Western Producer staff
OTTAWA — Quietly, virtually without debate or notice, the ground rules for the farm policy debate in government seem to have shifted.
Ideology is passŽ. The “practical”, the “doable” is in.
Don’t expect much sympathy if you come to Parliament Hill with a political view that Canada should set a policy that defies the market and deviates somewhat from the market-oriented march of the world.
The new tone is adapting to world conditions, living with the trade rules, becoming “competitive.”
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It is as if the fight over the GATT deal was the last gasp of farm groups arguing that Canada can have an independent farm policy.
The new Liberal government, conservative in most of its outlooks, is setting about designing policies that will reduce the government’s responsibility for farmers and end as much as possible Canada’s isolation from world farm policy influences.
Those farm advocates accustomed to pressing Ottawa for interventionist or independent policies are being marginalized. Agriculture Canada economists and planners, prone to smirking privately at the interventionists as throwbacks to a different age, have won the day.
Almost as if on cue, the farm lobby seems to be becoming more conservative, and “market-oriented” is the catch-phrase of the day.
Willing to accommodate
For all the quotable rhetoric of Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Jack Wilkinson, the message from the national umbrella farm group seems aimed these days at accommodating rather than challenging.
Prairie Pools Inc. recently appeared in town with a plea for support of value-added (and by extension, a de-emphasis on concentrating on export of raw product) that would have warmed the heart of Charlie Mayer and Michael Wilson, never mind Ralph Goodale and Roy MacLaren.
Traditional supply management is on the way out. Farmers, who expended much energy and money in the past decade demanding that the system be preserved, now must play the role of helping government figure out how to save some vestiges — hardly a call to the barricades.
The Crow Rate debate, 1994 version, will be far less dramatic and ideological than the version a decade earlier, even though the government is almost certain to suggest a change in the method of payment.
Defenders of the existing system will object but their value-added emphasis and analysis of the impact of trade deals will mute the opposition.
It is as if the right wing ideologues of the marketplace, who used to argue that theirs was not ideology but common sense, have won.
To argue anything other than the wisdom or at least inevitability of market forces and laissez-faire policy is to be seen as an advocate of an out-of-date activism.
In Parliament, with the demise of the NDP as a significant voice, there is no real English Canadian defender of an activist government.
Reform is essentially anti-government and against any attempt to tinker with market forces.
The Bloc QuŽbecois has adopted the old NDP role as the defender of government activism, but its impact is limited by the realization that its goal is not the betterment, but the destruction, of Canada.
And the Liberals, the only national party in Parliament, have the usual left and right wings, but on matters of nationalism and defiance of market forces, the right wing seems far better developed.
In agriculture debates within the party, there is the odd activist voice like that of Wayne Easter, former National Farmers Union president and now rookie Liberal MP.
At this early stage, though, his radicalism seems out of step with much of his party. It surely is out of step with core thinking of the Reform Party, which plays the role of government-in-waiting.
Impact of BST
At a recent agriculture committee meeting discussing possible introduction of the dairy growth hormone bovine somatotropin, Easter asked representatives of the drug and chemical company Monsanto what the impact of a growth hormone would be on the number of Canadian dairy farms.
Leon Benoit (Vegreville), who has emerged as the leading Reform Party agriculture spokesman, thought that an inappropriate issue to raise at the agriculture committee.
“Mr. Easter, I sometimes wonder if you’re on the agriculture committee or the social programs committee when you’re concerned about the number of dairy farmers,” he said. “I think we are all concerned about how well dairy farmers do. I don’t know if that is really the issue on the agriculture committee.”
In other words, farm policy should not be about farmer welfare but about competitiveness and business issues.
A bit extreme, perhaps, but a reflection of the emerging ideology among politicians, bureaucrats and lobbyists in Ottawa.
The primary business of farming and farm policy is business. Get the fundamentals of that right and other good things will flow to those who survive on the land.
Unless there is a sea change in Ottawa thinking, this likely will be the fundamental test for policy development in the next four years.
