While farmers argue for the preservation of the traditional family farm, the state is paying lip service. It is not the understanding of "farm" that is problematic. It’s the understanding of "family."

Sure, there was new money in last year’s federal budget for families with young children but the battle is for the mind and more importantly the state has allowed propagandists to contort and confuse the place and purpose of family. For while the vast majority of Canadians recognize that a family is the union of one man and one woman for the sake of childrearing, the state couldn’t care less. As of this month, Canada is the first country in the world to recognize that a child can have three parents: two mothers and a father. And if a child can have three parents, then a child can have seven. It also makes no difference to the state if a child is reared by two gay men or a husband and wife, in spite of the fact that it makes a difference to the child. The political elite tell us we need more women voices in government but apparently a mother (or father) in the life of a child is inconsequential.

It should be obvious to every breathing Canadian that our country has opened marriage to interpretation and, consequently, the family. Now in some Canadian public schools, by Grade Two, children are reading family books about a child and his two fathers. If you can have two fathers, then why not three wives? Movement is afoot to legitimize polygamy and our immigration policy already welcomes polygamists. The once common project of building civilization is no longer common. With the exception of some Conservatives, political leaders don’t have the courage to stop family from being twisted into something as useless as "people bound by a civil contract."

Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario general manager John Clement recently argued that he would like to see a greater emphasis on the word family in the definition of family farm and an emphasis, among other things, on its sustainability. So would we. Farms are one of the few places in society that appear to be producing enough children to be sustainable and that needs to be encouraged. Urban Canadians aren’t producing enough children and immigration is not making up the difference, while adding a tremendous burden on the health and welfare system. Rather than open Canadian borders to people prepared to work and fit in with our culture, Canada’s laws must allow absolutely everyone in who asks for refugee status, including this man. Explaining why he asked for refugee status when he arrived at the Toronto airport, he said: "My wife won’t do my laundry anymore." We’re now paying his hotel bills.

A society must produce 2.1 children per woman to sustain itself. Canada, as we know it, is imploding at the rate is 1.55. The doom and gloom is mostly in the large cities where there are 1.48 children per woman.

There are no purely rural statistics available but small urban centres (under 100,000 people) coupled with all rural areas record 1.67 children per woman. Farm families have much better odds of maintaining their way of life than any urban centre. Farmers feed cities but cities have more than food to be grateful for. They should be grateful for farm families in preparing the next generation.