It’s been amazing to see the rush of moral support from Manitoba’s provincial government for the cottage owners on Dauphin Lake. Both premier Greg Selinger and local MLA and finance minister Stan Struthers headed out there quickly after a wall of lake ice overwhelmed the shore and crushed a bunch of cottages and lakeside homes this past weekend.
So far there aren’t many offers of provincial money to help these folks, hit by an “Act of God” that many insurance policies won’t cover, but the moral support from Selinger and Struthers has been quickly and passionately supplied. That’s got to help alleviate the stress, anxiety and fear that many of the affected must be feeling. That’s a pretty crucial role for government, completely apart from financial support. Governments are expected to use their moral authority to prop up the flagging spirits of their people who are in crisis.
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What amazed me about the quick visit of Selinger and Struthers to the zone was how different it has been from the way they have dealt with the ongoing crisis in the hog industry, something that is ravaging a key provincial industry, jeopardizing thousands of jobs, and destroying the livelihoods and life-savings of hard working, diligent, tax-paying farmers. We haven’t seen a provincial ag minister at a hog industry event for years, if my memory serves me right, and the only thing the premier has done hogwise is to denounce them for supposedly dumping manure into Lake Winnipeg – right before the last provincial election call.
And as I visited the cattle country around the Shoal Lakes on Sunday, an area ravaged by manmade flooding (not created by the present provincial government, unlike the Lake Manitoba situation), I heard other accounts of a lack of provincial support and care for the farmers who are getting driven out of the area, with many thousands of acres of formerly productive farmland now lost to an ever-expanding lake. This is a slow-motion disaster, so perhaps the situation doesn’t qualify for high profile visits of care and support. Who knows? I know economic disasters aren’t as dramatic as giant walls of ice smashing through human structures, but their economic  impact is obviously much greater.
It also makes me wonder whether this provincial government cares about or values non-governmental people who produce the economic wealth that powers the provincial economy. The government falls over itself to laud Manitoba Hydro, a crown corporation, for its contributions, but it seems much less excited about the contributions and successes of the thousands of independent companies and people – including farmers – who are adding much, much, much, much, much more to the provincial economy than Hydro.
I’m not saying they don’t get it on a rational, intellectual level – I don’t think they’re anti-business – but I just haven’t gotten any sense that they get it on a emotional, gut level. Or think they have to do much to nurture and encourage it.
That’s too bad, not just because farmers aren’t getting their due, but because enough neglect and – for the hog farmers – harassment could actually drive them out, or just shut them down. Both things are happening in industry-specific and localized situations. The cattle producers around the Shoal Lakes are being pushed out by a problem that’s being neglected. Something similar is happening around Lake Manitoba. Â They ain’t making no more land, as the saying goes, so if tens of thousands of acres of pasture and hayland are lost to unnecessary flooding, that’s lots of cattle, lots of tax money and some jobs that are being lost to the provincial economy. And some of the farmers will just quit the business, and already a number have, rather than try to relocate their operations.
Lots of the hog producers will just quit the business, voluntarily or with the helping hand of bankruptcy. That’s been happening.
But maybe some will just move. Saskatchewan seems more friendly to hog farmers, so if profitability returns, and Manitoba keeps up its moratoriums on hog barn development, maybe some will move west. Maybe some will move south, into North Dakota.
Farmers actually can move. Quite a few present Manitoba cattle producers are farmers who left Alberta and its too-expensive farmland years ago to find a better situation in Manitoba. Farmers don’t need to stay where the economics make their lives unviable, even if moving is harder for a farmer than it is for a landless person.
I heard about this phenomenon last week when I met with a Brazilian wheat commission head on a visit to the Canadian International Grains Institute. He told me that Brazil has actually been importing wheat from Uruguay recently because that country now produces export wheat – something it never did in the past.
Who’s producing it in Uruguay all of a sudden? Argentinian farmers, chased out by the extortionate policies of the Christina de Kirchner administration. If you want to export crops from Argentina, the government hits you with an export tax. Believe it or not. So some of the Argie farmers have moved next door to Uruguay. That’s a movement of human capital that’s already costing Argentina. The Brazilian told me that Argentine wheat quality is declining because of the loss of some of the country’s best farmers, so Brazilian buyers are looking elsewhere for wheat. Argentina’s been taking its world class farmers for granted, and they’re beginning to react to that.
So I suppose this long and rambling blog post comes down to one simple point: dynamic people are actually a commodity, and there’s a market for them. Manitoba’s got to make sure it’s in that market, because that commodity doesn’t need to stay here. Farmers might seem locked to their land and immobile, but they – like everything else in a free economy – react to signals, and the signals in Manitoba for farmers have far too often been flashing red and yellow and some are getting sick of waiting for green.
