Western Producer staff
For long-time Crow-debate watchers, it is the most intriguing question about the Liberal rush to get rid of transportation subsidies and regulation.
Since this has been on the corporate-academic-bureaucratic agenda for close to two decades, how could the government and pro-change forces be so ill-prepared?
The government has decided that as of this summer, subsidy and regulation policy will be turned on its head. It marks one of the most dramatic policy shifts in a half century. Yet the evidence suggests government predictions of success in this forced march to adjustment are based on wishes rather than reasoned analysis and clear understanding of the implications of the revolution they are unleashing.
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As government makes necessary cuts to spending, what can be reduced or restructured in the budgets for agriculture?
Months of parliamentary hearings this spring produced no evidence of a detailed government game plan, a credible indication that they really know the implications of what they are doing.
Farmers are losing their subsidies. How will they cope?
They will switch to different, higher-value crops or diversify into value-added, says the government.
Where is the proof or the planning documents that illustrate this? Uh, it seems logical. Econometric models point in that direction.
How about the argument that farmers losing tens of thousands of dollars in annual income and property values may not have the money to invest in new equipment or new technologies that diversification could require?
Oh, farmers will figure out a way to survive, says the government body language.
How is it possible the answers are so vague and the predictions so poorly documented when the bureaucrats, academics and business people engineering this have been dreaming in technicolor about this day since the Otto Lang era?
Didn’t they do their homework?
Canadian agriculture policy has been characterized by incremental change – one program flowing logically from the one it replaces. At its core has been a presumption that agriculture has special needs which require a government commitment of support.
The Liberals are in the process of turning that core belief on its head.
Although wrapped in rhetoric of necessity and concern, the real Liberal message these days is that there is nothing really special about agriculture. It is just another business sector. The implications are that market forces should decide who is competitive, that Canadian policy should no longer be a screen to protect farmers from market illogic or competitive pressures.
For their own reasons, most farm groups seem to have bought into this, or at least figured out there is no percentage in fighting the inevitable.
Yet the question remains – why, after two decades of debate and scheming by those who want to cut agriculture down to size, does the reality of it seem like such a leap into the unknown? Why is it still a matter of faith?
Were all those years of free-market lobbying based solely on ideology and academics’ belief in economic theory?
Didn’t anyone figure out what this might mean to farmers before unleashing this politically-motivated future on them?
