Unlike retiring Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound MP Larry Miller, none of the candidates running to replace him is a farmer.
In five parliamentary terms, Miller, a former Wiarton-area beef farmer, served more than eight years on the Agriculture Committee, including several as chair. As a result of his absence in the current campaign, when the talk turns to agriculture policy, concerned electors may have to cut the available candidates some slack.
Grey County Federation of Agriculture president Hugh Simpson, who moderated an all-candidates debate at Keady last week, estimated the GDP contribution from Ontario agriculture at about $47 billion with more than $350 million in annual farm receipts in Grey County. That number for Bruce County is even higher, more than $400 million.
When local candidates met in Keady, however, the election’s national campaign by party leaders had yet to touch on major agricultural themes. As a result, we learned little new from the local candidates about farm policy.
Truthfully, there hasn’t been much to separate the major parties on agriculture in recent years. Essentially, all parties agree — except Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada – about key points. Because Canadian agriculture produces so much more than Canadians consume, we must maintain our access to export markets. It’s a no brainer.
There’s an exception for supply-management, Canada’s 50-year-old system for limiting the production poultry and cow milk by targeting domestic consumption and restraining exports. Bernier has proposed an end to supply management, promising a phased process and compensation for affected farmers, but at an undetermined cost which would be huge.
For the others, it’s been pretty much business as usual in recent years. A period of relative prosperity in agriculture, now fading fast, led to a succession of federal-provincial agreements about agricultural priorities that included cuts to farm support programs. Last year’s sharp decline in farm income and the currently chaotic atmosphere of international trade appear to have changed current agricultural needs and the federal parties have yet to catch up.
Among local candidates, the Green Party’s Danielle Valiquette and her family live on 50 acres with horses and laying hens. She made no claim, however, at the Keady meeting to the sort of agricultural policy knowledge that comes with seasons of commercial farming.
Liberal Michael Den Tandt has the distinction of having worked as a communications advisor to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during two years of fraught negotiations that led late last year to a new trade agreement with the United States and Mexico. I should also point out, for the sake of full disclosure, he is also a former editor of this newspaper and my former boss.
Conservative Alex Ruff is a recently retired Canadian Forces colonel with distinguished service in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq. For both Ruff and Den Tandt, however, there were obvious gaps in knowledge when questioned at Keady about details of available risk management programs in agriculture.
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