National Pork Board and the Pork Checkoff, Des Moines, Iowa, U.S. photo
The next Canadian federal election will take place on Monday, October 21, 2019. For producers, the next election is an opportunity for the interests of agriculture to reinforced by voting for your local candidate with the strongest background and most favourable policy positions in this area.
Approaching the upcoming election, Alberta Pork has previously covered the need for federal government support for international market access, business risk management programs and African Swine Fever preparedness. We have also provided profiles of our producers’ constituencies and available candidates.
On September 25, the Canadian Federation of Agriculture hosted a debate for party representatives of agriculture. Some of the information below has been sourced from that debate. Other information has been pulled from the parties’ platforms, the last of which was released on October 11. Full party platforms are linked below.
Where the parties stand
The Conservative Party of Canada would:
- Help farmers and agri-food businesses hit hard by market uncertainty by convening a meeting with farm groups to assess the damage and determine how to help farmers.
- Challenge China’s actions at the World Trade Organization and urge for increased inspections on Chinese imports.
- Deliver compensation to farmers affected by free-trade deals.
- Protect supply management while opening new markets for our farmers who depend on exports.
- Implement an agriculture and agri-food labour strategy, ensuring farmers and processors ensure access to the workers that they need.
- Work with provinces and farmers to make Agri-Stability more simple, predictable, bankable and timely.
- Postpone the Humane Transport Regulations to ensure they are based on complete evidence.
Analysis: The Conservative platform is responsive and acceptable for many commodity sectors.
- The Conservative platform addresses many of the broad issues facing Canada’s many agriculture sector. However, like most parties, the Conservatives strongly favour supply-managed commodities in their platform, which may concern commodity groups that are not supply-managed, including pork. Unique and positive in this platform is the reference to postponing the introduction of new animal transport regulations.
- Addressing the damages done by market uncertainty would be a great first step in helping Canada’s pork industry recover from the difficulties we have experience in trade. The recovery, though, will take more than a meeting. In this platform, compensation for trade losses seems to cover only supply-managed commodities, but the pork industry would fully hope and expect to be a part of that consideration, since our request for compensation has been on the table for more than a year.
- This platform gives specific consideration to business risk management—one of only two party platforms to do that. This is a priority area for the pork industry, and we would like to see an overhaul of existing programs, which this platform alludes to.
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