A section in the background document on new NISA (Net Income Stabilization Account), pretty well tells you that the federal government wants to get rid of 20 per cent of Canadian farms.

The federal government says it did an analysis of 2,500 grain and oilseed farms about the same size and located in the same region of the country. In a four-year period, between 1996 and 2000, it found that 20 per cent consistently turned a profit and 20 per cent consistently lost money. They lost money even when prices were good, the report emphasizes. The government paid out three times as much to the low performers as to the high performers. Yet the low performers didn’t become better producers, the report said.

In speeches around the world, agricultural minister Lyle Vanclief talks about American and European farmers "farming the mail boxes," his metaphor for living off government subsidies.

Evidently, that’s not going to happen in Canada. Last spring, the federal government, putting on its best spin, said it was giving $5.2 billion to the farm economy. The provinces would provide 40 per cent matching funds. Sounds like a lot of money and it is. But when the figure is broken down it looks less attractive. The federal and provincial governments together will provide $420 million annually over the next five years in farm safety net spending. About $2.2 billion over five years will go for the environment and food safety.

Government announcements about the program look a little like lipstick commercials: They’re designed to make the government look good. When you examine the numbers, the impact on individual farmers is minuscule. It represents 0.017 per cent of the farm cash receipts in 2002.

Last year, Alberta farmers, weathering a withering drought, lost $1.1 billion. The amount is more than twice the annual planned payout by the federal government to all provinces. Nobody is farming the mail box here, Mr. Minister.

This spring, U.S. farmers will be planting record grain and oil crops. Pretty well everyone there is expecting food prices to remain unchanged. Pretty well everyone there is expecting grain prices to go down. But farmers there will be protected by floor prices that will allow them to overproduce and profit regardless of how well the market does.

It has become a grim situation where the only hope for Ontario grain growers is a crop failure in a major world producing country. At the same time, the City of Ottawa is enjoying a federal building boom of about $4 billion, even though the city has surplus office space. The federal government has recently given $1 billion to a single company, Nortel. Nortel had revenues in 2001 of (US)$17.1 billion and had a workforce of 36,000. But don’t think federal largess to Nortel stopped at $1 billion. Companies are getting plenty of money from the secretive Export Development Canada. Of the $21 billion of aid on its books, about $10 billion has gone to Nortel and Bombardier customers, says a report in The Ottawa Citizen.

Politicians keep telling us that agriculture is the second largest industry in Canada, just behind the car industry. The statement might be true in terms of productivity. But it isn’t true if you look at money. Public administration, the civil service at three levels of government, spent $55.5 billion in the last quarter of last year.

The beautiful thing about public administration is there’s nary a discouraging word. While agriculture was taking a beating from drought, public administration money increased by 2.3 per cent. The taxpayers have deep, deep pockets for the people who gave us gun registry, and figure they’re not accountable for the billions they spend.

What can we conclude? The government has plenty of taxpayer money, but it has provided safety net funding at a level that can only work if we start lopping off the bottom 20 per cent. Then what?

How ironic the title of the backgrounder to the new NISA —. "Putting Canada First". Dare we ask for whom?