Is the dream of one voice for agriculture unattainable?

Saturday, January 31, 2015

Ted Menzies, the conservative activist and politician who did much to splinter the farm movement, is now lamenting the divisions that have weakened the industry's voice on Parliament Hill. But is One Big Unified Voice what farmers need or desire?

by BARRY WILSON

During the past three decades, an underlying subplot of Canadian agricultural politics has been the internecine battles between traditional farm group voices and upstart rivals who did not see their interests reflected in traditional farm lobby messaging.

An early fault line was trade policy. As agriculture appeared poised to be included in world trade talks that gained momentum in the 1980s, commodity-based splinter groups found common cause in chafing at the attempt by the federal government and the Canadian Federation of Agriculture (CFA) to promote a "balanced position" that promoted trade while defending supply management protectionism and the monopoly powers of the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB).

The December 1993 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade deal that preserved both CWB powers and triple-digit supply management tariffs while offering only tepid progress in trade liberalization proved to be something of a turning point.

On the Prairies, small conservative-minded grain sector groups, often in alliance with a strengthening Canadian cattle lobby, began to organize to challenge the CFA's right to represent itself as the voice of agriculture. They also had the power and influence of the collectivist traditional co-operative wheat pools and the National Farmers Union in their sights.

An off-shoot was the beginning of plans to create a pro-trade-liberalization group that would challenge the government to tilt its "balanced" trade position toward trade liberalization and not protectionism. The result was the birth of the influential Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance (CAFTA).

The result of all this has been an agricultural house divided, a weakened farm voice with competing messages and the delicious choice for governments of being able to play off one vision against another.

A key player in much of the civil war battles that splintered the farm voice was southern Alberta grain farmer and Progressive Conservative activist Ted Menzies. He held senior positions with the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association, Alberta Barley Commission and Grain Growers of Canada.

At the fateful 1993 GATT meeting that sealed a deal export-oriented farmers thought was a sell-out to protectionists, Menzies was in Geneva as a lobbyist representing CAFTA. The personable and admired (in some circles anyway) farmer and trade advocate moved on to a successful federal political career as a four-term southern Alberta Conservative MP who pulled almost 78 per cent of the vote in his Macleod riding south of Calgary in 2011.

Menzies ended his almost decade-long House of Commons career as the influential and popular minister of state for finance before stepping down in late 2013 to become president of CropLife Canada, the farm chemical company lobby.

Given his contribution to the splintering of the farm movement and his influential role in a government that largely excludes farm voices it does not agree with, it can only kindly be called ironic that, in a post-political interview, he lamented farmer divisions which weaken the industry's voice on Parliament Hill.

"The big challenge has always been a disparate message from so many different organizations," he told an interviewer. "Perhaps it's time we thought about an overarching organization that speaks for agriculture, that speaks to the benefits of research, the interests of the primary producer, the challenges of the processors and food distributors."

Presumably that "overarching organization" would articulate a conservative view of free trade, free enterprise and less protectionism that he fought for in the trenches.

It surely would not articulate support for supply management protectionism or calls for more government-enforced curbs on agri-business market power, as the CFA did in its House of Agriculture days that Menzies opposed.

But is the dream of One Big Unified Voice really what farmers with their myriad interests, business realities and opinions need or desire? As they like to say in politics, one size (or voice) doesn't fit all. BF

Barry Wilson is a member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery specializing in agriculture.