A rchive Date
[ 21-07-2002 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/waugh.html
No cheque drought
By NEIL WAUGH -- Edmonton Sun
July 21, 2002
Alberta Agriculture Minister Shirley McClellan, in assessing the emergency farm aid package the Klein government announced last week, put the program in perspective. "We know that this isn't perfect," sighed the minister, herself a farmer in one of Alberta's perennially drought-stricken regions known as the "special areas."
The district is called this, by the way, because the provincial government was forced to take most of the land back from an earlier generation of farmers who went broke in the big drought in the Dirty Thirties.
McClellan is right. But the perfection she is talking about has more to do with the amount of money Alberta taxpayers are once again being asked to fork over to people in a sector of the province's economy who portray themselves as rough, tough and hard-to-bluff businessmen when it suits them.
And the stalwart guardians of an icon of rural Alberta culture called the "family farm" when things turn nasty. As they have this year with 75% of the province's agricultural land locked in a devastating drought. It not only has triggered serious crop failures but because many cattle ranchers have run out of pasture and are now facing severe winter feed shortages, they are selling off their herds, many of which took generations to build up.
But while McClellan was trying to portray this year's crisis as like no other, her instructions to farmers signalled otherwise. Receiving a farm bailout in Alberta now appears to be as routine and simple as buying a lottery ticket - and generally more rewarding.
"Check the box, fax it in and we will mail the cheque," she beamed.
All the data is already in the government computers from last year when the Klein government went to the taxpayers' well for a similar one-time-only emergency farm program.
All the support payments and special assistance programs combined, by McClellan's own admission, will hit $1 billion this year. And how much of this is already in the budget, and how much must be scooped out of next year's surplus, has not been made clear by Finance Minister Pat Nelson.
Since she must also find more money for forest fire-fighting, flood damage, teachers wage settlements and regional health authorities, it better be big.
At the same time her financial management commission - which was clearly held hostage by special interests led by the construction lobbies - wants her to raid the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund to build $800 million in delayed infrastructure projects.
The real Alberta budget, when it is presented in the last week of August along with the first-quarter results, will bear little resemblance to the phoney document that the MLAs debated for all those weeks in the spring.
"Farmers don't like ad hoc programs and the government doesn't like ad hoc programs," McClellan spat. Then she went ahead and announced one that's so ad hoc and untargeted that every farmer gets a cheque, whether he's flat broke and busted or a Calgary oil company executive with a spread in the foothills where he can enjoy his six-figure lifestyle and play cowboy.
All this was done while McClellan and her team of bureaucrats were standing in the middle of a field that hadn't yielded a crop in five years - as though that was a symbol for something. Well it was. But not in the way it was supposed to be.
If the land hasn't produced a cent of income in half a decade, why on earth is someone still farming it? And why are Alberta taxpayers - who don't have an entire department of the government riding to their rescue when they lose their jobs - paying for it?
A little while back the Klein government held one of those navel-gazing sessions called an agricultural summit where it was agreed by all the special interests that attended that farming was a good thing but only if the "safety nets" (the agribiz name for subsidies) were better. Apparently nobody dared ask the question of why we need so many unproductive, money-losing, subsidy-eating farms?
And why are we encouraging farmers to destroy massive tracts of wildlife habitat, pollute watercourses and turn a large part of the province into toxic, bio-diversity-free deserts to grow crops that nobody wants to buy at a price where the business can break even?
At least in the United States they have the good sense to pay the farmers to stop farming and turn their land back to the birds and the deer. In Alberta it appears the only way they can get a subsidy is to grow more.
As McClellan says, the system is far from perfect.
Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@edm.sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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