The voice, rumbling on the other end of the line, was unmistakable, and not just because of the tortured grammar.
“Can you imagine, the United States dealing with 10 pipsqueak provinces up here? Impossible. We built agriculture with a strong central authority. Now they want to destroy that. Can you imagine? God, they make me mad. Call me.”
Eugene Whelan had worked up a head of steam by the time he finished leaving his voice-mail message.
At first blush, the object of his scorn was a Reform Party promise to decentralize agricultural jurisdiction if they ever take power.
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Under the Reform proposal, part of its “New Confederation” package, the provinces would be given “exclusive provincial control” over agriculture.
Party representatives have tempered that somewhat to insist that a Reform government would leave the federal government in charge of some national safety net programs, policing dismantlement of interprovincial trade barriers and handling international trade issues.
To Whelan, this weakening of Agriculture Canada would be nothing short of heresy. “I think this is a very dangerous thing they are proposing.”
In an age of growing private power and shrinking federal budgets, he figures a national vision and national standards are all the more important. “If they want to do something that would save money, then they should be moving federal.”
But Whelan’s deeper angst came when the conversation turned to how the Liberal government has reacted to Reform’s proposals. It hasn’t.
“I have no idea why (agriculture minister Ralph) Goodale hasn’t said much about this,” groused the man who occupied Goodale’s office for more than 10 years. “A lot of these Liberals seem to have forgotten where they come from, what they stand for.”
Whelan sees it as a more general Liberal abandonment of their public enterprise tradition. Instead of standing for activist government and public research, they are backing away.
Services are being turned over to the private sector, public research money is tied to private research investment that pursues more narrow commercial interests and Ottawa is looking for ways to transfer responsibility to the provinces.
“I have read the Red Book (the 1993 Liberal campaign document) and this doesn’t sound much like Liberals to me,” he said. “It is contrary to Liberalism. It is contrary to federalism.”
Whelan has a point about the lack of Liberal response, or response generally, to Reform’s decentralizing ideas. These will be key issues in the months leading up to the next election and yet they have attracted precious little reaction.
The Liberals these days seem mesmerized by the threat from Quebec, designing policies that react to a threat of dismemberment rather than joining in a broader debate about the proper federal-provincial power sharing arrangement.
For English Canada, Reform has thrown down the challenge.
It is now the responsibility of the Liberals, and hopefully farmers, to become engaged in the debate.
