Canada: Leading the Way Backwards Again

I'd written about soils and desertification last week, so was disappointed to see this today. I don't think any comments are needed, and probably shouldn't be written down anyway, I'll just say them out loud to myself.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/canada-first-country-to-pull-out-of-un-drought-convention/article10475872/

Canada first country to pull out of UN drought convention

ENVIRONMENT

• by MIKE BLANCHFIELD
• March 28, 2013

The Harper government is pulling out of a United Nations convention that fights droughts in Africa and elsewhere, which would make Canada the only country in the world outside the agreement.
The federal cabinet last week ordered the unannounced withdrawal on the recommendation of Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, ahead of a major scientific meeting on the convention next month in Germany.

The abrupt move caught the UN secretariat that administers the convention off-guard, which was informed through a telephone call from The Canadian Press.
The cabinet order “authorizes the Minister of Foreign Affairs to take the actions necessary to withdraw, on behalf of Canada, from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, in those Countries Experiencing Severe Drought and/or Desertification, particularly in Africa.”
Canada signed the convention in 1994 and ratified it in 1995. Every UN nation – 194 countries and the European Union – is currently a party to it.
The UN body has a research committee dedicated to finding ways to stop the spread of droughts that lay waste to farmland across the planet, particularly Africa.
Scientists, governments and civil society organizations are headed to Bonn next month “to carry out the first ever comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of desertification, land degradation and drought,” says a notice from the United Nations Environment Program.
“Also, for the very first time, governments will provide concrete data on the status of poverty and of land cover in the areas affected by desertification in their countries.”
The issue of encroaching deserts has become urgent because of renewed droughts that have plunged millions into poverty in Africa’s Sahel belt last year and in East Africa the year before.
The Bonn-based secretariat for the UN body said no Canadian official had contacted them about the withdrawal.
“We cannot comment on something that is not communicated officially to the secretariat or to the United Nations,” said a spokeswoman, who added she planned to contact the secretariat’s legal office for advice.
Mr. Baird’s office referred questions to the Canadian International Development Agency, which rejected a request for an interview.
A spokesman for International Co-operation Minister Julian Fantino said in an e-mailed statement that “membership in this convention was costly for Canadians and showed few results, if any for the environment.”
Mr. Fantino’s office refused to answer follow-up questions, including how much money was being saved by the move, and when Canada planned to notify the UN of its decision.
Government documents show Canada provided a $283,000 grant to support the convention from 2010 to 2012.
NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar said the decision “shows … that the government is clearly outside of what is international norms here. We’re increasing our isolation by doing this.”
He also questioned why the government didn’t announce the decision.
“The questions are Why are we doing this? Who is behind this? And it would appear they just got caught doing this. They didn’t make an announcement about this,” Mr. Dewar said.
“Was this something they were hoping no one would notice?”
The decision could stoke more criticism of the Harper government’s record on the environment.
Canada, along with Japan, Russia and New Zealand, joined the United States in opting out of the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
The government has also faced widespread criticism for muzzling scientists, leading to a recent complaint to the federal information commissioner to look into the matter.
Its decision to cut the funding for the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy has also sparked an outcry.
Mr. Baird has suggested the closing of the think tank was because the government did not want to pay for advice that did not fit with the government’s general direction.
The roundtable had warned repeatedly that the federal government would not be able to meet its targets for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions without putting a price on carbon, an idea the Conservatives vehemently oppose.
“Desertification, along with climate change and the loss of biodiversity, were identified as the greatest challenges to sustainable development during the 1992 Rio Earth Summit,” says the secretariat’s description of the 1994 convention.
It calls the convention the “sole legally binding international agreement linking environment and development to sustainable land management.”
Canada has also been an active participant in the convention, and has said it was in the country’s national interest to be a party to it.
The Canadian International Development Agency – soon to be merged into the Foreign Affairs Department – has administered Canada’s participation and affirmed that fact in an undated, 40-page report.
The report says that Canada is an “Affected Party” under the treaty because of “the existence of drylands in the Canadian prairies.”
The convention, the report states, requires Canada “to ensure that desertification issues are integrated into its national sustainable development plans and policies.”
The convention also obliges its parties “to report on activities undertaken to address the problem,” says the CIDA report.
“Our status as Party to this Convention is in our national interest because this Convention (and related issues like biodiversity), and the global thinking which is emanating from it, will benefit our own vision and approach of how we address our own, and the world’s drylands,” the report concluded.
In a May, 2008, speech to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development, Canada’s representative said in a prepared text that “Canada has been a strong supporter” of the convention.
The text said that “Canada applauds” the efforts of the convention’s executive secretary “to elevate the profile of desertification as a key environment and development issue, and will continue to support activities to combat desertification, land degradation and drought” in keeping with the goals of the convention.

The Many Sides of Slow Food

It's grey, wet, cold on Canada's East Coast, with hardly any signs of Spring,  so how about something to feel hopeful about.


http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/slow-food-quickens-the-pace/?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

Slow Food Quickens the Pace

• by MARK BITTMAN
• March 26, 2013

AMSTERDAM — It may be that Slow Food’s original focus on taste and the quality of food — on gastronomy — simply seemed too narrow, and therefore elitist. But at least since its “Puebla Declaration” [1]in 2007, Slow Food has become a force to be reckoned with, probably the only international organization that integrates concerns about the environment, tradition, labor, health, animal welfare … along with real cooking, taste and pleasure.
Slow Food was founded by Carlo Petrini, who remains its president. He was a food writer when he launched a protest in 1986 against the opening of an enormous McDonald’s branch (more than 400 seats) in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna (better known to Anglophones as the Spanish Steps) — the first McDonald’s in Italy. More than 20 years before the coining of the term “locavore” and “the Omnivore’s Dilemma,” Petrini saw the battle as being against the industrialization of food, and now, a generation later, he was clearly prescient.
The situation has gotten both better and worse in the intervening time: fast food is practically hegemonic; cooking is often seen as little more than a lovely hobby for those with “time”; the number of small- and medium-size farms has plummeted; and although there is good food to be had by any who can afford it, overall production could hardly be more industrial.
There is, however, a growing movement of people who believe that we can reduce both hunger and obesity while improving the quality of food, the life of farmers, the impact of agriculture on the environment and health, and so on. And Petrini has become, especially in Europe, a man to be listened to on all of these subjects, an elder statesman who’s recognized as a founding father of this movement.
We were both at the Food Film Festival here, organized by a branch of Slow Food called the Youth Food Movement. I had an opportunity to sit and chat with Petrini. (“Chat” may be the wrong word, since we spoke in three languages, only one of which I’m any good at; there is interpretation and a small amount of paraphrasing here.)
First I asked if my original misperceptions of Slow Food as an organization of “gourmets” was wrong. He had two answers to this. First: “The nature of Slow Food has changed. When we began Terra Madre” — a biennial conference in Turin, Italy — “we were joined by Asians, Africans and Latin Americans, and we realized that ‘gastronomy’ was perceived by everyone in different ways, because our histories and conditions are different. But we all realized we had something in common, and that this fraternity was an important value.”
But, he reminded me, “gastronomy is holistic. It’s not only recipes and cooking but agriculture, physics, biology, genetics, chemistry, history, economy, politics and ecology. If we adapt this vision of gastronomy, our relationships with food and each other changes.”
One problem, of course, was that gastronomy became equated with “gourmet-ism,” or something of concern only to bon vivants. (He uses the word “gastronomer” as we might use “foodie” or, more kindly, one who appreciates the pleasures of food.) But now, he said: “A gastronomer who is not an environmentalist is just stupid. Whereas an environmentalist who is not a gastronomer is sad. It’s possible to change the world even while preserving the concept of the right of pleasure.”
These, of course, are not the only challenges:
“People in rich countries need to regenerate our way of thinking to give value to food, which has been lost in the last 50 years. As a result, we have a systems crisis: by using more energy than we produce to grow food — and we’re using 76 percent of our water for agriculture — we’re reaching the end of the planet’s resources. And young people understand we can’t survive with this and are beginning to act. Not just Slow Food and this Youth Food Movement. Look at Occupy.
“The main difficulty is that politicians don’t understand that we need a new paradigm. They continue with the old ones: finance, production, consumption and waste.
“So we’re producing enough food for 12 billion people, yet 1 billion out of our 7 billion aren’t eating enough. And we hear that because there will be 9 billion people in 2050, we must produce more. But more production creates more environmental problems and more waste.”
On solutions: “First is the local economy. Rather than move food from one country to another, we need to change the system of distribution and help the farmers around our houses. We have people who want to farm but cannot — why can huge companies get credit but young farmers cannot? — and we have a broken knowledge chain that we need to rebuild. We need a stronger and more productive dialogue between ‘official’ science and traditional knowledge.
“We have to break down the separation between production and consumption and say ‘we are all citizens’ — a new concept of respect for agriculture is very important. We must give back the value of menial work, pay farmers fairly and use their products, even if it means giving them away to poor people. Obviously that’s better than wasting it.
“This is a process related to a new civilization.”
My interpretation: a democratic food system is possible only in a real democracy, and working for or creating one of these means working for or creating both.
Have we made progress? Should we be hopeful? When I ask these questions, his response is almost exactly what I heard from Wendell Berry a year ago. “Everything has to start again, but everything already has started again,” Petrini said. “Sometimes I see this crisis and I’m not optimistic, but then I look at the communities that are changing the way they live. This is a river that is flowing under the soil and it is soon going to come out.
“We can access a new vision, but it will take patience. Politics is a problem, but you can already see the way. It’s straight and determined, but this is a slow revolution. Slow. Slow.”
Finally, I asked him about the rumors of him becoming Italy’s minister of agriculture: “That would be crazy,” he answered. “Slow Food is more important.” Maybe so.
1. Which includes statements like “Our well-being cannot be measured purely by quantitative indicators and without taking into account the well-being of other species and of the planet itself.”

If You Care About the Soil, This Really Matters

I tried in my journalism career, and now in columns and this blog to not overstate things.  I think it's important to try to persuade with facts and arguments, not hyperbole, and I also accept that we all have beliefs and opinions that have been hard won, and we give them up very reluctantly.  So I say "this really matters" with care, but I really think this does.

Last month a man called Allan Savory gave a "TED TALK".  (TED is a buffet of smart people talking about important things. Googling TED when you've got a spare minute or two is never time wasted.)  Savory has spent his life trying to understand  desertification, that agonizing loss of soil fertility that threatens so many,  and is getting worse because of climate change. He's discovered (and presents a lot of visual proof of his findings) that properly managed, intensive livestock production improves soil fertility, producing food that otherwise wouldn't be available. This is totally contrary to what most of us have been told, that livestock overgrazing is the CAUSE of desertification.  So please take a few minutes to view his presentation. It will give you something  to feel very positive about.

http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change.html

Something I Want to Believe

For many it will feel like spin, a public relations exercise.  I want to believe it's more than that. The PEI Potato Board issued a news release this week fully supporting the work of the "fish kill committee" appointed after last summer's fish kill in the Trout River watershed in Western PEI. There's more information on all of this below, but let's think about the news release for a moment. First it acknowledges that farm field run-off after a heavy rain was the reason the fish died. That seems obvious to many, but the position of farm organizations has often been that farmers are easy to blame, so people should wait for more proof.  Secondly the release links together environmental sustainability and economic well-being:
" Environmentally sustainable production of potatoes is not only in the best interest of the natural environment and all Islanders, but it is also the most economically sustainable option for growers, the P.E.I. Potato Board says."
It's not that farmers didn't believe that before,  in fact many would say quietly sitting in their kitchens, "We know we can't keep farming the way we have" or "that Sharon Labchuk isn't all wrong you know". It just seemed impossible to say this publicly, that somehow it would be giving in to anti-pesticide radicals.
Now saying the right words, and doing the right things are completely different exercises, and commercial farming carries a lot of risk financially and environmentally.   Farmers make decisions every day that lessen or increase those risks, but clearly stating that  environmental damage is not a necessary or legitimate cost of farming is a good start.

And I think there are other risks coming from the "fish kill" committee's findings. This is from a column I recently wrote:



It was last July when the government appointed a committee to look at why there have been so many fish kills in Barclay Brook, part of the Trout River watershed in Western PEI,  twice in the last two years, and four times in the last decade.  There was a sense of urgency to the committee’s work,  with September  14th originally mentioned as a deadline.  That was extended through the Fall, and committee members were told the government definitely wanted recommendations by November. The report is dated November 14.

It wasn’t so much released to the public as dribbled out in late February.  There’s no reference to it at all on the “News Room” page of the provincial government  website where virtually every development, big and small, is referenced. (It can be found here: http://www.gov.pe.ca/photos/original/elj_suslndmngt.pdf  ) The environment minister Janice Sherry was unprepared to comment on it which in itself hints that the release wasn’t stage managed the way these things normally are.

All of this seems a little strange until you see that one of the recommendations involves money, $200,000 a year to take environmentally risky land out of production for good.  With the “release” coming almost in March, rather than last fall the Minister can safely argue that it can’t be included in this year’s budget, and put it off for another year. Now I’m just guessing that’s what’s happened,  but we know the province is broke, and that this kind of expenditure won’t be an easy sell to a public already suspicious of paying farmers to “do the right thing”.

I think the committee did a good job, and was right to resist what could have been seen as an easy fix: increase buffer zones again from 15 to 20 meters.  The fact that even with heavy rains last summer, the fish kill was isolated to one stretch in one tributary of one river, means a lot of other farmers across the province  were doing the right things (that’s the good news). 

And there are some excellent recommendations with minimal costs: using the “dammer-dyker” that creates hundreds of little settling ponds in potato furrows to absorb water, nutrients and pesticides, and even more important, a plan to promote the build-up of organic matter in soils, something that can bind up pesticides on fields and keep them  where they’re needed.  From the report:  “The pilot project’s goal is to increase the amount of organic matter within the crop producing area of a field which in turn would reduce losses of pesticides in field runoff.” (That by the way was also a recommendation in the Roundtable report from almost twenty years ago, I’m just saying)

But it’s the money recommendation that’s the most controversial, and risky for the committee. It obviously felt that tinkering with rules and regulations just wasn’t good enough for some fields, and that they just shouldn’t be used for row cropping, period.  Putting the purchase of this land off for another year, or two, or three means the chance of another fish kill remains. I think it is reasonable to pay farmers fair value for the land, it would have been bought with the understanding that it could generate income, and we all benefit from nutrients and pesticides staying out of waterways. Does that land now get held “hostage” while government decides whether it will pay or not, farmers thinking that if they voluntarily take it out of production there’ll be no reason for compensation. This has the makings of something pretty ugly.  The government must decide whether it will support this recommendation or not, delaying is the worst option.

There are not just carrots, but  sticks at play here too. We’re still waiting for the serious charges under the Federal Fisheries Act against Prince County grower Warren Ellis to be heard in court.

Perhaps the most important thing to come from the committee was acknowledging that one rule doesn’t fit all,  that farmers need to take a step back and not ask how close can I get to the waterway and stay within the rules, but rather ask what do I need to do to keep pesticide and nutrient run-off to a minimum if there’s a heavy rain.  That’s the environmental regulation that will be most productive.

It's OK To Fire Up the BBQ

For more than five decades we've been hearing about the evils of eating red meat. The latest study came out about a week ago,  with predictable coverage. I did find a contrary piece and it didn't come from a beef producers group or McDonalds.  Mother Jones is a hard headed publication that stays on the progressive side of politics and environmental coverage, so a piece questioning the "hair on fire"  reports on red meat consumption was a surprise, and for me a welcome one. I still think to have sustainable agriculture with falling rates of erosion and pesticide use, livestock needs to be in the middle of it, eating the hay and forage from longer crop rotations, and supplying manure for soil building.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/03/eat-burger-wont-kill-you

 

Science: Beef Good, Bacon Not So Bad

A new European study claims an increase in processed meat consumption rasises the risk of early death. But the real news? Red meat won't kill you.

• by Stephanie Mencimer
• March 18, 2013

Joshua Resnick/Shutterstock

Earlier this month, researchers announced the results of a big new nutritional study in Europe that seemed to yield more evidence that processed meats like bacon and sausage can lead to an early grave. The media responded with the usual "Death By Salami" headlines. What news outlets downplayed about the study, though, is that despite their best efforts, the EU researchers couldn't find any evidence that red meat will kill you. In fact, the study shows that not eating red meat is a risk factor for an early demise.
After correcting some measurement errors, the researchers in Europe had to conclude that not only was red meat intake "no longer associated with mortality" but "all-cause mortality was higher among participants with very low or no red meat consumption."

The government, public health advocates, and the American Heart Association have long warned Americans that overconsumption of red meat can lead to heart disease and other ailments. Yet the scientific evidence supporting this hypothesis has always been weak. And in fact, this month's study isn't the first to fly in the face of these assumtions. A large study in Japan also found no increase in heart disease deaths from moderate meat consumption as well.
And last year, Harvard researchers published another similar large study. The media reporting on the study declared that researchers had found that "adding an extra portion of unprocessed red meat to someone's daily diet would increase the risk of death by 13%. The figures for processed meat were higher, 20% for overall mortality." But the Harvard data also showed that meat consumption had a protective effect for a lot of people. Up to a certain point, people who ate more of it fared better than those who ate little or none. The source of some of this confusion is simple: People who eat junk food are unhealthy in myriad ways that make it nearly impossible to zero in on a single food item as the source of their health woes.
To see what I mean, let's take a closer look at the EU study. Known as the European Prospective Investigation in Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC), it included more than half a million people from 10 European countries, who were queried on a host of different factors, from how much and what they ate to their levels of education, their age, their weight, and whether they'd ever smoked. The study indicated that people who eat a lot of processed meats are also more likely to smoke, eat few fruits and vegetables, and have lower levels of education. They're much fatter and exercise less than the rest of the sample. And men in this category are also serious boozers. Oh, and  the heavy meat eaters were older, too—so many of them were well into their 70s by the time they suffered the consequences of too many sausage rolls.
And the people who ate the most processed meat—which the study qualifies as more than 160 grams per day (about six sausage links' worth)—didn't only die of cardiovascular diseases and cancer, the things we associate with a bad diet; they also died of lots of "other causes," a category that includes car crashes, accidental injuries, and other non-food related causes. (The study's big chicken eaters, on the other hand, were the Girl Scouts of the data pool: They don't smoke much, they eat lots of vegetables, exercise, go to college, and no doubt brush their teeth, wear seatbelts, and get regular check-ups.)
The researchers did try to adjust for the booze and smoking, education, and even sugar consumption, but they couldn't completely factor those things out or there would be very few people left in the study. Out of 127,000 or so male participants, a mere 619 were heavy processed meat eaters who'd never smoked. And as it turns out, the scientists couldn't find a significant association between heavy processed meat consumers and non-smokers, only former or current smokers—a finding they acknowledge is "compatible with residual confounding by smoking." Which begs the question: Is it the bacon or is the cigarettes that's killing these people? Concluding that it's only the bacon that's the culprit here seems like a stretch.
What's more, not even one percent of of the people who died during the 12 years of the study were among those who ate the most processed meat. Zoe Harcombe, a British obesity researcher (and a participant in the EPIC study), points out that the researchers had to group the participants in an unusual way, so that the number of people in the high-processed meat consumption category is very small. (There were so few women in this category that the association with processed meats and mortality wasn't statistically significant for them.) She writes, "This is like doing a survey about alcoholism and mortality and making the top group so small that it includes Billie Holiday and George Best and making headlines on this basis."
Of course there are plenty of good health reasons to avoid processed meats—think pink slime or listeria—not to mention environmental ones like factory farming and climate change. The EU researchers also point to salt, extra fat, and carcinogens like nitrite that are found in processed food as potential culprits that should make any health nut wary. But not all processed meat is created equal, either. The difference between some nice Italian prosciutto and that Spam-like stuff in Lunchables is vast (and perhaps one reason why Italians have a longer life expectancy than Americans).
In the final equation, eating some bacon for breakfast now and then probably isn't going to kill you, and eating a nice (grass-fed) steak once in a while might even extend your life.

A Different Perspective

I've whined and complained a lot in this blog about the challenges facing Maritime farmers, higher costs, a long way from the big consumer markets, and how the current laissez-faire attitude of the federal government in particular isn't good for agriculture in this region. It's not an easy message to get out, because the national media is full of good news stories about agriculture, and there's no question that grain and oilseed producers in Western Canada and the United States are "in the hay".  I came across a piece written by a recent and interested visitor to PEI, and was pleased to see that he got it, and really expressed the challenges much more forcefully than I have.

"The passion to stay and fight is always strong, but the economic pull from other regions of Canada is too. That made it so different from Ontario agriculture, which I am very used to. These people are fighting for their farming future. "

http://www.todaysfarmer.ca/2013/03/13/fighting-for-their-farming-livelihood-in-pei-a-continuing-challenge 

Fighting for their farming livelihood: in PEI

• by Philip Shaw Wednesday, March 13, 2013 1:29:40 EDT PM
• March 13, 2013

 Mid-February I found myself sitting in a plane destined for Prince Edward Island. I had been asked to come to Prince Edward Island to speak to the Agri-Insight and Prince Edward Island conference, sponsored by the Prince Edward Island Agri-Alliance. This group had been put together a few years ago to try to foster agricultural economic growth in the province after some particularly hard times.
    I was asked to speak on the volatility of grains and oilseeds with particular emphasis on Prince Edward Island.
    Other speakers talked about bringing innovation in agriculture and food to Prince Edward Island. It was a great conference, one in which your loyal scribe learned quite a bit.
    It was obvious to me after I received the invitation to go to Prince Edward Island that I needed to know how cash grains basis behaved on the island. Basis is always somewhat of a measurement of supply and demand for localized grain, but this being Atlantic Canada I knew I was a bit out of my element.
    So I contacted the General Manager of Prince Edward Island Grain Elevators Corporation, Neil Campbell. Neil filled me in on the nuances and challenges of pricing grain in Canada's smallest province.
    80% of the agricultural commodities produced in Prince Edward Island are exported because of the relatively small population and the relatively good propensity to produce. For instance one of the things I was very interested in was the transportation cost of grain to end-users, wherever they may be. For instance, in Ontario there are many end-users, especially when you consider the export market on our doorstep. However, that is not the case in Prince Edward Island because it is a long ways away from everything, end-users included. If you farm on Prince Edward Island, you have to be willing to innovate to survive.
    It costs $60 per tonne to move corn and soybeans to and from Prince Edward Island from various end-users and originators in Ontario and Québec. That is a very high cost, but there is really no other way. With regard to production agriculture in Prince Edward Island, everything surrounds the potato rotation. So after the potatoes get their acres, then it is time for grains and oil seeds to get their place in the sun.
    In 2001 there was 5000 acres of soybeans and in 2012 there were 60,000 acres of soybeans. Despite the high transportation costs, islanders are producing soybeans at a continual record pace.
    Much of the grain in Prince Edward Island gets shipped for those high fees into Ontario or Québec end-users or ends up in Halifax and other points in Atlantic Canada. For instance it costs about $25 a tonne to ship grains and oil seeds from Prince Edward Island to Halifax elevators. These various transportation cost parameters define the success of farmers on the island. It is a tall order to make it all work. Innovation and flexibility is key. Eking out a living in this small island province is a continual challenge, masked with a passion for what it is to be a Prince Edward Islander.
    The continual challenge of farming was very evident at the conference. It was all about innovation, achieving food excellence in finding ways to sustain farming on Prince Edward Island. It was very evident to me that sustainability was not taken for granted here and that the conference organizers were extremely dedicated to finding ways to make agriculture thrive on Prince Edward Island. The alternative was the very real specter of failure, which in this maritime outpost is always around the corner.
    The passion to stay and fight is always strong, but the economic pull from other regions of Canada is too. That made it so different from Ontario agriculture, which I am very used to. These people are fighting for their farming future.
    Ditto the same for much of Atlantic Canadian agriculture. The question is, how much should the rest of Canada care and should the federal government be worried about that? Of course the answer is yes, this is Canada and whether you are from Ontario, southern Saskatchewan or rural PEI it doesn't matter. We are all Canadians and we have a responsibility to each other.
    In fact, in Canadian agriculture, we could use a little bit of that Prince Edward Island attitude wherever we are. They are fighting for their agricultural industry in a hostile unforgiving environment. Compared to them, the rest of us are on cruise control. I still don't get that Anne of Green Gables thing. However, don't underestimate her, she is who she is. PEI agriculture is too. They know what they need to do, and no stone will be left unturned getting there. 

Canadians to Be Proud Of

We've lost a couple in the last month. Some great tributes to Stomp'n Tom through the week. People who knew him much better than me talked about everything from his extraordinarily good song writing, to his genuine affection for Canada and Canadians. He really gave the voiceless a chance to be heard.

Another loss but not so well-known was Eugene Whelan. There's an amazing story about how his diplomacy had a big impact on creating perestroika in the former Soviet Union. That story below, but first a short column on why I'll miss Eugene Whelan.

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Eugene Whelan was a lot more than a large man wearing a green Stetson.  The timing of his death in late February gives all of us one more chance to appreciate his stubbornly unique view of the role government should play in agriculture, just as that view is under severe attack. With European trade negotiators complaining that Canada has to “give” more to get a deal (that give will include giving up some import protection for the dairy industry), and the Conservative government determined that the road to riches is in export not domestic markets, the Whelan doctrine is slowly being dismantled.

        What people forget is that Eugene Whelan said no to farmers as often as he said yes. The video footage dragged out by the television media after his death always includes Quebec dairy farmers dumping milk on agriculture minister. He had refused a subsidy after world dairy markets had collapsed.  What he did give farmers (and consumers) was a regulated marketing system called supply management that limited production just to demand, and in return assured farmers a price based on the cost of production. It’s been twisted and turned by both farmers and economists over the years, and is in need of reform. Whelan insisted that the quota used to limit supply be free and belong to the government. Instead it’s become a recognized asset, often the most valuable thing on the farm, limiting new entrants and raising serious questions about whether farmers are paid too much. 

         Here’s the thing. While Europe and the United States were (are) in a bidding war to subsidize farmers and compete in export markets, Whelan realized Canada didn’t have the resources to play that game and did something completely different: carve out a Canadian domestic market to supply, and just as important make sure that everyone in the marketing chain is treated fairly. It’s not what processors and retailers are used to, but it’s created considerable stability for dairy, poultry and egg farmers, even in the Maritimes where farmers struggle with higher costs.  This isn’t the vision of the current government.

         The timing of Whelan’s death is also interesting with the “horsemeat” scandal in Europe. Many observers have said the cross-border trading of meat, and the fiercely competitive forces in the marketing chain are partly to blame. That just doesn’t happen in a regulated system where everyone knows what they can sell and at what price. It’s the not the “wild west” economics that financial commentators like, but it’s worked pretty well.

         We should also remember the confidence in Whelan given by Pierre Trudeau, not  a man who suffered fools lightly. The marketing boards created by Whelan were as controversial back then as they are now, including in the Liberal cabinet of the day.  Trudeau was an economic nationalist, and Whelan’s idea of supplying a stable Canadian market without the need for government subsidies made sense.

         And we can’t forget what Eugene Whelan told a group of PEI potato farmers in  a Vernon River church in 1981. He said PEI should focus on high valued seed potatoes, and leave the fresh and processed markets to others.   PVYN would probably have killed that vision too, but this was  a man with strong opinions that history will show was more right than wrong.




 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/man-in-the-green-stetson-brought-verve-and-sass-to-public-life-during-trudeau-era/article9277732/

Man in the green Stetson brought verve and sass to public life during Trudeau era

Sandra Martin

Pierre Trudeau may have contemplated his political future during a walk in the snow, but it was his long-serving agriculture minister, Eugene Whelan, who helped initiate the fall of the Soviet Union with a stroll in the garden of his Amherstburg, Ont., farm. In the late 1970s, Cold War rivalries had gone back into a deep freeze: Ronald Reagan was promoting a Star Wars version of anti-ballistic missiles from the White House, a belligerent Margaret Thatcher was in Downing Street and the Soviets had marched into Afghanistan, precipitating a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics by a slew of Western countries.

Nearly a decade earlier, the aging leaders of what Mr. Reagan liked to call the “evil empire” had ostracized a peacenik, one-legged war veteran named Alexander Yakovlev by making him ambassador to Ottawa – the Soviet version of sending somebody to Coventry.
In the Canadian capital, Mr. Yakovlev made friends with an unlikely pair of politicos. The first was the ascetic Mr. Trudeau, who had been aggressively pursuing The Third Option in Europe and Asia, an alternative diplomatic policy to pandering to American hegemony. They chatted about novels by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, according to an article by Christopher Shulgan in Saturday Night magazine.
The ambassador’s second pal was Mr. Whelan, the folksy advocate for women and champion of farmers, who connected with him on all matters agricultural – back in the days when Canada shipped a lot of wheat to the then Soviet Union.
The friendship between the Soviet “exile” and the Canadian cabinet minister led to Mikhail Gorbachev, then a junior member of the politburo and in charge of managing the Soviet farm system. After a meeting in Moscow in 1981, the engaging Mr. Gorbachev accepted the gregarious Mr. Whelan’s invitation to tour Canadian farming operations in May, 1983. He was the most senior Soviet official to visit Canada in a dozen years.
That 10-day cross-country trip included shopping in grocery stores, tours of manufacturing plants, visits to Alberta ranches, a one-on-one with Mr. Trudeau – the first Western leader Mr. Gorbachev had ever met – and tentative, and then open, discussions en route with Mr. Yakovlev about the failures of communism and the need for restructuring Soviet society and government. The key conversation took place in Mr. Whelan’s backyard in Amherstburg while the future Soviet leader and his confidant waited for their host to arrive home from Ottawa.
The two Soviets ditched their bodyguards and strolled around the garden like characters in a Jane Austen novel, engrossed in private and deep discussions about what they had seen and how to apply it to their own country. Years later, Mr. Yakovlev estimated that 80 per cent of the ideas the two men discussed in Mr. Whelan’s back yard were incorporated into perestroika.
At the time, few in Canada realized the key diplomatic role Mr. Whelan had played, first in giving Mr. Gorbachev an inside look at ordinary Canadian life, and then by providing the opportunity for a private meeting with Mr. Yakovlev, the man who would become known as the godfather of Glasnost.
Facilitating that meeting of minds is as integral a part of Mr. Whelan’s political legacy as his shamrock green Stetson, his support for farmers and supply-management policies and his advocacy for feeding the poor of the world.
Mr. Whelan was a die-hard Liberal. “The Conservatives have the right wing, The NDP have the left wing. The Liberals have two wings and that’s why we can fly,” he loved to boast. First elected to the House of Commons in 1962, he served under two prime ministers, Lester Pearson and Mr. Trudeau, and is one of the remaining bridges between the young men, including John Turner, Herb Gray, Donald Macdonald and Jean Chrétien, who went to Ottawa in the early 1960s, and Justin Trudeau, front-runner in the current Liberal leadership contest.

 

This Is NOT What Fairness Looks Like

Look for motivation, and the language being used. Those were first steps for me when covering a complicated story with either government, or a well-heeled corporation in the middle of it. The EI story has both. It certainly plays well to the Conservative's western base: it cuts government expenditures,  sends a message that EI freeloaders won't be tolerated, and forces the opposition parties to defend the lazy stay-at-homes. It's win-win-win as far as Stephen Harper is concerned. That's the motivation. The language came in February: "integrity investigators" is what the Service Canada (itself a name worthy of Orwell) folks are calling the people asked to go door to door and check how hard EI recipients are trying to find work. The minister in charge puts it this way: "Human Resources Minister Diane Finley says EI fraud costs ''hundreds of millions of dollars'' each year, hurting those people who are legitimately out of work and in need of benefits."  Now fraud is not a good thing, but I'm not clear how EI fraud hurts people who are "legitimately out of work and in need of benefits".  What we can say for sure is that investigating fraud has created a lot of anxiety amongst the honest and guilty, and to what end.

Years ago a very smart person said to me that for every person who works around or just outside the edges of the EI system, there are just as many rich people who hire smart lawyers to work around the edges of tax law.  Has the government sent any "integrity investigators" into Westmount or Rosedale?

For me the most frustrating part of this is the lack of respect and understanding of the nature of seasonal work.  Yes there are anomalies: inshore fishermen are the only independent business people eligible to receive EI, and many of them can make good money on crab or lobster. (that hasn't been the case the last couple of years, and the EI payments have been badly needed).  It started really in the seventies when Romeo Leblanc was Federal Fisheries Minister and he didn't want small boat Newfoundland ground fishermen to starve to death, and if these inshore fishermen were to get paid, others had to as well. 

But it's the nature of the jobs that keep people from going to work everyday, not the nature or the quality of the people.  Someone has to harvest the oysters, cook the lobster, make the beds in the tourism accommodations, dig the potatoes, etc.  When the rich and powerful settle into a plate of choice oysters in a bar in Toronto, Calgary, or Ottawa, do they want to pay the true cost of keeping a harvester's family going, or the subsidized price allowed by an EI system.

There continues to be good evidence that a "guaranteed annual income" plan is still the most efficient, fair, and productive way to maintain a social safety net, but these are words that will be spoken even less than "green shift".

And it's not as if EI recipients have secret Swiss bank accounts. They get the cheque and spend it and more putting food on the table, oil in the tank, that's how a consumption based economy works. Taking money out of the hands of people takes the same money from the local grocery store and fuel company, who in turn can't pay their employees, and on and on it goes. John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a very good book on the Depression which stuck with me. He wrote that there was no shortage of wood, hammers, nails, and skilled carpenters during the 20's and '30's, there was a lack of money to put these to work. That's why people suffered. EI is one way (maybe not the best way) to make sure this doesn't happen again. That's a pretty good deal for everyone.