By Mary Ellen Kirby
Local Journalism Initiative
As soon as our last two slowpoke ewes deliver, our lambing season will be over again for another year. There are dozens of bouncy wee lambs scrambling through the pens, playing tag and bleating their silly little heads off. Their mothers are stoic and unconcerned, calmly eating hay or chewing their cuds and pretty much ignoring their babies. There is no helicopter parenting going on here. The ram struts around, the undisputed king of all he surveys. I suppose he is allowed to be a bit smug: his offspring are vigorous and plentiful. As any farmer will tell you, things don’t always go according to plan when dealing with livestock. We had some difficult births in the wee small hours; there were a couple of weeks of mixing up bottles of milk replacer to supplement several sets of triplets; we managed to get an orphan lamb grafted onto a foster mother after we lost his own mother and twin brother to an impossibly difficult birth, and we managed to keep everyone fed and watered through a couple of snowstorms and power outages. While we are fond of our sheep, we are always glad to put the intensity of lambing season behind us.
As always, the sleep deprivation and stress leave me feeling discombobulated and out of sorts, but this year it’s worse than usual. I feel a little bit like Rip Van Winkle these days. I haven’t been asleep for twenty years, as he was but I have been sort of sleepwalking through the last six weeks. Emerging from my lamb-induced stupor, I find myself in a country I barely recognize. Crass political opportunism is running rampant, otherwise sensible Canadians are earnestly buying the ‘Elbows Up’ hogwash and critical domestic issues are being buried or flat out ignored by the press whose job it is to hold governments to account on our behalf. Instead, it appears the media prefers the drama: they have been complicit in stoking the Trump fire, probably a desperate attempt to bolster waning viewership. So here we are, in the middle of a snap election called on the pretext of defending our country from the bogey man of American imperialism. According to an Abacus poll taken last week, 54% of Canadians think the primary issue in our federal election is Donald Trump. I fail to see the logic in that. He is not our president. He is not our problem. However, Canada does indeed have an enemy; one that imposes crippling tariffs, undermines our democratic processes, infiltrates our Parliament and imprisons and executes our citizens. But that enemy is not the USA. Why on God’s green earth is China given a free pass in this election that purports to be about Canadian sovereignty? They have just levied punishing tariffs on Canadian ag exports as a retaliatory measure against our imposition of 100% tariffs on Chinese manufactured EVs. I thought mass adoption of electric vehicles was supposed to get us to net-zero nirvana. Why would the very eco-conscious, carbon-taxing Liberal government choose to limit Canadians’ access to more affordable electric vehicles? I am truly baffled. In any case, the resulting Chinese counter tariffs on canola, peas, pork and seafood leave our farmers and fishermen in troubled financial waters. Canola alone is worth $43.7 billion dollars to Canada’s economy and supports 206,000 Canadian jobs. While the threatened auto industry gets immediate pledges of $2 billion in support from Mark Carney, our farmers and fishers get silence. In fact, when worried NFLD fishermen tried to ask Mr. Carney about the Chinese tariff effects on their businesses at a recent campaign stop in St. John’s, they were denied entry and subsequently locked out of the venue. Disgraceful. It smacks of overt partisan pandering, in my opinion. Could this be because auto sector jobs are mostly in the Liberal party base of Ontario, while canola mainly affects the prairie provinces where the vote is decidedly blue? I dunno…I’m just asking for a friend.
While I am perturbed by our government’s machinations, I am much more perplexed by the response of ordinary Canadians. If Trump’s 25% tariff threats send us into such a paroxysm of patriotism and boycotts of everything American, why do the 100% Chinese tariffs not engender four times the outrage? Are we so blinded by the ‘orange man bad’ rhetoric that we can’t or won’t recognize the bigger threat to our country? I suppose if we boycotted all the Chinese imports, our collective virtue signalling would be much more difficult: we wouldn’t be able to run to the nearest dollar store for those cheap, made-in-China Canadian flags that have suddenly sprouted up like mushrooms after heavy rain. We need to do better than knee-jerk reactions to dog-whistle politics if we are serious about defending our sovereignty. And so does anyone who aspires to the Prime Minister’s office. While there seems to be a variety of choices on the ballot, we have a de facto two-party system at the moment. So far in this election campaign, the only party leader I have heard address these looming agricultural issues is Yves-Francois Blanchet, and we all know the Bloc Quebecois will never form a national government. Neither the Greens nor the NDP have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning, so either the Liberals or the Conservatives will form the next government. As far as I can tell, neither party has made any attempt to formulate or promote policy around food and agriculture. Which leaves me in a quandary: where do I park my vote?
If anyone thinks that agriculture is irrelevant in this election, that the only “existential threat” to Canada comes from the big, bad orange man south of the border…well, I have a lovely little citrus plantation in Yellowknife that I can sell you.
In theinterest of full disclosure, I want to declare that I identify as politically non-binary. I don’t vote according to party lines; I pay attention to platforms, track records, promises kept – and broken – and then I mark my ballot according to what seems to make the most sense to me at that time. Shortly after my 18th birthday I cast my first vote and I have voted in every municipal, provincial and federal election since then. I have voted across the political spectrum over the last four decades with no allegiance to any party or leader. I have even voted Rhino once or twice when I was thoroughly disgusted by all the other options. There are about three weeks left in this campaign, and I am going to be watching for some substantive agricultural policy from both the red team and the blue team. I hope they ante up. Otherwise, I will be tempted to draw heavy black pencil lines through all the choices on offer in my riding and write in my preferred candidate: Pinocchio. At the very least, it would be obvious when the puppet Prime Minister was lying; it would be as plain as the nose on his face.