VIKING, Alta. — All is quiet on the western front — very quiet.
Election campaign? What election campaign?
After driving through Prince Edward Island and rural Ontario, where hard-fought battles come with the usual election sign wars, it was jarring to drive through rural Saskatchewan and Alberta late last week and on the weekend to see precious little evidence that an election is underway.
Let’s just say that if Ottawa’s Five Man Electrical Band songwriter and front man Les Emmerson had been driving through the rural Prairies during the 2011 election rather than rural Illinois in 1970, he would never have written his classic lyrics, “Signs, signs, everywhere signs, cluttering up the scenery….”
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There are few signs cluttering up the prairie scenery.
It is perhaps a sign in itself. Most prairie election races are forgone conclusions. Why waste precious campaign money on signs?
Of course, that doesn’t mean that intense political conversations aren’t happening in the living rooms and coffee shops of the Prairies.
Last week, Vegreville-Wainwright Conservative candidate and six-time MP Leon Benoit found himself in a coffee shop conversation with constituent Gerard Wadley, a supporter.
Wadley identified himself to a visiting reporter as the second biggest redneck in Viking.
Who is the first?
“Dunno, but there must be one. They just haven’t found him yet.”
For Benoit, who has played right wing for the Reform/Conservative party for 17 years, hockey town Viking must be a comfortable place. It is home of the fabled Sutter NHL brothers and until last weekend Ottawa Senators coach Cory Clouston, who led the team in 2010-11 to its worst result in years before being fired.
Much of what Wadley had to tell the candidate was positive: he is a supporter, the Conservatives are on the right track, the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly must be ended.
However, he also had a bone to pick about the growing power of corporations in the food system, the ability of Monsanto and others hold farmers captive.
“Within years, the seed companies will control the food system and that’s not right,” said Wadley. “We can’t let the big corporations control us.”
Then Benoit was let off the hook.
“That’s why we need a majority Conservative government to deal with these companies.”
Benoit said it was a reflection of farmer anger at the growing lack of competition among upstream and downstream companies farmers must deal with, a sentiment he supports.
From the conversation that seemed to satisfy Wadley, it wasn’t clear how a majority Conservative government will solve the issue of the farmer right to save seed for replanting, or of corporate power in the market.
But Benoit was able to leave the encounter having reassured another voter about the importance of a majority Conservative victory May 2.
