The Rural Voice, 2001-03, Page 10Keith Roulston
Someday government will listen
The federal government's massive
loan guarantee to the profitable
aircraft giant Bombardier while at the
same time it ignores the plight of
cash-strapped grains and oilseed
farmers proves politics has changed
in the new millennium.
Farmers have been fretting for a
decade or more that the decline in the
farm population means rural residents
no longer have the political clout to
get attention for their problems but
there are still a lot more farmers than
there are aircraft companies. The
difference is, the aircraft companies
are big and profitable and aviation is
a high-tech "winner" in a society that
worships winners.
Old-time politics died in the late
1980s with the acceptance of the free
trade act. We got so much more than
free trade. We also got a change in
the philosophy of the country. If you
want to be globally competitive, you
must reward winners and let losers
fall by the wayside. No longer do we
strive for the just society advocated
by Pierre Trudeau. Now we accept
that some people are going to be lett
behind unless they get their act to-
gether and adapt to the new realities.
While the cries for help from
thousands of farmers over the past
couple of years of low commodity
prices have been ignored. the
demands of a
much smaller
sector of society
have been heard
and responded to.
The well-off
professionals and
entrepreneurs
have been
demanding tax
cuts, claiming too
much of their
hard-earned
salaries have been
going to
government (to
support programs
that help less fortunate members of
society). "Make Canada more like the
U.S. or we'll take our expertise and
go south to where we're appreciated
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6 THE RURAL VOICE
i
more," has been the threat. The result
has been a $100 billion tax cut by the
federal government, at the same time
as farmers are told there's no money
to match the farm subsidies of the
United States and Europe.
We have moved beyond being a
democracy to being a meritocracy:
people will be rewarded on the basis
of merit. On the surface, the idea of
rewarding people for their merit
sounds good. Those who contribute
more deserve to be rewarded. Why
should some lazy lout, or worse,
some criminal. be treated the same as
someone who works hard and adds to
the prosperity of the whole
community.
Yet there are dangers. Since the
American Declaration of
Independence claimed "all men are
created equal" we have been trained
to think people have a right of
equality simply by being human
(though in reality, such as American
blacks, this has seldom been prac-
tised). This kind of thinking got
expanded and expanded until there
was the idea that everything should
be fair, but of course it got compli-
cated because "fairness" is a concept
not an absolute. Eventually people
got tired of the constant struggle to
define fairness and returned to the
absolute of the marketplace. It's fair
that those who fill a market need
should be rewarded.
It doesn't matter if that need isn't
really a "need". The world could
quite easily get along without video
games. It can't get along without
food. But there are plenty of people
to provide food and few to provide
video games so the makers of video
games are rewarded for meeting
demand while farmers suffer.
Farmers should be rewarded on
the basis of merit and someday they
will — when there are few enough
farming companies left to dominate a
market the way Bombardier or
George Weston Limited does. It's not
the number of farmers that matters in
our new society: it's the clout. It
won't do much for our rural way of
life, but it will improve farm profits.0
Keith Roulston is editor and
publisher of The Rural Voice. He
lives near Blyth, ON.
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