WHERE is the urgency? Why aren’t Canada’s agriculture ministers busy trying to close the gaps that so far have prevented the emergence of a fully formed next generation of farm policies?
Officials from Ottawa and the provinces continue to work behind the scenes but only ministerial negotiation and decision will fill the big gaps that remain to be filled if there is to be a comprehensive plan.
Yet the earliest they are getting together again is late October, a full four months after they cobbled together a high-level agreement-in-principle in Whistler, B.C., that left many of the key funding and program design issues still to be resolved.
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At the time, no one realized how much later “later” really was.
In little more than six months, the Agricultural Policy Framework and its array of programs is scheduled to expire.
The politicians have promised a replacement. But across the country, farmers and delivery officials who depend on those programs for business risk management funding, farm environmental and food safety support and many other services are nervously eyeing the March 31, 2008 deadline and wondering what will replace it.
“If there isn’t a clear signal by early winter that funding will continue in the new fiscal year, interest in the program clearly will wane,” says one provincial director of farm environmental plan programming. “The lack of predictability clearly is undermining the program’s credibility.”
That unease also led the Canadian Federation of Agriculture board of directors to insist this summer that the government “ensure that transitional funding and policy direction for on-farm food safety programs (and environmental plans) are in place immediately so as to allow a ‘seamless transfer between frameworks’ and to maintain program momentum.”
Issues still at play in the aftermath of the sometimes-acrimonious Whistler meeting include federal-provincial cost-sharing arrangements for disaster assistance, the definition of a disaster and details of a promised production insurance scheme.
Then there is the touchy subject of whether Ottawa will reverse itself and agree to resume co-funding of province-specific companion programs. The issue will play out in rural Ontario throughout the provincial election campaign as the Liberals try to win rural voters by noting they have funded their 40 percent of a provincial risk management program but the federal Conservatives have refused their share.
So why aren’t the ministers more actively and visibly engaged on the file, or at least signaling there will be an extension?
Officially, federal minister Gerry Ritz canceled a tentatively scheduled early September meeting because he was new to the job and needed more time to prepare.
Unofficially, he said he did not want the politics of two and maybe three provincial election campaigns to turn the next meeting into a bash-Ottawa affair.
But waiting out the provincial campaigns will not get federal-provincial politics out of the mix. And with a possibility that elections will inject new provincial ministers into the negotiations, presumably they will need time to get up to speed as well.
The clock continues to tick toward March 31.
So back to the beginning: where is the urgency? Tens of thousands of farmers are watching.
