OPINION: From the feds without love

The Canadian Federation of Agriculture asked the federal government for $2.6 billion to get through an economic lockdown created not by a pandemic, but by government response to a pandemic.

We know that the federal government came back with $252 million but only $100 million for core agriculture.

Here’s why the government response is outrageous. The total federal government deficit this year for only three months from April to June was $120 billion. Statistics Canada reports that the deficit for the entire year will be about $380 billion. Not all of that was COVID cash emergency funding. But of all the overspending, the federal government could only muster less than a sliver of a fraction of one per cent for core agriculture in emergency funds.

It’s also outrageous because our government wasted more emergency funding than what 15,000 people can earn in an entire lifetime.
Say what? The average wage in Canada last year was just over $50,000. If a lifetime of earnings is 30 years, that’s about $1.5 million earned by one person in a lifetime (in today’s dollars). So, it would take 15,000 people of lifetime earnings to spend $22.8 billion, which appears to be the amount of federal government wasted in the COVID cash emergency payout to Canadians.

The think-tank Fraser Institute says that more than $12 billion in emergency funding went to people from ages 15 to 24 who were dependents living with their parents in households with at least $100,000 annual income in 2019. That’s poorly targeted. That’s waste. If the government had given $12 billion to Canadian farmers, none of them would have to work for a year.

About $7 billion in COVID cash went to spouses earning less than $24,000 in families with at least $100,000 in income in 2019. So, hey, there’s lots of money to burn.

We also learned recently that the federal government offered almost $1 billion (or 10 times what the government gave core agriculture) to a charitable organization to subcontract the management of student loans. But that was taken off the table when the federal government got caught offering this equivalent of a gigantic lottery winning to WE charity that pays Trudeau family members for speeches.

Farmers are not amused and not just because they have been ignored but because the carbon tax also went up on April 1. So, taxes increased for farmers during a pandemic lockdown while over the same period the federal government increased salaries for 10,000 unionized federal government workers.

Whenever there is a possibility of an election, governments spend lavishly. So, if this the best that the Liberal government can do, farmers won’t need to think long and hard about who not to vote for.