Quebec - where agriculture is mainstream politics
Sunday, June 8, 2014
Ever since the first Parti Quebecois victory in 1976, agriculture has always been front and centre in Quebec politics. Will it also become so in the next Ontario provincial election?
by BARRY WILSON
It was a moment almost too Canadian to absorb – a Quebec separatist politician leading a Canadian nationalist on a tour of artifacts from one of the great Quebec icons of Canadian federalism.
In the summer of 2012, four-term Bloc Québécois MP and ardent Quebec sovereignist André Bellavance welcomed a visiting Anglo-Quebec journalist to his mid-Quebec riding, represented almost 140 years before by Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Canada's first Quebec Roman Catholic prime minister and the creator of a century of Liberal federalist hegemony in Quebec, and showed the visitor around Laurier's home.
"He is part of our history," said Bellavance, a former BQ agriculture critic and one of the few Bloc survivors of the 2011 NDP sweep of the province. He had been reminded of the irony of a separatist offering a sympathetic tour of a key federalist site. "People here are proud of our history."
He included during that day a visit to a local award-winning cheese producer. Typical, really, because deeply embedded in Quebec politics is a respect for the agricultural sector and its issues.
In provinces much more dependent on agriculture and food production – the Prairies and Ontario come to mind – agricultural issues usually are an electoral afterthought.
Not so in Quebec.
In 2005, Bellavance was the rookie MP and former radio newsman who proposed a motion that led to Parliament unanimously voting to protect supply management against any encroachment or compromise proposed in international trade talks.
Last month, he announced he is a candidate to become the next leader of the BQ. It is certain protecting and supporting Quebec's agricultural sector will be a key part of his campaign. It is the Quebec way.
Agriculture in Quebec politics is more mainstream than just one MP or one party. In April's Quebec provincial election, leaders of both the governing Parti Québécois (defeated) and the Liberal opposition (elected) visited Quebec farm lobby offices to pronounce farm policy and fidelity.
Liberal leader and now-premier Philippe Couillard promised a $103-million annual program to fund the transfer of farms between generations.
The PQ government with agriculture minister and legislature dean François Gendron as deputy premier promoted a "food sovereignty" agenda with local food and Quebec production as a key ingredient of an independent Quebec.
The idea has its roots in the first PQ government elected in 1976. In 1977, agriculture minister Jean Garon surprised a meeting of the Canada Grains Council in Montreal by announcing a subsidy program that would make Quebec 50 per cent food self-sufficient within five years, ensuring an independent Quebec could feed itself.
The policy had varying degrees of success and often led to accusations from other provinces that Quebec was using subsidies to buy Canadian production share. But it illustrated the point that, while far from a Canadian food-producing powerhouse, Quebec politicians consider farmers and food production to be a key part of the social contract in the province.
In most provinces with far better credentials as food powerhouses, that is not the case. Agriculture is an afterthought in political debate.
With Ontario in election mode, the premier as an activist agriculture minister and opposition Progressive Conservatives holding most rural and agricultural seats, that should not be the case in this province.
The fate of food production and processing in a province that has been losing food processing plants, and the farm sales and jobs that go with them, should be a key issue.
Can the farm/food industry make it so? BF
Barry Wilson is a member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery specializing in agriculture.