In recent years, subtlety has not been one of the main attributes of the Ontario corn farmer lobby.
It much prefers the “throw a grenade into the garden party” approach to political discourse – mince no words and a strong offence is the best defence.
Right now, its main campaign is to convince federal and Ontario politicians that Saskatchewan and Manitoba farmers are Confederation’s whiners who already get too much help from taxpayers and are asking for more.
A secondary theme is to paint federal agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief into a corner.
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The latest polemic from the Ontario Corn Producers Association urges Vanclief to intervene in the ongoing interprovincial battle over whether future funding should be on the basis of risk or the economic value of the provincial farm sector.
The OCPA, which favors Conservative governments, suggests Vanclief follow the example of former Tory agriculture minister Don Mazankowski.
In 1988, deputy prime minister Mazankowski also took the agriculture portfolio and found that Ottawa was paying as much as 80 percent of farm support costs on the Prairies.
He laid down the law. In the future, provinces would have to pay a greater share. Ontario loved it.
“Vanclief should … remember that Mazankowski’s ability to make difficult choices, despite provincial opposition, is one reason why he is considered one of Canada’s best agriculture ministers,” said an editorial in the July issue of the OCPA magazine. “It’s tough at the top for those willing to make tough decisions.”
Vanclief can weigh that harsh assumption that he is a wimp, unwilling to put Saskatchewan and Manitoba in their place, against a growing chorus of complaints from prairie critics that he understands little about prairie problems and cares less.
But that strident Ontario view cannot be dismissed.
The corn producer lobby has easy access to both Parliament Hill and Queen’s Park. Ontario’s new agriculture minister may pay attention to an argument that the province is being pushed around.
While Ontario under a succession of Tory governments prior to 1984 considered the province the moderating and mediating centre of Canada, governments since then have been more polarized.
The OCPA arguments fit nicely into the sense of Ontario’s regional grievance and Canadian inequity.
They paint the existing safety net funding split as unfair because it compensates the failures of the volatile prairie climate and cropping system over the more stable but larger Ontario farm sector.
Saskatchewan and Manitoba ministers have their work cut out for them this summer, convincing Vanclief that their case rests on more than whining and an assumption that the rest of Canada owes the Prairies a living.
