Western Producer staff
Almost five years ago, then-Tory heavyweight Don Mazankowski mounted the podium to deliver his first speech to an Agricultural Outlook Conference.
Traditionally, minister’s speeches at the annual December conference were upbeat, dwelling more on what was likely to go right in the farm sector than on what was going wrong.
Mazankowski took a different approach.
He laid it on the line.
The federal government was picking up too much of the tab for farm support, since it was supposed to be an equally-shared jurisdiction.
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That year, when farm supports were near their peak, Ottawa paid 64.5 percent of the almost $7 billion in government agriculture spending. In Saskatchewan, after a severe drought, the federal share was 80 percent.
There were two Tory answers to the problem – the provinces should pick up more of the tab and farmers should be weaned off such generous support.
Five years later, statistics compiled by Agriculture Canada suggest that the world has evolved much as Mazankowski had willed it.
Spending estimates for the the current government year suggest that in 1994-95, Ottawa will pick up less than 55 percent of the total agricultural budget.
And total government spending on agriculture and agri-food has fallen from almost $7 billion to $5.7 billion, including a decline in net program payments from $3.3 billion in 1988 to $2.7 million.
Meanwhile, net farm income last year was higher than ever, suggesting that farmers ARE being weaned off government support and back onto the market.
It’s this kind of information politicians like to refer to when asserting the value of their political legacy.
So what did Mazankowski and subsequent governments do right?
Very little. It is a case of statistics giving the facts, but not necessarily the truth.
The provincial share of farm program spending has gone up for one simple reason – since 1988, the provincial spending has remained stable while Ottawa’s spending has been slashed.
In 1987/88, Ottawa spent almost $4.7 billion. This year, it expects to spent $3.1 billion – a 34 percent decline.
In 1987/88, the provinces spent $2.3 billion. This year, they promise to spend almost $2.6 billion – a slight increase that does not match inflation.
The other half of the story is that in the interim, the federal government has also changed the rules so it never need spend as much on agriculture again.
The federal push has been to create low-level safety nets that limit government responsibility to farmers.
As market prices have increased in recent years, the effect of the federal withdrawal from the support field has been masked.
In the future, if market prices ever crash again as they did in the late 1980s, governments will not be there as they were before. They have limited their obligations.
Farmers who cannot live off market returns or off-farm income will perish. Survival of the fittest. It is the playing out of the Tory dream, now apparently being embraced by the Liberals.
