NO OFFENCE and looks can be deceiving but Larry Miller does not look like a Beatles kind of guy.
The beefy 49-year-old Ontario beef producer and second-term rural Conservative MP seems more Waylon Jennings or the Judds than Mersey Beat.
So Miller probably has not watched the 1964 Beatles’ movie A Hard Day’s Night during which (for those days) long-haired guitar player George Harrison is asked what he calls his hairstyle.
“George,” he replies.
End of conversation.
Miller would appreciate that because he also doesn’t see much in a name.
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Last week, in the midst of yet another spate of stories and accusations about whether the federal Conservative government is “scrapping” the controversial Canadian Agricultural Income Stabilization program as it promised in the election campaign or merely tinkering with it, Miller was blunt as usual.
He has spent the summer in his largely agricultural riding in Ontario’s cattle country, listening to farmers.
“Quite frankly, what it’s called doesn’t make an iota of difference to farmers,” he growled into his cell phone Sept. 1 on the way to a plowing match in his riding. “What matters is whether the program delivers. If we improve it, they won’t care what we call it.”
George, maybe.
Last week was a curious one for anyone who follows Canada’s torturous and arcane agriculture policy debates.
In the journalist dog days of summer when little is happening, an Ottawa-based wire service reporter remembered the Conservative election promise to replace the CAIS program and called the government to find out what was happening.
What has happened, of course, is that the provinces quickly tuned in the new federal agriculture minister Chuck Strahl about the fact that they like the margin-based principles of CAIS because they find them trade neutral (and truth be told, less expensive) and have no interest in seeing them scrapped. And by the way, agriculture is a shared jurisdiction so the provinces have a veto on changes.
What has followed since that first revelation meeting in Harrison Hot Springs, B.C. in March is that Strahl and the provinces have been working on compromise proposals that allow him to say the changes are substantial enough to qualify the program design as “new” while allowing the provinces to quietly raise their glasses to the defeat of another harebrained federal idea.
The Conservatives were, as Liberal critic Wayne Easter has argued, naive both about the details of CAIS and the complexity of the federal-provincial agriculture file.
But the wire service reporter wouldn’t know all that. Instead, he wrote a story that implied an election promise to farmers was being broken.
The government issued a statement saying it wasn’t. Then, people who should have known better reacted.
Newspapers with some knowledge of the file published the story that really was not new. “Unpopular farm program won’t be scrapped,” declared one newspaper that had written the story before.
Provinces and critics who have followed the debate reacted as if this was a great revelation. Ah, the power of the press to create a story. Can the real political season begin soon, please?
