutionary Russian Social Democratic Labour party, the minority radical movement took the name Bolshevik, to mean ‘the majority’, while the majority moderate faction accepted the title Menshevik, which meant minority.

Do you want to support the minority or the majority? Minority leader Vladimir Lenin won the language war and the revolution.

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But the ownership of language to remake the situation on the ground is widespread and not always as dramatic as St. Petersburg, 1917.

Anytime a country (North Korea, Yemen, Congo come to mind) adds “democratic” to its official title, head for the hills. It is a dictatorship.

Whenever a regime calls its latest missile the “Peacekeeper” (as the Reagan regime did in the United States), you know it’s a death maker.

So now we turn to Canada where the record of language theft is much more benign but no less real.

Consider last week’s federal budget in which the Conservatives announced a five-year, $500 million Agriflex program of spending to support programs designed to respond to province-specific conditions.

Never mind that two-thirds of the $500 million will be taken from spending already approved so few new dollars will flow.

Look at the use of the term Agriflex.

For the past year, the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, Ontario Federation of Agriculture, Quebec’s Union des Producteurs Agricoles and the Quebec-Ontario Grain Farmers’ Coalition have campaigned to have Ottawa add a sixth pillar to the new Growing Forward framework of programs, an “agriflex” pillar that would see Ottawa resurrect the companion programs of old and contribute 60 percent to province-specific safety net programs like the cost-of-production-based Ontario Risk Management Program or the Quebec ASRA.

Federal agriculture minister Gerry Ritz has never been a fan of returning to federal funding for provincial safety net programs. In that stance, he has some supporters and a position worth arguing.

He is undoubtedly correct when he says the advocates of safety net Agriflex do not speak for all farm sectors in their province.

But he saw the popular language of the Agriflex supporters and decided to run with it, presumably in an effort to show that the Conservative government is sensitive to farmers in the vote-rich Quebec and Ontario corridor. So he announced an Agriflex program in the election and last week’s budget. During a pre-budget news conference to outline what was coming, he was asked directly if this new program would meet CFA demands.

“It’s similar in nature,” he said. “Their program originally called for a pot of $50 million that they thought would do and give them the flexibility they wanted in programming. We have added another zero to that to make it $500 million.”

He did not say the program design falls far short of the demand.

The Ontario-Quebec grain farmer coalition immediately denounced the program design as a broken promise.

By absconding with the language but not delivering the content, it is difficult to imagine who the Conservatives think they are fooling in vote-rich rural Eastern Canada.