FORMER prime minister Kim Campbell once famously said election campaigns are not the appropriate time to discuss the details of complicated ideas.
If she meant that policy nuances get lost in the bustle of a campaign, she probably was correct.
Earnest detail gets overwhelmed and ignored in media obsession with leadership, personal attacks, vision promises and polls about who is winning the horse race.
Still, it was the wrong thing to say at the beginning of the 1993 campaign and it haunted her in a race that was the beginning of the end for the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, the Tory political family that founded Canada.
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So it would be na•ve to imagine the 2004 election campaign will produce serious debate about complicated issues that require more than slogan solutions.
Instead, expect cartoon debates about issues that lend themselves to simplistic bombast, wide of the mark as they may be.
Why is the American border still closed to Canadian live cattle?
The Liberals have dropped the ball and alienated the Americans, Conservatives will thunder. Never before have imports been allowed from a BSE country so quickly thanks to good Liberal work, will be the response.
Why is the farm economy in such dire straits?
Liberal support programs are inadequate, Conservatives will say. Government farm support is at record levels, Liberals will respond.
Yawn.
Imagine a campaign in which fundamental questions are asked and discussed and serious, nuanced answers are demanded from politicians.
Start with the question from Alberta Conservative MP Ken Epp during an agriculture committee meeting in the dying days of the last Parliament.
The victim that day was Cam Dahl, executive director of the free enterprise Grain Growers of Canada lobby group, who was on Parliament Hill to call for freer trade, a reduction in subsidies and, by the way, a temporary $1.3 billion increase in annual subsidies since that is the effect on grain industry revenues of foreign subsidies.
Epp is a low-key 10-year veteran of the Commons, born in Saskatchewan 65 years ago and later an Alberta mathematics teacher, who asks the darnedest questions.
The Conservative party, an opponent of the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly, is supposed to be an ally of the grain growers, opponents of the CWB monopoly with trade liberalization, anti-subsidy credentials.
“What’s in it for us as Canadians to be subsidizing farmers in order to produce 80 percent to simply ship out of the country at a loss?” he asked.
“Why don’t we just simply say you can’t get our grain unless you pay the price of production plus a little bit for the farmer so he can feed his family? What’s wrong with that?”
Dahl dodged and weaved. Instead of answering the question of why taxpayers should subsidize farmers who know they are exporting at a loss and want to be compensated for it because it’s unfair, he asked a question.
If we don’t export, 25,000 farmers will have no market, he said. What would happen to them?
That’s another good question, but it didn’t answer Epp’s question.
Why should farmers expect public support because world markets are unfair?
The Europeans answered that question 40 years ago in farmers’ favour but Canada never has.
Oh, for an election discussion on that.
