The Rural Voice, 1985-07, Page 37KEITH ROULSTON
The proof
is in the budget
Is it the quiet in the eye of the hur-
ricane or have the politicians really
managed to make the crisis on the
farm a dead issue?
You had a feeling when Minister of
Finance Michael Wilson released a
report claiming farmers made twice
as much as "ordinary" Canadians
and paid half as much in taxes that
the government was declaring war on
farmers, trying to destroy their
credibility. Perhaps it's worked.
Farmers' problems haven't been get-
ting much space in the media of late.
The federal government has
demonstrated that it may care about
the problems of farmers in trouble
but it isn't going to do much to help.
The budget's only provision for
farmers was the capital gains tax
amendments, which will encourage
farmers to leave the land, not stay on
it.
Farmers have so little political
clout anymore that one article like
that about the supposed high income
of farmers can destroy the work that
hundreds of articles detailing the
reality of farming have built up. The
problem is that in a democracy,
perception becomes reality. If enough
people believe something is the truth,
it becomes the truth even when it's a
total lie.
There is the perception, for in-
stance, that Canadian farmers are
heavily subsidized. It was startling
then to hear Del O'Brien, chairman
of the Advisory Ontario Agricultural
Council, reveal that compared to
European farmers and those farmers
in the heart of the good old free enter-
prise U.S., Canadian farmers get
hardly any assistance at all. In the
years 1983 and 1984, he said, the
European farmer received 39 per cent
of his income from the government
and in the same period the U.S.
farmer got 32 per cent of his income
from government. Canadian
farmers? A mere 12 per cent.
But as I said, truth isn't truth:
perception is truth. We have the idea
in urban Canada, even in our small
towns and villages, that farmers are
propped up by government.
Back in 1976, the guest speaker at
the annual meeting of the Huron
County Federation of Agriculture
was John Wise. As the agricultural
critic for the opposition party, the
Progressive Conservatives, he spent
the biggest part of his speech
deprecating Agriculture Minister
Eugene Whelan, though he was
careful not to attack Whelan per-
sonally as the man in the green hat
still had a lot of personal popularity
at the time.
Whelan, Wise said, was a good
man; it was just his party that wasn't
any good. The problem with the
government, he said, was that the
Liberals were dominated with
members from the urban areas. The
PCs, however, had a high proportion
of people from rural areas in the west
and Ontario, so they understood the
problems of the farmer.
The problem with Wise's comfor-
table theory was that in order for the
Conservatives to form a government,
they had to win in the cities. Once
they won in the cities, they too would
be more likely to listen to the urban
voice than the city one. The Conser-
vatives were only dominated by farm
ridings as long as they were losers.
We've seen exactly that happen.
Even the Western rural ridings which
gave the Conservatives a virtual
monopoly in representation have got
lost in the shuffle as Brian Mulroney
tries to stay popular in urban ridings
in Quebec and Ontario. The proof is
in the budget, which Wise totally fail-
ed to influence. ❑
ODDS Et ENDS
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JULY 1985 35