Whelan is a former federal minister of agriculture and farmer from Ontario.
Imagine a government program in which it cost more to apply for funding, in the form of paying accountants and lawyers, than you would receive in actual funds.
Imagine a government program that costs an average of $1.1 billion a year, but the officials in charge of it can’t be bothered to issue an annual report in a timely or efficient manner.
Imagine a government income-support program in which applicants who received payments below what they were entitled, or denied funding outright at the whim of a bureaucrat, weren’t allowed to have their applications reviewed subsequently.
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Imagine a government department that has had income-support programs audited regularly since 1991.
Each time, the auditors recommend that the department needs to make this program more transparent for users, and report data and payouts more accurately.
Each time, the department fails to implement these recommendations and often backslides into weaker performance when the auditors return.
And how about this?
Imagine a government department in which the public servants who decide who gets these program funds also hire themselves out on the side to fill out the applications they’ll be assessing.
Such premeditated conflict of interest violates the public trust so fundamentally that this borders on criminal.
There’s no need to imagine. These things actually happened. They occurred under the watch of Agriculture and Agri-food Canada and its administration of the Canadian Agricultural Income Stabilization program, a program that farmers were supposed to rely on for emergency income support in challenging times.
And as any farmer can tell you, there have been a lot of challenging times lately.
Canada’s auditor general, Sheila Fraser, found these problems, and many more, with Agriculture Canada’s handling of the CAIS file. CAIS spawned the kind of low-rent corruption and government incompetence that drives taxpayers into a rage and leads inevitably to scandal.
But Canadian farmers, who were supposed to benefit from CAIS, have known the program was badly run for years. And they knew it was badly designed from the day it was launched.
Now federal agriculture minister Chuck Strahl has promised an end to CAIS, throwing in $400 million in additional funding for emergency farm aid.
Fair enough, I suppose.
But as Ms. Fraser pointed out, the amount of money for federal income support was not the problem. It was how it was administered.
Minister Strahl has not made any statements committing his government and his department to regional flexibility in directing income-support funds, building a true partnership between the federal government and the provinces and farmers and their advocacy groups.
If minister Strahl wants to attack CAIS as a bloated, inefficient and unfair bureaucratic mess of a program, nobody in the countryside will challenge him on that.
But the minister has to look forward and build the foundation of a more stable, more flexible income-support program in this era of globalization if he really wants to make federal farm policies work for producers.
The minister might also want to take heart in something that I have been saying for decades in my public addresses: any country that neglects agriculture is also neglecting its entire society, because agriculture affects the health, success and quality of life of every single citizen no matter where they live.
Ontario and Quebec farmers have proposed that the federal government support companion programs. This means that federal funding envelopes would be established to bolster provincial programs that are tailor-made to the farming challenges in particular regions.
For example, grains and oilseeds farmers have had their income devastated by years of agriculture subsidies in the United States, which has driven the price of corn, soybeans, wheat and edible beans below the cost of production.
Ontario and Quebec are anxious to help them with long-term, insurance-based programs that would establish floor prices for these commodities affected by U.S. farm subsidies.
But the province’s hands are tied by the federal government, which has dodged the request for regional flexibility for long-term, stable companion programming and funding that’s not wrapped up in CAIS-like red tape.
To do otherwise would result in keeping something like CAIS around. It would just have another name.
Farmers don’t want that, taxpayers don’t want that, and I’m pretty sure minister Strahl doesn’t want that either. But if he wants to really make farm income support work in Canada, he’s going to have to go beyond just bad-mouthing CAIS.
He has to offer long-term solutions that get to the heart of the auditor general’s findings: the need for transparency, flexibility, accountability and getting the funds to where they’re needed most.
Minister Strahl is going to have to accept that farming has regional challenges, but also that there are regional solutions.
