As of Tuesday morning just after midnight CT, Marie-Claude Bibeau was leading in her Sherbrooke, Que.-area riding of Compton-Stanstead by a spread of over 3,300 votes over her nearest challenger, Bloc Quebecois candidate Nathalie Bresse, with 273 of 275 polls reporting.

The makeup of the House of Commons is expected to have changed only marginally as a result of Monday’s election.

Overall, the Liberals were elected or leading late Monday night in 155 of 338 ridings, followed by the Conservatives with 120, the BQ with 33, the New Democrats with 27 and the Greens with two.

By comparison, at the dissolution of Parliament on Aug. 15, the Liberals held 155 seats; the Conservatives, 119; the Bloc, 32; the NDP, 24; and the Greens, two. Five seats were held by independents.

Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives were holding over 34 per cent of the popular vote nationwide, ahead of Trudeau’s Liberals, with just under 32 per cent; Jagmeet Singh’s NDP, with 17.7 per cent; Yves-Francois Blanchet’s BQ, with just under eight per cent; Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party, with just over five per cent; and Annamie Paul’s Greens, with 2.3 per cent.

At least two of the incumbent agriculture critics from the opposition benches are also poised to return to the Commons.

Lianne Rood, the ag critic for the Conservatives, easily held her southwestern Ontario riding of Lambton-Kent-Middlesex by a spread of more than 16,400 votes over Liberal challenger Sudit Ranade with 243 of 245 polls reporting.

Alistair MacGregor, the NDP’s ag critic, also held his British Columbia riding of Cowichan-Malahat-Langford, by a spread of more than 7,200 votes over Conservative challenger Alana DeLong, with 237 of 250 polls reporting.

BQ ag critic Yves Perron, meanwhile, appeared to be pulling ahead late Monday in a tight race in his Trois-Rivieres-area riding of Berthier-Maskinonge.

Perron faced a relatively strong challenge from a previous MP for the riding — Ruth Ellen Brosseau, a former House leader and former agriculture critic for the NDP. Perron had been trailing for part of the evening but was ahead of Brosseau late Monday by a spread of just over 900 votes with 270 of 274 polls reporting.

Trudeau’s cabinet table is expected to see some losses, including Peterborough MP Maryam Monsef, the minister for rural economic development; southern Ontario MP Deb Schulte, minister for seniors; and Nova Scotia MP Bernadette Jordan, minister for fisheries and oceans, who were trailing in their ridings late Monday.

The House of Commons is scheduled to resume sitting Oct. 18. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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Labour Minister Filomena Tassi on Tuesday announced the introduction of Bill C-29, which “would end the work stoppage at the Port of Montreal and ensure the safe resumption and continuation of operations at the port.”

Dockworkers represented by the Syndicat des debardeurs du port de Montreal (CUPE Local 375), whose last contract expired in 2018, began a full-time strike Monday morning.

CUPE 375 and the Maritime Employers Association (MEA), which represents port facility operators, “remain far apart,” Tassi said in a statement, and when “all other efforts have been exhausted, and a work stoppage is causing significant economic harm to Canadians — the government must act.”

C-29 would also set up a “neutral mediation-arbitration process to resolve the issues in dispute between the parties and conclude a new collective agreement,” she said, emphasizing the government “is not taking sides.”

Tassi also said the bill does not prevent the union and MEA from “concluding an agreement on their own terms at any point in this process.”

Given the Liberals’ minority government status, C-29 would need the support of at least one other party for passage through the House of Commons. Conservative leader Erin O’Toole said Monday on news channel LCN that his party would support the bill.

The federal New Democrats on Tuesday ripped the bill as “tipping the scales in favour of the employers” against unionized workers’ Charter right to strike. Meanwhile, Bloc Quebecois leader Yves-Francois Blanchet said Monday on Twitter that special legislation is “not the solution.”

Monday’s strike follows a 19-day work stoppage last August, a mediated truce that ended last month and, from April 13 onward, a “partial” strike in which dockworkers refused overtime and held strikes on weekends.

CUPE 375 has described the main sticking point in talks as worker scheduling as it relates to “work/life balance.”

A strike isn’t expected to affect bulk grain traffic at Montreal, as the federal Labour Code calls for port workers during a strike or lockout to “continue to provide the services they normally provide” for loading, tie-up, let-go and movement of grain vessels in and out of port.

However, a strike is expected to affect export traffic through Montreal’s container terminals, including those handling containerized crops and other agrifoods. Several Canadian farm and ag sector groups have previously called for intervention to ward off a strike.

Fertilizer Canada also said last week that a strike at Montreal would affect deliveries of imported fertilizer going into planting season in Eastern and Atlantic Canada. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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Conservative MP Philip Lawrence’s private member’s bill C-206, An Act to amend the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act (qualifying farming fuel), passed second reading in the House of Commons on Wednesday, and was forwarded to committee for review.

The bill got to that point without support from the governing Liberals save for one member, southeastern Ontario MP Francis Drouin.

Introduced by Peterborough-area Conservative MP Philip Lawrence in February last year and reinstated in the current session, the bill got support from each of the opposition parties, with the Bloc Quebecois, Green Party and New Democrats joining the Conservatives in voting for the bill to move to committee.

Before the vote on C-206 was held, Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau and Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson released a joint statement signalling their intentions.

C-206, they said, “does not provide relief for the fuel costs of grain drying, as it does not add grain drying as an eligible farming activity.”

Contention over the bill’s text was part of the debate MPs held in the House before voting on it, and Lawrence was firm in his assertion his bill would exempt fuels used for grain drying.

Western Manitoba MP Larry Maguire, who seconded Lawrence’s bill, said in a statement Thursday it would “provide a full exemption on all farm fuels, including natural gas and propane.”

Rather than pass a bill introduced by an opposition member, the Liberals are signalling intent to introduce their own bill offering relief to farmers drying grain.

“We are committed to new rebates for on-farm fuel use such as grain drying, in order to both support our food producers and also encourage new investments in sustainable technologies, that go beyond existing exemptions for farm fuels and rebates for greenhouses,” the ministers said in their statement.

“In addition, our government will make grain drying and barn heating a priority focus under the new $165 million agriculture clean technology fund. The program will invest in energy efficiency, fuel switching, and other new technologies on farms. This program will be announced in the coming months.”

No further details, or specific timelines, were offered.

Facing scrutiny for the grain drying costs farmers bore during a particularly wet harvest last year, Bibeau avoided making any commitments but defaulted to a favoured position: requesting more information on the matter.

While the Liberals deliberate their own plan to relieve farmers of grain drying costs, continued industry support for C-206 is clear.

The momentum of Lawrence’s bill, coupled with the Liberals’ new, albeit vague, commitment should ensure farmers will be getting some form of relief from grain drying – but when is still unclear.

C-206 getting to committee marks the halfway point in a six-stage process toward a bill becoming law, but like many private members’ bills, it faces a long road to possible passage.

If Parliament doesn’t prorogue first, the Commons standing committee on agriculture and agri-food will hear testimony from stakeholders in and outside of government before reporting back findings and possible amendments to the House of Commons.

The bill would die on the floor and would have to be introduced for a third time if government rises and the current parliamentary session ends before its passage — a looming threat in any minority government situation. This scenario would essentially mean the bill goes back to its infancy, and the process of its passage would begin again.

Last year, federal officials told a committee of MPs that an Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) internal analysis suggests costs of grain drying are “a fairly small share of overall costs.”

While the analysis has not been made available to the public, officials say grain drying costs typically represent only one to two per cent of total costs for producers.

Provinces and provincial producer groups have put forward numbers suggesting carbon taxes — including those on fuels used grain drying — account for a significantly higher amount of overall costs, but AAFC officials suggest those figures factored in indirect costs, resulting in a higher estimate.

An evaluation of grain drying costs provided by some provincial governments or producer groups was done in 2019 by AAFC. The results don’t represent AAFC’s estimates and instead represent a standard set of results from different groups to offer comparable results.

“Based on the information received, the average per-farm cost of pollution pricing associated with grain drying by province ranges from 0.05 per cent to 0.38 per cent of net operating costs for an average farm, equivalent to $210 to $774, depending on the province in question,” that report said.

— D.C. Fraser reports for Glacier FarmMedia from Ottawa.

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John Horgan’s NDP, which in 2017 overturned a minority Liberal government with the help of the Green Party, was projected Saturday evening to form a majority on its own, winning or leading in 55 of 87 ridings, followed by Andrew Wilkinson’s Liberals with 29 and Sonia Furstenau’s Greens with three.

Lana Popham, the NDP’s incumbent minister of agriculture, is expected to hold her Vancouver Island riding of Saanich South, with a spread of 4,020 votes over Liberal contender Rishi Sharma, with 92 of 92 ballot boxes reported.

Ian Paton, the Liberals’ agriculture critic heading into Saturday’s election, is also expected to hold his Vancouver-area riding of Delta South, leading by a spread of 3,286 votes over NDP candidate Bruce Reid with 92 of 92 ballots boxes reported.

Votes counted on Saturday night are to include only those from general voting and advance polls. The final vote count is to include a substantially higher-than-usual number of mail-in absentee ballots not counted on election night; the final count is expected to begin 13 days after election day and to continue for three days.

Popham is a co-founder of Vancouver Island organic vineyard Barking Dog Vineyard and former president of the Vancouver Island Grape Growers Association, while Paton has owned and operated a dairy farm and farm auction business at Delta.

The province and its agriculture and agri-food sector have faced a number of pandemic-related issues including management of its seasonal agriculture workforce, among others.

The province is also facing demands for flexibility in residential construction within its Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR), in the face of escalating housing prices in the region.

The ALR includes about 11 million acres of land provincewide on which agriculture is deemed the priority use and non-farming uses are restricted. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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As of 9 p.m. CT Monday, incumbent Premier Blaine Higgs’ Progressive Conservatives, who went into the vote with a 22-seat minority government, were elected in 27 of 49 ridings.

The provincial Liberals, who briefly held a minority government after the last provincial election in 2018, were elected in 17 seats as of Monday night. The provincial Greens and People’s Alliance captured three and two seats respectively.

Ross Wetmore, who’s been Higgs’ minister for agriculture, aquaculture and fisheries since November 2018, easily held his riding of Gagetown-Petitcodiac, coming in ahead of People’s Alliance candidate Craig Dykeman by a spread of 3,470 votes.

Isabelle Theriault, the Liberals’ incumbent critic (or “policy advocate,” as the party describes the critic role) for agriculture and aquaculture, held her northeastern riding of Caraquet by a spread of 4,638 votes over the Greens’ Marie-Christine Hache.

Andrew Harvey, the Liberals’ ag minister before the party was knocked out of government by a non-confidence motion in November 2018, finished second Monday night in his western riding of Carleton-Victoria, 391 votes behind Tory challenger Margaret Johnson.

Wetmore, a businessman best known as co-owner of Gagetown-based K+W Quality Meats and the Gagetown Marina, came to the legislature in 2010 as the MLA for the riding then known as Grand Lake-Gagetown. He was re-elected in 2014 and again in 2018.

For some farm groups such as the Agricultural Alliance of New Brunswick, Monday’s election took on added significance as the Liberals, Greens and People’s Alliance went public in favour of new restrictions on the use of glyphosate herbicide.

The Liberals said in late August a Liberal government would phase in a ban on glyphosate use on Crown land over four years. The Greens’ platform called for a ban on glyphosate spraying in Crown forests.

“Farmers across the province are increasingly concerned that potential decisions, like this one, are being made in haste and are creating an environment of unpredictability that reduces growth and investments in our sector,” the AANB said in a statement Sept. 2. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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Dominique Anglade, who was named last month as the Liberals’ new leader, on Tuesday appointed Jean Rousselle, MNA for the Laval-area riding of Vimont, as the party’s critic for public safety and for agriculture.

Rousselle, the Liberals’ critic for labour since October 2018 and for “integrity in public procurement” since last July, has held Vimont for the Liberals in three elections since 2012.

Before entering provincial politics, he worked as a police officer in Laval for 30 years, from 1976 to 2006.

During the Liberals’ previous stint in government, he served as parliamentary assistant for municipal affairs (2014-16, 2017-18) and for public security (2016-18). Previously, on the opposition benches, he was the Liberals’ critic for housing (2012-14) and, briefly in 2014, for sports and recreation.

As official opposition critic for agriculture, Rousselle replaces Marie Montpetit, who had also served since late 2018 as vice-chair of the assembly’s committee for agriculture, fisheries, energy and natural resources, and as critic for the environment.

Anglade on Tuesday shuffled Montpetit, the MNA for the Montreal riding of Maurice-Richard, to the health portfolio.

In the Quebec assembly, Rousselle will face Andre Lamontagne, the governing Coalition Avenir Quebec’s (CAQ) MNA for the southwestern riding of Johnson and the province’s minister of agriculture, fisheries and food since October 2018. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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Trudeau said clearly in his victory speech Monday night that Alberta and Saskatchewan are part of the country and will be heard by his government — but with no representation in government from either province, how will that be accomplished?

Jim Everson, president of the Canola Council of Canada, noted the lack of representation from Alberta and Saskatchewan in the Liberal government. All but one of the 48 seats between the two provinces will be represented by the opposition Conservatives.

Because Liberals were rejected in Canada’s canola-growing regions, he said the government will have to address the clear regionalism demonstrated by the vote. It’s a challenge to move issues forward, he said, when there’s a lack of representation in the government from Western Canada.

“We are certainly here as a canola council to work with them to ensure the interests of farmers nationally and in Western Canada are taken into consideration,” he said. “That’s a challenge and I hope the government recognizes that it’s a real challenge.”

One of the issues Everson will look to move forward is continuing to ask and advocate for more international market access.

“International trade seems to be more protectionist in nature, with these sort of tariff wars that are taking place, and I think the government really needs to look at how to respond to that,” he said.

“We are a country that relies really heavily on rules-based trade, but now the case is the rules don’t appear to be working to Canada’s advantage and so I think we need to be able to look at that and adapt our trade policy.”

Everson is hopeful the government will also better support farmers, by means of incentives, to leave their land in better condition than they found it.

Keith Currie, a vice-president with the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, said there was a clear message sent by voters.

“All you have to do is look at where parties were elected across the country and clearly there is a divide on who is the best party to lead,” he said.

Despite those divisions, which also saw the Bloc Quebecois take 32 of Quebec’s 78 seats, Currie pointed out agriculture “is one of the few things that bind this country right from coast to coast.”

The new government, according to him, has “real opportunities from an economic standpoint for this industry to deliver.”

Challenges facing the industry — such as a need to reform business risk management programs — are recognized by all parties.

Western Canadians have long been outspoken about the need for such supports, and they aren’t expected to quiet down because of the election results.

Currie pointed to infrastructure investments in rural Canada for improved broadband internet and affordable energy sources as two other keys to supporting rural communities and the ag sector.

Jeff Nielsen, president of Grain Growers of Canada, said he is eager to start the ball rolling again and his staff are already making calls to facilitate meetings.

“We’re not sure who are going to be the dance partners yet,” he said. “We think we had some consensus on some key items (such as business risk management) with all parties.”

— D.C. Fraser reports for Glacier FarmMedia from Ottawa.

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As of about 2 a.m. CT on Tuesday, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals held onto power in a minority government with 157 of 338 seats, ahead of Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives with 121, Yves-Francois Blanchet’s Bloc Quebecois with 32, Jagmeet Singh’s New Democrats with 24 and Elizabeth May’s Greens with three, plus one independent, former Liberal MP Jody Wilson-Raybould.

Trudeau’s agriculture minister, Marie-Claude Bibeau, held her Quebec riding of Compton-Stanstead on Monday night against Bloc Quebecois challenger David Benoit by a spread of 3,043 votes with all polls reporting.

Bibeau’s challengers in the 2019 contest also included one of the Green Party’s non-sitting agriculture critics, Jean Rousseau. He had served previously as the riding’s NDP MP from 2011 to 2015 but finished in fifth place for the Greens on Monday night.

Scheer’s incumbent agriculture critic, Luc Berthold, easily held his Quebec riding of Megantic-L’Erable against Bloc challenger Priscilla Corbeil by a spread of just over 11,000 votes with 232 of 233 polls reporting.

The Bloc Quebecois’ incumbent agriculture and labour critic and party whip, Simon Marcil, also easily hung onto his seat Monday night in the riding of Mirabel, 13,700 votes ahead of Liberal challenger Karl Trudel with 202 of 242 polls reporting.

Singh’s incumbent agriculture critic, Alistair MacGregor, also held onto his Vancouver Island riding, Cowichan-Malahat-Langford, by a spread of 6,639 votes over Conservative challenger Alana DeLong, with all polls reporting.

The Green Party’s other non-sitting agriculture critic, Kate Storey, came in fourth in her western Manitoba riding of Dauphin-Swan River-Neepawa against Conservative candidate Dan Mazier, a former president of provincial general farm organization Keystone Agricultural Producers.

Other incumbents who have previously handled the ag file and are returning to the Commons include former Liberal agriculture minister Lawrence MacAulay, the Liberals’ former Parliamentary secretary for agriculture Wayne Easter, and former Conservative associate ag critic John Barlow.

The Liberals’ reduction to minority government status might not necessarily complicate the party’s stated plans for the agriculture and agri-food file.

Those include a review of business risk management programs; increased support for farmers against “risks beyond their control;” and an “expanded and enhanced” role and mandate for Farm Credit Canada.

The New Democrats, with whom the Liberals would be expected to partner in order to pass legislation in the Commons, put forward ag policy goals including further compensation to supply-managed sectors for loss of market share to international trade deals; defending Canadian ag exports against trade retaliation such as China’s; support for public ag research; and providing low-cost start-up loans for new farmers.

The NDP also proposed developing “a national strategy to address mental health challenges facing farmers.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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While the true results won’t be known until Monday night, most pollsters are speculating either a Conservative or Liberal-led minority government.

One scenario could see the Conservatives win the most seats, but only by a slim margin. That opens the door for Liberal leader Justin Trudeau to court the support of others — likely the New Democrats or Green Party — to stay on as prime minister.

Similarly, Scheer could seek support from other parties to prop up his government, a situation that may be less plausible given the NDP’s stated reluctance to help Conservatives.

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has outlined conditions of his support to the Liberals, focusing on items such as climate change and a national pharmacare plan.

Vancouver Island MP Alistair MacGregor, now in a dogfight to keep his Cowichan-Malahat-Langford seat, served as the NDP’s agriculture critic in the last Parliament. Days before the election, he outlined what role the NDP would play in supporting agriculture as part of a coalition government.

“In a minority situation, if we were able to have some influence over government policy as a condition of our support, I would certainly like to see that, starting off with supply management that we actually honour the promises that we make,” he said, referring to concessions made in trade deals involving the European Union, the U.S., Mexico and Pacific nations.

The NDP would also push to compensate industries impacted by those deals, similar to the $1.75 billion over eight years dished out to Canada’s dairy farmers this August.

The last Liberal budget also promised $3.9 billion to dairy, egg and poultry farmers to support producers who lost farm income because of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with the EU and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).

MacGregor said honouring supply management would be an “absolute condition” for NDP support of a Liberal government.

He also said the NDP would push the Liberals to effectively deal with climate change and reconsider business risk management programs.

“We have to do a full-scale review, of the whole suite of programs, to make sure they are flexible,” he said, noting uncertain global markets and climate change-associated risks may create a need for more dynamic support options. “Farmers may start having to need those programs more often.”

The NDP has stated it has no plans to prop up a Conservative-led minority government, and it is less clear what such a scenario would entail for Canadian farmers — but a Conservative government would mean there are new players with significant sway over the industry.

The Conservative Party did not respond to interview requests for this story, but did commit in its platform, released late in the campaign, to revamp the Canada Grain Act, address labour issues and improve available risk management programs. Like the NDP, the Conservatives support compensation to farmers affected by free trade deals.

Agriculture tends to be one of the less partisan issues, with many of the parties sharing priorities.

“(Every party has) representation in rural ridings and we’re there to work for all of them,” MacGregor said, pointing to the relatively co-operative nature of the Commons’ agriculture committee.

But that committee, known formally as the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food, will have significant changes to it after Monday; at least four of its 11 incumbent MPs are at risk of losing their re-election bids.

Liberal MP Marie-Claude Bibeau, the minister of agriculture in Trudeau’s government, is also at risk of losing her seat in Quebec’s Compton-Stanstead riding.

Despite the election, it is also realistic to expect a time lag between the results and a clear direction of agriculture policy in Canada being formed.

No matter which faces — old or new — are shaping that policy, their work likely won’t begin for several weeks, if not months, after the election, because Parliament is not expected to reconvene immediately.

— D.C. Fraser reports for Glacier FarmMedia from Ottawa.

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Platform documents released Sunday last week (Sept. 29) call for the merger of several existing federal financial and advisory services — which the Liberals said are “currently scattered between several agencies” — into Regina-based FCC.

First set up during the Diefenbaker administration in 1959, FCC today bills itself as a “financially self-sustaining federal Crown corporation” reporting to the federal ag minister, lending money and providing other services to farmers, agrifood operations and agribusinesses.

Under a re-elected Liberal government, FCC, whose “mandate will be expanded and enhanced,” would become a new entity dubbed Farm and Food Development Canada.

The new agency “will serve as a single point of service to help all parts of Canada’s food economy develop, grow and export to new markets,” the Liberals said.

A re-elected Liberal government would also move to increase Farm and Food Development Canada’s capital lending capability by up to $5 billion per year “on top of the existing support” FCC provides, the party said.

That expanded lending capacity, the party said, would “help more food businesses access the capital and support they need to succeed and grow.”

In a separate platform plank dealing with red-tape reduction, the party also pledged to eliminate “all fees” charged for business advisory services such as mentorship and training provided by FCC.

Similar fees would also be eliminated at other Crown lenders such as the Business Development Bank of Canada and Export Development Canada, the party said.

A table in the party’s platform document, budgeting for the cost of financing expanded services to the ag sector, calls for the use of “retained earnings” to the tune of $64 million during 2020-21.

That figure is shown decreasing by $6 million annually in each of the three subsequent budget years, to $46 million in 2023-24.

Other ag-related measures noted in the Liberals’ platform include:

• a “collaborative review” of Canada’s business risk management programs, with “a special focus on AgriStability;”
• a pledge that the party is “prepared to increase federal support to farmers to help them manage risks beyond their control;”
• continuing to work with farmers on tax measures to “facilitate the intergenerational transfer of farms, making it easier for farmers to transfer or sell family farms to family members or others;”
• moving ahead on “full and fair support” for Canada’s supply-managed sectors, including processors, in the wake of market access granted to imports under the Canada-EU (CETA) and Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) trade pacts, and taking “the same approach” on compensation when the new Canada-U.S.-Mexico agreement (CUSMA) is ratified;
• a new Canada Commercial Consular Service, to help connect exporters with local legal assistance and support against “unfair practices by other countries who don’t respect rules-based trade;” and
• “protecting the rights of hunters and farmers, by not bringing back the long-gun registry” in the context of a pledge to tighten federal gun laws and ban assault rifles. “Hunters and farmers do not use or need assault weapons,” the party said.

— Glacier FarmMedia Network

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