Populism and Producerism

With the recent debate on the Wheat Board there has been a focus in Federal politics on Western Farmers. The farmers movement in Western Canada influenced politics in Canada both left and right for the past ninty years and still is.

It is the politics of producerism. It's populism is deeply political, and its producerism is the source of its critique of the capitlaist monopoly marketplace.

When it is used by the right wing such as the Reform party, it is used as an attack on state monopolies. When used by Social Credit it was the monopoly of the banks. When used by the left such as the CCF it was an attack on monopoly captialism and its state.

The Prairie Roots of Canada's Political 'Third Parties'

Farmers' organizations were also thinking seriously about new political departures. When the "Union Government" from 1917-1920 failed to make significant changes to the tariff structure, many farmers decided to give up on the old parties.

Some political activists on the prairies believed that political parties were inherently undemocratic, and that they should be replaced by non-partisan political organizations. Even if not solidly "anti-party," many western political activists were determined to break the mold of previous party practice.

As grain farmers made up the largest single occupational group on the prairies, provincial grain grower associations and co-operatives made up the major interest groups who dealt with provincial and federal governments. So when organized farmers in Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan followed the United Farmers of Ontario by "going political" between 1920 and 1922, potent political forces ready to replace old party government were suddenly on the scene.

Farmers' parties were able to mobilize citizen opinion concerning public ownership of banks and resources, re-design of political institutions, and other reform measures. Under pressure from the "Non-Partisan League," the United Farmers of Alberta organization (UFA) developed the most radical and distinctive critique of old-party politics, and a new theory for political representation. Farmers' organizations of other western provinces were less innovative but nonetheless succeeded in laying the foundations for third party politics.

Prairie farmers regularly attacked the National Policy, especially the protective tariff. In 1921, the Canadian Council of Agriculture's "Farmers' Platform" observed that the tariff was "a chief corrupting influence in our national life because the protected interests, in order to maintain their unjust privileges, have contributed lavishly to political and campaign funds, thus encouraging both parties to look to them for support, thereby lowering the standard of public morality."

The originators of this Western Populism and Producerism were William Irvine who would co found the CCF and Henry Wise Wood the ideolouge behind the United Farmers of Alberta movement.

Farmers not only reinforced, but they also criticized the rural socio-economic order, as they often expounded a radical, "populist" discourse that exposed the material inequalities inherent in monopoly capitalism. Drawing on populist traditions of castigating corporate, political, and social privilege, this particular strain of radical agrarianism at once embraced and critiqued the concept of producerism, or the labour theory of value. This vision of society held that the producing class, made up of farmers and skilled workers, needed to band together to defeat monopoly and corporate power to retain the fruits of their labour for themselves. Even though this socio-economic outlook encountered many adherents in both the Grange and Patrons of Husbandry, it tended to exhibit a more negative view of other classes in the larger community. Dividing society into either useful producers or slothful and parasitical non-producers, some members of the Dominion Grange and the Patrons of Industry fostered adversarial sentiments within the less prosperous members of the agricultural population, focusing on issues of their material, political, and even social exclusion. However, what is noteworthy regarding this antagonistic class rhetoric of agrarian protest is that farmers advocating the continuance of market agriculture and those supporting the co-operative system could both maintain hostile relations with those individuals deemed non-producers. "Severing the Connections in a Complex Community": The Grange, the Patrons of Industry and the Construction/Contestation of a Late 19th-Century Agrarian Identity in Ontario

While monopoly especially by banks and railroads were the main focus of producerist outrage its populism could easily become the hatred of the 'other' as much as critique of the capitalist banker, landlord, railbaron. That other was the loafer. And thus the rural revolt in Western Canada, the source of our 'alienation' as a colony of Ontario and the Railroads, was as much against the metropole as it was against colonialism by "lazy-faire capitialists".

"The Business Clerk as Social Revolutionary; or,
a Labor History of the Nonproducing
Classes"

In fact, the age abounded in loafers. There were literary loafers, Yankee loafers,
French loafers, genteel loafers, common loafers, and country loafers, among others, the
latter observed by Nathaniel Hawthorne at the Brighton Cattle Fair “wait[ing] for some
friend to invite them to drink.” Nevertheless, loaferism was most essentially a metropolitan
phenomenon, haunting the city’s sidewalks, wharves, museums, and parks, and serving as a
ready epithet for anyone needing to hurl an insult. The young New York conservative
George Templeton Strong thus ascribed the worst tendencies of democracy, “so called,” to
the loafer, while the Southern Literary Messenger accused him of no less than advocating
“the sublime doctrine of social equality.” Loafers were known for cursing without shame
and for smoking cigars. They cared little for the law and exhibited a marked disregard for
public life in general. They were eccentric, if not impudent, in their personal habits. They
had a weakness for billiards and bar-rooms and were maddeningly self-satisfied, if not
philosophically reclusive. And they wore stand up collars that were, more often than not,
covered in stains.

The producerist/populist ideology of Prairie farmers, is a contiental North America phenomena.

A COMPARATIVE VIEW OF POPULISM ACROSS TIME AND SPACE:

Fertile fields, indeed, for social movements of the type that Tilly described: modern, organized, and sustained efforts on behalf of people who consider themselves powerless to shape their own future, movements that are political in intent but not confined to political parties. What we have seen emerging since the 1970s are cross-class movements, for the most part, tending to be centered in the lower middle class, but still comprised of people who consider themselves to be “producers” (though now their self-identity may include equal parts of “consumer”), and possessing as a birthright sufficient cultural resources to organize themselves for action. For a variety of reasons most have come to view government as the principal threat to their liberty and economic well-being and to express that feeling with as much intensity as “my” populists ever did against the monopolists.
I believe that Tilly points us toward the kind of framework needed to analyze “populist” movements of the past quarter century as a class of collective behavior, not merely a language or generalized sense of resentment. Modern day movements of this type are organized and sustained activities that bring forward programs of “reform” on behalf of “the people.” They make use of cultural resources at hand, even while harboring deep suspicion of dominant cultural institutions. They connect, in some way, to constitutional and democratic processes. While they often have strong leaders they cannot be understood solely in terms of the leader’s ability to sway the impressionable masses.
In this way of looking at the phenomenon in America, groups that are “off the grid”

When producerists support a market place alternative to cooperatives like the Wheat Pools and the Wheat Board, though the later is state sanctioned, it is not the current capitalist marketplace they long for. It is the idealized 'free market'.

"Raising Less Corn, More Hell"

In the course of three decades as a newspaper writer, Pyle went from feeling that the "farm beat" was like covering the progress of a glacier to understanding that the real story of agriculture in America is quite dramatic. In Pyle's view, our farming culture is based on one big bad idea and one big fat lie.

"The bad idea," he writes, "is the increasing concentration -- economic, political, and genetic -- of the ways in which our food is produced." The lie behind it is that "the world is either short of food or risks being short of food in the near future." With the help of an editorial writers' fellowship, and later as the director of the Prairie Writers Circle at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, Pyle took time away from his daily deadlines to research a book on the American farm economy.

"Raising Less Corn, More Hell" is dedicated to the memory of his father, who was raised on a Kansas farm, but Pyle is no sentimentalist when it comes to the fate of family farms. What the agricultural economy needs, he argues, is a truly free market -- not one kept afloat by federal subsidies and unaccounted environmental damage. The root cause of hunger, he claims, is usually a lack of money. Yet the fear of not having enough food has driven the rise of chemical fertilizers, massive machinery, genetically modified seed, and whatever else will help squeeze greater yields out of every acre.

Meanwhile, the true costs of the industrial system -- eroded soil and depleted aquifers, polluted water and air, desperate and indebted farmers, rundown main streets, unhealthy diets, and a food supply at risk - are not factored into the price of food.

Even as we push to grow more, the government subsidizes farmers for growing less. The subsidies continually fail to keep up with gains in production, leading to a surplus of food that costs less than it should. This gets shipped abroad and cripples the efforts of third-world countries to develop their own agricultural base. And so the system fails even on its promise to feed the world.

It was perhaps inevitable that a producerist ideology would find itself supplanted by the distributionist ideology advocated by Social Credit. The later is more urban the former rural. Within a decade the producerist populism of the UFA would divide itself into two political streams the prairie socialism of the CCF and the distributionist poltical economy of Social Credit.

The latter is a post WWI modernist movement that attempted to create a catholic socialism. It is the theories of Hilaire Belloc transformed by the English journal New Age publishers of Major Douglas the founder of Social Credit. Distributionism places the producer and consumer as equals while railing against monopoly, banking monopolies in particular .The unfortunate downfall of all such economic monotheisms that they fall into consipracy theories around the origins of Banking and the Jews.

If producerism is the populist economics of agrarian revolt, Distributionism is its equivalent for those living in towns and cities outside the major port metropoles of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Halifax. The common enemy of producerism and distributionism is the banks, which are an icon for the Eastern Power Establishment in both Canadian and American political geography.

Thus years later the Reform Party of Canada was able to launch itself on the basis of a prairie populism which had once been a movement of radical reform that had become established as a prairie identity, despite the changes and evolution of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and B.C. into modern urban cultures. The conservative ideology has always been to look backward, and in this case in looking backwards they embraced agrarian protest politics and purged it of any of its socialist roots.

The Eastern establishment, a much more sophisticated political class saw this as bumpkinism. They laughed off the Reform party, and its funny looking leader as irrelevant in this day and age. They forgot two important things, the deep seated roots of prairie populism regardless of party political alignment and that economic and thus political power was moving west.

If the Reform/Alliance/Conservative party gained credence and support from its shameless exploitation of genuine prairie populism, the newly minted Green Party may be able do the same with its embracing of a fiscal conservative economics merged with Distributionism which is the ideology of new Leader Elizabeth May .

See:

A History of Canadian Wealth, 1914.

Happy Canada Day/Jour heureux du Canada

Historical Memory on the Eve of the Election

Calgary Herald Remembers RB Bennet

Canada's First Internment Camps

Social Credit And Western Canadian Radicalism

Rebel Yell

Social Credit

Western Canadian Populism


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Global Farmers Fight Back

My comrades who are Free Market Libertarians and mutualists who oppose capitalism in favour of a cooperative marketplace, will find much to praise in this new farmers movement. It poses a real alternative to capitalist globalization and corporatist free trade. None other than creation of a new movement for a cooperative commonwealth.

The latest attempt to destroy the Wheat Board in Canada is an example of the attack by the State on small farmers in favour of the Agribusiness cartels in the developed world. The Green Revolution, the push for GMO crops and patents on crops as well as using arable land for production for export; palm oil, are examples of non sustainable agribusiness versus the sustainable production of local farmers.

The recent Fraser Institute report by Preston Manning and Mike Harris calling for the end of supply management, the Wheat Board , and subsidies in the market place for farmers, does nothing but open up the farm marketplace to the agribusiness oligopolies. Ironic since Manning's daddy ran a party; Social Credit, made up of farmers that saw these same oligopolies as enemies of a producer run economy.


The fact is that the majority of farmers in the world are family farmers, not far removed from their peasant roots. It is the peasantry that provides the basis for the survival of the food economy. But with the advent of capitalist globalization the peasantry has become a new force in the world economy as Warren Bellow points out.

It is agricultural reform, the privatization of the inherent collectivism of peasant farming, the enclosure of common lands that led to the creation of capitalism in Britain. Forced off the land the peasants move to the cities to look for work becoming the proletariat.

But not all have done so, since it is the farmers who support the cities with their food production. And forced by globalization to collectivize farmers are reforming cooperatives to deal with the new demands of the marketplace.

Thai pig farmers protest at CPF headquarters

S. Korea may allow farmers to export locally grown rice: gov't source

Farmers Cooperative Extends Rollout Of SOA Tool

Connecting Coffee Growers and Drinkers

Cameroon: Coffee - Reasons Behind Poor Performance

Phoenixville Farmer's Market returns to town for sixth season

Innovations in rural financial system inPunjab

What began in England over 400 hundred years ago is now writ wide across the globe. It is not Free Trade nor Free Markets but the concentration of capital and its power to monopolize the market. It is the transformation of agriculture from sustainable economics to the economics of unrestrained growth. Thus the land, people and environment suffer as we see in Indonesia as the islands there burn for the sake of the agribusiness palm oil industry.

Whereas export crops like organic and fair trade coffee have become a basis for sustainable export farming, which can support sustainable agriculture as well as meet the farmers need to be part of a global market place.


Free Trade vs. Small Farmers

Walden Bello is Executive Director of Focus on the Global South, a Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute, and a Professor of Sociology at the University of the Philippines at Diliman.

The main battle cry of Via Campesina, whose coordinating center is located in Indonesia, is “WTO Out of Agriculture” and its alternative program is food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means first and foremost the immediate adoption of policies that favor small producers. This would include, according to Indonesian farmer Henry Saragih, Via's coordinator, and Ahmad Ya'kub, Deputy for Policy Studies of the Indonesian Peasant Union Federation (FSPI), “the protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports, remunerative prices for all farmers and fishers, abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies, and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture.”

Via's program, however, goes beyond the adoption of pro-smallholder trade policies. It also calls for an end to the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights regime, which allows corporations to patent plant seeds, thus appropriating for private profit what has evolved through the creative interaction of the natural world with human communities over eons. Seeds and all other plant genetic resources should be considered part of the common heritage of humanity, the group believes, and not be subject to privatization.

Agrarian reform, long avoided by landed elites in countries like the Philippines, is a central element in Via's platform, as is sustainable, ecologically sensitive organic or biodynamic farming by small peasant producers. The organization has set itself apart from both the First Green Revolution based on chemical-intensive agriculture and the Second Green Revolution driven by genetic engineering (GE). The disastrous environmental side effects of the first are well known, says Via, which means all the more that the precautionary principle must be rigorously applied to the second, to avoid negative health and environmental outcomes.

The opposition to GE-based agriculture has created a powerful link between farmers and consumers who are angry at corporations for marketing genetically modified commodities without proper labeling, thus denying consumers a choice. In the European Union, a solid alliance of farmers, consumers, and environmentalists prevented the import of GE-modified products from the United States for several years. Although the EU has cautiously allowed in a few GE imports since 2004, 54% of European consumers continue to think GE food is ”dangerous.” Opposition to other harmful processes such as food irradiation has also contributed to the tightening of ties between farmers and consumers, large numbers of whom now think that public health and environmental impact should be more important determinants of consumer behavior than price.

More and more people are beginning to realize that local production and culinary traditions are intimately related, and that this relationship is threatened by corporate control of food production, processing, marketing, and consumption. This is why Jose Bove's justification for dismantling a MacDonald's resonated widely in Asia: “When we said we would protest by dismantling the half-built McDonald's in our town, everybody understood why -- the symbolism was so strong. It was for proper food against malbouffe [awful standardized food], agricultural workers against multinationals. The extreme right and other nationalists tried to make out it was anti-Americanism, but the vast majority knew it was no such thing. It was a protest against a form of production that wants to dominate the world.”

Many economists, technocrats, policymakers, and urban intellectuals have long viewed small farmers as a doomed class. Once regarded as passive objects to be manipulated by elites, they are now resisting the capitalist, socialist, and developmentalist paradigms that would consign them to ruin. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious “class-for-itself.” And even as peasants refuse to “go gently into that good night,” to borrow a line from Dylan Thomas, developments in the 21st century are revealing traditional pro-development visions to be deeply flawed. The escalating protests of peasant groups such as Via Campesina, are not a return to the past. As environmental crises multiply and the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life pile up, the farmers' movement has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone who is threatened by the catastrophic consequences of obsolete modernist paradigms for organizing production, community, and life.

Farmers hungry for change

At this week's intergovernmental meeting in Rome to assess progress towards the pledge to halve hunger by 2015, the mood was sombre. Figures from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) show not a reduction but an increase of more than 25 million chronically undernourished people since 1996. The figure, now at more than 850 million, is testament to how current global policies are consigning the hungry to stay hungry.

So what is going wrong? In 2002, when the UN World Food Summit pledge was last reviewed, the parallel Forum for Food Sovereignty, organised by non-governmental groups representing small farmers and those who feel the sharp end of hunger directly, concluded that the problem was not a lack of political will, as the FAO asserted, but the opposite. Trade liberalisation, industrial agriculture, genetic engineering and military dominance, it said, were now the main causes of hunger.

The farmers, from 30 countries, who participated in the conference were eloquent about how farming for small producers is more than just a food production system. Edgar Gonzales Castro, from Peru, said his vision of the future was "traditional" agriculture aimed at satisfying the needs of farmers, rather than generating profit. "What matters is that, on the family plot of land, farmers and their families have a range of crops to fill the cooking pot," he said.

"When governments decide to hold public consultations to help guide their decisions, policy experts as well as representatives of large farmers and agrifood corporations are usually centre stage, not small-scale producers, consumers and their organisations," says Pimbert.

The message of the report is that small-scale farmers - the majority of growers in the world - want radically different policies from those being promoted by their governments. The call is for policies to start from the perspectives of food producers and consumers rather than the demand for profit.

If "one-planet farming" means that western governments will only support farming practices that provide healthy, local food, maintain livelihoods for local producers and conserve resilient landscapes, then there is common ground with small-scale farmers. But if it means a uniform system for all, this will accelerate the hunt to source food globally and as cheaply as possible.

This will result in a continuing decline in food quality, with ever higher social and environmental costs, and be lorded over by fewer and fewer transnational agribusinesses. It would lead both to greater obesity and greater starvation, and see the eradication of more farmers and further loss of farmland.

Farmers' Views on the Future of Food and Small Scale Producers is at http://www.iied.org/pubs/pdf/full/14503IIED.pdf

Friends of African Farmers & Fishermen

Friends of African Farmers & Fishermen is a Non Profit local community organisation formed by local women and men who are farmers and fishermen. Due to increasing poverty in the area, the local people formed this organisation of Volunteers to help themselves. Due to lack of money and machinery for farming and fishing, wish to appeal for donations of Farm Machinery ie, tractors, irrigation equipment etc. Donations for our Agricultural and development projects in Volta Region of Ghana. To help women and children to have food to eat.Train the young women and youth to acquire the needed skills. To also help farmers with farming machinery and fishing equipment. This would generate income for the local people.Non Profit Organisation.

SEE:

Free Trade Not Aid

Free Trade and Africa

The War For Chocolate

IWD Economic Freedom for Women

Water War

Development Versus Population Growth

WTO: Privatization of Water

Is There a Silver Lining to the WTO Talks? No




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Petulant Child

Harper throws a temper tantrum, stamps his feet and pouts;

Harper vows to end CWB monopoly

See:

Slap Upside The Head

ind blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
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More Critics of Bio Fuels

The truth about bio-fuels is spreading.

Biofuels and the destruction of the rain forest

Murray Dobbin's Last Stage Of Denial: ethanol will save us!

A H/T to Driving the Porcelain Bus.

See

Bio Fuel

Bio-Fuels

ADM

Ethanol


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NOT GOP STUPID

Texas A&M AgriLife to lead historic investment in Texas’ efforts to become ‘climate-smart’

Texas A&M AgriLife Research receives largest competitive grant in its history

Grant and Award Announcement

TEXAS A&M AGRILIFE COMMUNICATION

Texas A&M AgriLife Research is anticipating the largest competitive grant in the organization’s history, up to $65 million, to execute a five-year multi-commodity project to work with Texas’ large agricultural sector on expanding climate-smart agriculture and forestry practices.

The grants are not just historic for The Texas A&M University System, but for the nation, as part of a federal investment in 70 partnerships recently announced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

According to the USDA announcement, these federal projects will expand markets for climate-smart commodities, leverage the greenhouse gas benefits of climate-smart commodity production, and provide direct, meaningful benefits to production agriculture, including for small and underserved producers.

“We are proud to lead this major effort,” said Chancellor John Sharp. “The diversity of Texas’ climates, soils and agriculture allows a carefully crafted Texas Climate-Smart Initiative to serve as a model for future climate-smart programs nationwide. This grant further cements Texas A&M as the No. 1 research university in Texas and the Southwest.”

“Production agriculture is the backbone of the Texas economy,” said Jeffrey W. Savell, Ph.D., vice chancellor and dean for Agriculture and Life Sciences. “This grant proves that when we assemble a team of expert researchers and leaders, while simultaneously staying focused on being responsive to the needs of Texas and key priority areas, that real magic can happen. We’re proud to be creating meaningful solutions for the people of Texas.”

Project partners will be tasked with providing technical and financial assistance to producers to implement climate-smart production practices on a voluntary basis on working lands.

“Sustainable production systems that strengthen economies and bolster human health are cornerstone priorities for our research enterprise,” said Cliff Lamb, Ph.D., director of AgriLife Research. “Over the next five years, we will build on all the competitive advantages that make AgriLife Research the premier agency to lead a research initiative of this magnitude in Texas.”

Texas A&M AgriLife's internal members for this initiative include AgriLife Research, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service, Texas A&M Forest Service and the Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

For The Texas Climate-Smart Initiative, AgriLife Research will partner with the Texas Soil and Water Conservation Board, Prairie View A&M University, University of Texas – Rio Grande Valley, Tarleton State University, BCarbon, Nori, Plains Cotton Growers Association, Texas Wheat Producers Board, Texas Corn Producers Board, Texas Sorghum Producers Board, Texas Rice Producers Board, U.S. Rice Producers Association, Texas Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, Texas International Produce Association, Texas Citrus Mutual, Texas Pecan Growers Association, Texas Small Farmers and Ranchers Organization, 100Ranchers, Texas Cattle Feeders Association, Texas Association of Dairymen, Texas Poultry Federation, Texas Forestry Association, Texas Chapter of National Women in Agriculture, Global Revive, Small Producers Initiative and American Plant Food.

Additional commodity-specific funding awarded to Texas A&M AgriLife Research for projects relating to climate-smart production  

Texas A&M AgriLife also will serve as a major contributor to four other partnership projects totaling $185 million that focus on cotton, beef and bison production, and sorghum systems:

• U.S. Climate-Smart Cotton Program, led by US Cotton Trust Protocol: This project, with potential funding up to $90 million, will build markets for climate-smart cotton and aid more than 1,000 cotton farmers, including historically underserved cotton producers, across the country.
• Climate-Smart Cotton through a Sustainable & Innovative Supply Chain Approach, led by ECOM USA, LLC: This project, with potential funding of $30 million, will strive to implement methods to restore soil and ecosystem health in cotton production through regenerative farming and best practices based on specific regions and needs.
• Climate-Smart Beef and Bison Commodities, led by South Dakota State University: This project, with potential funding up to $80 million, will create stronger market opportunities for beef and bison producers, educate producers on practices best suited for their operations and manage large-scale data.
• National Sorghum Producers Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities Project, led by National Sorghum Producers Association: This project, with potential funding up to $65 million, plans to implement climate-smart production practices across hundreds of thousands of acres of sorghum working lands over a five-year period, with the goal to reduce hundreds of millions of pounds of carbon emissions and develop markets for sorghum as a climate-smart commodity.

For a comprehensive listing of projects and participating organizations included, visit: https://www.usda.gov/climate-solutions/climate-smart-commodities/projects.

-30-

SASK Protesters rally to support farmers challenging controversial laws in India

© Laura Sciarpelletti/CBC Farmer protesters have faced violence from the Indian government. In response, there were 200 shoes lined up at the Legislative building on Wednesday to represent the people who have lost their lives in India during the unrest.

Regina's blistering cold weather did not deter dozens of people from chanting "No farmer, no food!", holding posters and voicing their outrage during a solidarity rally in front of the legislative building Wednesday.

They were supporting Indian farmers who have been protesting controversial agricultural laws in India since August.

The laws will change the rules around the sale, pricing and storage of crops from the country's agricultural regions. Farmers there say the changes will ravage the livelihoods of small farmers and eliminate some of the government supports that regulate prices and allow private companies to exploit the market.

Since the summer, tens of thousands have marched to New Delhi, India's capital, where they have clashed with police and set up protest camps.

Protesters have faced violence from the Indian government.

Gagandeep Singh, organizer of Wednesday's rally, says the Canadian protests largely began in Victoria, British Columbia. Protesters displayed 200 shoes in front of the B.C. Legislative Building. The shoes represent many of the people who have lost their lives in India during the unrest.

© Laura Sciarpelletti/CBC Protester Simranjot Singh stands in front of the Saskatchewan Legislative Building in Regina, where he is showing solidarity with farmers in India.

B.C. protesters then challenged residents of Alberta to do the same and mailed the shoes over. Saskatchewan was next to receive the shoes and do their part to support the farmers in India.

"Canada is known for its diversity. It's a multicultural society here. Canada is always standing for human rights ... Not only are those farm bills affecting the farmers negatively, also they're violating the human rights," said Singh.

The protest followed public health guidelines for COVID-19, and had volunteers circulating to ensure everyone in attendance was wearing a mask and physical distancing.

Trudeau voiced concern

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has voiced concern over the Indian government's response to the protesters.

Despite anger from an Indian Foreign Ministry spokesperson, who called Trudeau's comments "ill informed," the prime minister reiterated his support.

"Canada will always stand up for the right of peaceful protest anywhere around the world, and we're pleased to see moves toward de-escalation and dialogue," Trudeau said.

But Singh says he wants Trudeau to do more.

"We want the Canadian government to speak up ... to step up for the farmers. We want Mr. Justin Trudeau to speak up for the farmers. We want him to talk with the Indian government."

Singh says he thinks the Indian government will take notice of the solidarity protests in Canada.

"This thing is going to pressurize them too. That's why we're standing up here. We can't go back to India right right now in this COVID. So that's how we are giving our support to the farmers who are sitting on the outskirts [of New Delhi]. We just want to strengthen them and say we are with you and you guys are doing good and we love you for that."

© Danish Siddiqui/Reuters People attend a Maha Panchayat or grand village council meeting as part of a farmers' protest against farm laws at Kandela village in Jind district in the northern state of Haryana, India, on Feb. 3.

Moe agrees with Indian government

While the protesters in Regina want the Canadian government to speak out against the new laws, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe made it clear he supports the Indian government's position.

Moe says the Sask. government is often in contact with members of the government of India.

"As painful and challenging as the discussion is in India, I think Saskatchewan can provide an example of moving through the years away from sustenance agriculture to producing more and decreasing your risks of lack of food in your community and in your country, and ultimately moving toward a market-based agriculture system that provides opportunities for higher production and sustainability," said Moe. 

© Laura Sciarpelletti/CBC Regina's cold weather didn't deter dozens from chanting, holding posters and voicing their outrage at a solidarity rally at the Legislative building.

The premier pointed to the removal of the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB), a former mandatory producer marketing system for wheat and barley in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and parts of B.C. During the time of CWB, it was illegal for any farmer in areas under the organization's jurisdiction to sell their wheat and barley through any other channel than the CWB.

"It has created opportunities for us to increase our production. And now we are one of the highest producing agricultural regions in the world. We have a high quality product that we sell very competitively," Moe said.

Saskatchewan now has a trade office in India. Moe says his government has visited India and met with many farmers, and values the trading relationship between the country and the province.

PSAC: Remote work demands helping drag out Canada civil-service strike

Randy Thanthong-Knight, Bloomberg News

The right to work from home is one of the key outstanding issues at the center of negotiations to end one of Canada’s largest strikes. 

More than 155,000 civil servants have been on strike since Wednesday to demand higher wages from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government, the country’s largest employer. In addition to better pay and a right to work remotely, they’re also pushing for a ban on contracting out jobs and a requirement that seniority be respected during layoffs.

Entrenching the right to work-from-home could set an important precedent in Canada, for both public and private sectors, as workers call for more flexible arrangements while employers try to push back or impose hybrid requirements. Any return to something resembling the full-remote-work model seen during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic would have major ramifications on real estate in major cities, as well as downtown businesses. 

 “We have proposed to review, jointly with unions, the current telework directive,” Mona Fortier, president of the Treasury Board, said in an open letter on Monday. “The directive has not been re-assessed for a post-pandemic world, so a formal review would help ensure that our approach is modern, fair, and supportive” for our employees.

Last October, business groups warned that government departments were lagging “significantly” behind the private sector in bringing employees back to offices — particularly in the Ottawa-Gatineau area that is home tens of thousands of federal workers. 

The government said the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the country’s largest federal-worker union representing the Treasury Board and Canada Revenue Agency workers who are staging a nationwide strike, came to the table with more than 570 demands, and that it has managed agree “on most of them” during negotiations. 

Still, the union said despite some headway on remote work and wage increases, it’s “not there yet.” It threatened to escalate its demonstrations, particularly at ports, as a result.

The strike has resulted in a delay or pause in several government services. Impacts at key agencies include: 

• Some Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada programs and services may be affected, including research centers, poultry and wine sector programs, as well as a youth employment program
• There will be delays in processing some income tax and benefit returns at Canada Revenue Agency, particularly those filed by paper
• At Employment and Social Development Canada and Service Canada, services will be partially or fully disrupted including the temporary foreign worker program, job banks and biometrics collection
• Delays are expected for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada citizenship events, passport services, grants and contributions services, as well as immigration-related appointments and applications processing
• Transport Canada’s regulatory work, aircraft services, issuance of licenses, certificates or registrations, and the complaints and recalls hotline are expected to be partially or fully disrupted
• The public may also have trouble accessing some Government of Canada buildings where services are delivered 

Civil servants’ push for remote work has Canadian employers watching anxiously

Randy Thanthong-Knight, Bloomberg News

Canada’s government is grappling with what comes after the “forced experiment” of remote work brought on by the pandemic as it negotiates with striking civil servants, the country’s labour minister said. 

More than 155,000 federal employees launched one of the country’s largest strikes a week ago in a dispute that primarily focuses on wages and enshrining the right to work from home. 

With talks at a standstill, the union has escalated its demonstrations, targeting major ports for exports of grain and other commodities. While that’s prompted calls from industry for the government to step in, Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan declined to comment on the status of negotiations. 

Though O’Regan said the government doesn’t dictate what works for other employers or sectors, a deal that cements a right to remote work may set a precedent. If the civil servants are successful, it may strengthen the negotiating leverage of workers in other sectors to push back against employers who favour a return to office.

“The government as an employer is trying to figure it out. We as a society are trying to work this out,” O’Regan said in an interview at his Ottawa office. “We had a crazy forced experiment of remote work imposed on us. There are some workers who had no choice but to go to work. There were a lot of people who didn’t have to go anymore, and yet we functioned and our economy got through it.”

When most COVID-19 restrictions were lifted, employers started mandating a return to office or hybrid work, saying that it would foster collaboration and boost productivity. But some workers are eager to keep the autonomy and flexibility they enjoyed during the pandemic lockdowns.

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The Public Service Alliance of Canada is demanding that the arrangement be included in a new collective agreement. If that happens, it has the potential to influence the outcome of future talks between unions and provincial governments, municipalities, and even private-sector businesses. 

About a dozen clients who are currently negotiating collective agreements have already asked to delay the process to see the eventual deal from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government, according to Patrick Groom, a labor lawyer at McMillan LLP in Toronto. 

“This is going to set the standard for collective-bargaining negotiations and employee expectations, even in non-union environments across the country,” Groom said. “If the federal government agrees to working from home arrangements, that’s going to be a serious and difficult challenge to overcome for employers who want to have their workforces return.” 

Employee resistance has left many business districts from Toronto to New York and San Francisco much emptier than in pre-COVID times. That’s been particularly acute in Ottawa, where more than 45% of workers were still working from home last year, compared with a national average of about 25%, according to Statistics Canada.   

In an open letter earlier this week, Treasury Board President Mona Fortier — the cabinet minister who’s leading the talks for Trudeau — said the government has proposed to review the current telework directive jointly with unions to “help ensure that our approach is modern, fair, and supportive” for employees.

“We value our workers. We’re like any other firms out there. We want make sure that we retain them,” O’Regan said. “The government has a vested interest in making sure that it gets the best employees at the best value for the taxpayer. I’m very hopeful that we’ll land in a good place.”

Farmers grow concerned as striking PSAC workers block grain exports

By David George-Cosh

David George-Cosh

Reporter

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Some Canadian farmer groups are becoming increasingly concerned about the economic impact on the country’s agricultural sector after striking federal workers blocked grain exports across several Canadian ports earlier this week.

Union workers from the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) picketed the Cascadia Terminal in Vancouver on Monday, preventing grain exports from receiving their final inspection before being shipped overseas. Federal workers also picketed outside Thunder Bay, Ont. and Montreal ports, according to Milton Dyck, president of the Agricultural Union within the PSAC.

More than 100,000 federal workers walked off the job last week after failing to negotiate a new contract with the Treasury Board amid a dispute over wages and remote work. Economists estimated that the strike could see between a 0.2 per cent to 1 per cent hit to Canada’s gross domestic product in April, depending on how long the job action lasts.

The Wheat Growers Association, an industry trade group that represents Western Canadian farmers, said in a statement on Tuesday that it was “stunned” to learn that PSAC workers intentionally targeted the Cascadia Terminal and disrupted grain exports. 

“A strike is one thing, but to intentionally target a port that is critical to the lives of grain farmers and to the entire Canadian economy is the height of reckless irresponsibility,” said Wheat Growers president Gunter Jochum in a statement. “It’s time for the federal government to intervene.”

The Wheat Growers added that the Canada Grain Act needs to be amended to allow more third-party grain inspectors to handle grading and weighing services to avoid “double inspections.” It noted that Canadian farmers pay over $60 million per year to have staff from the Canadian Grain Commission inspect grain exports.

The Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan (APAS) also issued a statement on Tuesday urging the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Marie-Claude Bibeau to come to an agreement with the federal workers to avoid prolonging any additional impact the strike would have on farmers.

“Delayed inspections will cause backlogs at ports. Every day a ship must wait means demurrage charges to grain companies, and these costs always make their way to the farmer,” said Ian Boxall, president of the APAS, in a statement.

In an interview with BNN Bloomberg, Dyck said that Canadian Grain Commission inspectors should be considered essential workers and are key to ensuring that Canada’s grain exports meet the high-quality standards sought after by importing nations. While he acknowledged that some farmers will likely see additional costs from demurrage charges being passed to them, those are not as significant as what the trade groups are suggesting.

“I can’t see why the costs would be onerous from one day of blocking the port,” he said.

The grain export dispute comes as Statistics Canada issued its latest outlook on farmer crop planting for this year’s harvest with 27 million acres of wheat expected to be planted, an increase of six per cent from 2022 and the biggest amount since 2001. Wheat prices have fallen by nearly 50 per cent since reaching all-time highs in 2022, while they’re up about 16 per cent from pre-pandemic levels.