Some with absolute glee and others with kind congratulatory good wishes, while still other farm organizations outlining their own specific sector needs going forward as the no-experience left-leaning Justin Trudeau government takes over.
“We look forward to working with the Liberals in advancing the interests of prairie farmers,” said Levi Wood, president of the Wheat Growers. “The Liberal election platform contains several positive elements for Canadian agriculture.”
The Wheat Growers like the fact Trudeau signalled early on his support for international trade, strongly suggesting that Canada will ratify the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.
“Strengthening market access for Canadian grain and livestock producers is critically important for the farm economy,” says Wood. “The Liberal’s past support of trade agreements gives us every reason to be optimistic on the trade front.”
George Matheson, chair of Manitoba Pork says international trade, human resources and business risk management are among the key issues they will be focusing on as Canada transitions to a new federal government.
“Number 1, international trade. Of course we are definitely an exporting nation of pork,” said Matheson. “The second one, human resources, very important to us of course. We take a lot of labour and that’s hard to come by of late, and the third would be business risk management.
Our industry takes lots of risk, fluctuating commodity prices primarily and we would like to see some insurances that would level that for us.”
The MP chair says the pork industry in this country is a great economic engine employing many people and consuming a lot of feed grains which would be expensive to export out of this country. It adds a lot of value to other aspects of agriculture.
“Its value every year is in the neighborhood of $5,000,000,000 and exports amount to approximately $3,000,000,000 a year,” said Matheson. “In a country of 35,000,000 million people those are impressive figures and we would like to impress upon Canadians in general that the pork industry is important to the gross national product and the general well-being of all Canadians.”
In Saskatchewan, where Florian Possberg is the chair of the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board, he says the organization is looking forward to working with the newly elected federal Liberal government to provide the best opportunity for the province’s pork producers to succeed.
Possberg says market access remains a key priority for pork producers.
“There’s really been quite a focus on a number of international trade deals in the last number of years.” he said. “The trade deal, the CETA deal, with the European markets and the Trans-Pacific Partnership with southeastern Asia as well as North American countries.
We view those as potentially very positive for our hog industry and there’s quite a bit of work that needs to be done to complete those trade deals and we’re really looking forward to working with the new administration to have those trade deals come to reality.”
He says there is much uncertainty because any time government changes they aren’t exactly sure what that will me for agriculture.
Rick Bergmann of Steinbach, the chair of the Canadian Pork Council says market access, availability of labour, business risk management and competitiveness will be among the key issues Canada’s pork industry will be focusing on as Canada transitions into a new federal administration.
Bergmann says moving forward the pork industry’s message to the new administration will continue to focus on priorities that are critical to the success of pork producers including things like market access, availability of labor, business risk management, competitiveness and on the contribution the industry makes to the economy.
“We have a significant economic activity here in Canada of over $13,000,000,000, a major employer of over 100,000 jobs, we create significant wages, there’s significant taxes generated by all of this,” he said. “We certainly want to carry the message on that we’re a significant part of the Canadian economy and that our needs would need to be looked after so we can continue to stay strong in our position here and sustainable.”
Bergmann says moving forward the Canadian Pork Council will continue telling the pork industry’s story. •
— By Harry Siemens