Last week’s announcement of subsidy-matching aid to Liberal-connected and Montreal-based mega-corporation Bombardier Inc. hit the farm population like a sledgehammer.
Farm lobbyists have been demanding subsidy equivalents to the Americans.
Ottawa has said it is inappropriate and unaffordable. Suddenly, Bombardier receives subsidy equivalents to the Brazilians because 24,000 aerospace jobs are at risk.
About 100,000 farms and hundreds of thousands of food industry jobs are at risk in the battle for grains and oilseeds market share.
A few thousand eastern Canadian aerospace jobs? Eh? But what should be the appropriate response?
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Should farmers demand that prime minister Jean Chrétien fire the hapless Lyle Vanclief and install Newfoundlander Brian Tobin as agriculture minister? After all, in promising aid to Bombardier, Tobin said it was to match unfair foreign subsidies.
Hey, what about us?
Or should westerners say that it was another reason to be alienated, a clear case of western farmers shunned while rich Quebec firms are supported?
In fact, the farm reaction against the Bombardier announcement came from the West and Ontario, so it was difficult to paint it as an east-west slight.
But westerners will remember the Bombardier affair as the Liberal version of the 1987 Conservative decision to award a maintenance contract for the CF-18 fighter jets to a Montreal firm, rather than accept a cheaper bid from a Winnipeg company.
This generation of Liberals seems prone to making the bone-headed political judgments that give western physicians who specialize in blood pressure treatment a surplus of work.
And this generation of westerners seems anxious to find a reason to uncover another slight from Ottawa.
Last week, a Saskatchewan friend complained that the Jan. 11 resignation of Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard rated a four-hour special on CBC Newsworld. The earlier resignation of Saskatchewan
premier Roy Romanow rated just a fraction of the time.
“Bouchard tried to break up the country. Romanow tried to save it. Who is the most important?”
Earlier, some CBC prairie types wondered if it would be appropriate to do a story on the fact Ottawa seemed more anxious to help Prince Edward Island potato producers fight American restrictions than to compensate prairie farmers.
Wasn’t this a clear example of the contempt in which the Liberals hold the West?
Well no, not necessarily. The nature of the news business is to give people who try to blow up schools more coverage than people who organize a parent-teacher group.
Bouchard versus Romanow? No contest.
And P.E.I. potatoes being kept out of the United States on questionable trade-rule legality versus prairie farmers with low incomes because of legal, if odious, American subsidies?
Again, it is no contest.
But the West seems in search of grievances. The Liberals seem oblivious.
It is not a formula for increased federal legitimacy west of the Ontario-Manitoba border.
