Shadow Agriculture Minister Tours Lakeland Riding

Shadow Agriculture Minister Tours Lakeland Riding

Michelle Pinon News Advertiser

It was a whirlwind four-day tour of Lakeland last week for the Conservatives newly appointed Shadow Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Foods Lianne Rood.

The MP for the Lambton, Kent, and Middlesex Constituency in Ontario was here at the invitation of MP Shannon Stubbs who asked her to tour the constituency right after her appointment a few short weeks ago.

“This was my first available opportunity to take a trip being in this portfolio and my first trip was right here to Alberta. First of all, I’ve got a great colleague here in your MP. She grabbed me and said you’re coming to Alberta whenever you can come here, you’re coming to my riding and coming to see what’s going on here. So she did steal me away, and here we are today.”

During a candid interview with Rood in Pysanka Park in Vegreville on Oct. 3. Rood grew up on a vegetable farm in Ontario and could sympathize with things she was hearing first hand from local producers in the region.

“We’ve had a great few days so far touring around and meeting folks from all of these areas that have been just devastated by the floods here. It’s been rather heartbreaking actually to talk to some of them because I feel for them because I’ve seen my family be in similar situations, not quite as bad as some of those we’ve heard from this week. But we’ve experienced flooding, we’ve experienced drought, we’ve experienced bad pricing, I get it.

And it’s really unfortunate that the Minister of Agriculture has been invited here by Shannon to come and see the devastation herself. To see that there is a problem here and I’ve called her out on it this week. I’ve said to her, you know you can see the pictures, but boots on the ground, it’s a whole different story than the pictures. You need to come here and talk to these people. And we haven’t heard anything from her yet so we’ll keep being the advocates here.”

Rood said the common thread amongst the farmers throughout the area, was the fact that the agricultural programs, Agri Stability, in particular, are not working for them.

“Most of them, (farmers) I’ve talked to out here don’t even subscribe to the program. They have drained their Agri Invest Accounts and they really are hanging by a thread. They have drained their accounts because they are trying to keep their businesses afloat. They don’t have any cash flow because they aren’t making any money. They’ve had to pull the funds they set aside for a rainy day out, and we’ve had many rainy days, no pun intended here. Their savings are depleted because they are just trying to keep going. “It’s very saddening to hear farmers say to their kids who want to farm no don’t do it. Have your day job, have a career, maybe you can do this on the side. This is not what we want to hear. Farmers are our heroes. They’re feeding us. People need to understand across this country that without our farmers we don’t get fed.

I said in my first speech in the house as shadow minister you know people we’re worried about toilet paper and not having enough toilet paper, but nobody said, hey what about food. Are we going to be able to eat down the road?

And maybe it’s because I come from a family where my grandparents fled the war and had to go through not having food and they taught us the value of making sure that you work hard and you put food on the tables, and farmers do exactly that for Canadians. They work hard and they are feeding us but we’ve been continually undervalued like we’re kind of like were some kind of bad word sometimes. There’s always a negative connotation. I think with COVID we’re starting to see the switch flip on that and people pay more attention to where their groceries are coming from and who is supplying those. It’s my hope I can continue to educate people on the hard work and the passion that Canadian farm families put into feeding Canadians and the world. Because we have world-class products here we work very hard to produce and we need to make sure people value the contributions that farmers, ranchers and producers, and agriculture makes to the Canadian economy to our small towns and overall, to the health of our country.