Nova Scotia elects new premier

Aug 18, 2021

The Progressive Conservatives will form the government for the first time since 2006

By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com

Nova Scotians voted for change on Tuesday.

The Progressive Conservatives (PC), led by premier-designate Tim Houston, won in 31 of the province’s 55 seats to earn a majority government.

A party needs 28 to form a majority.

The Liberals won 17 seats, the NDP won six seats and an independent MLA captured one.

This victory marks the first time the PC party will form the government since 2006 when Premier Rodney MacDonald had a minority government. The Liberals have been in power ever since.

Tim Houston “Regardless of what the polls may say, what we know is that if you provide real solutions to real problems then the voters will pay attention,” he said during his victory speech. “Not just in here in Nova Scotia, but in all of Canada, we proved that just because there is a pandemic doesn’t mean government gets a free pass.”

The PC platform focused heavily on health care, but it did include some items related to agriculture:

The party’s Nova Scotia Loyal plan establishes measures to increase local food consumption by participating in a loyalty rewards program, and
The PCs committed to engaging in discussions with ag and other sectors to determine how to make more environmentally conscious progress.

Premier-designate Houston hasn’t made any indications about who will be in his cabinet.

But the party’s agriculture critic, John Lohr, a farmer and agri-business entrepreneur, won his riding of Kings North with 3,971 votes. He won by more than 1,300 votes over Liberal candidate Geof Turner.

Former premier and leader of the Nova Scotia Liberals Iain Rankin becomes the first premier to lose a re-election bid during a pandemic campaign.

In 2020, New Brunswick Progressive Conservative Premier Blaine Higgs won re-election as did NDP Premier John Horgan in British Columbia.

Farms.com has contacted ag groups in Nova Scotia for comment on working with a new government.

Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”