Reflection

Even the Diehards can change how they vote

by Karen Emilson

I grew up in Southern Ontario, the firstborn daughter of a Hamilton city bus driver. Dad was a Union man and because of that he always voted NDP. If it hadn’t been for his unionized job, I would have grown up poor.

After I got married and told everyone that Mark and I would be moving out to the family ranch 35 miles from the nearest small town, they all thought I’d lost my mind.
Everyone except dad.

“This may be the most perfect place on earth,” he said one afternoon as we enjoyed a cool drink one hot evening in mid-July after a day of raking and baling hay. My dad is a wackier version of me. He’s cheerful, optimistic and believes that hard work and a love for what you do will get a person through the rough spots. It’s no wonder he fits in so well at the ranch.

Now that he’s retired, he visits often. Sometimes in the dead of winter, I’ll see him through the living room window standing perfectly still in the yard, listening to the sound that nothing makes.

Soon after I started working for the Manitoba Cattle Producers Association, I added Dad to the Cattle Country mailing list and gave him a shirt with the MCPA logo on it. He wears that shirt whenever he is going to be in a crowd of people or on a plane where he can corner an unexpected stranger and tell them all about our cows. He passes around pictures of calves like they are his grandchildren.

After the border closed five years ago, dad called every weekend for updates. When the election was called in the spring of 2004, we had many long discussions about which government I thought would do the most to help the cattle industry.

“How do you want me to vote?” he asked, offering to depart from his usual NDP leanings if it would help us out.

That was a tough question. The Liberals were in power and Dad’s MP, Bob Speller in Haldimand-Norfolk was Federal Agriculture Minister. You could see in Speller’s eyes that he cared about the future of the cattle industry and the families affected by BSE. In fact, he lost his seat to Conservative Diane Finley because he was so busy in the West visiting cattle regions, that he didn’t do enough campaigning at home. The Conservatives might argue that wasn’t the reason, but I got the scoop from the bus driver who after 40 years of taking people back and forth to work, has a thorough understanding of how the working man thinks.

No doubt Dad was wearing his MCPA shirt the day he went in to introduce himself to Diane Finley, his new MP. He insisted I send a signed copy of my book about the cattle industry to give to her.

As we geared up for this last election, Dad called me again. I’ve voted Conservative for more than 20 years, but he wanted to check again to see how I wanted him to vote. After I hung up the phone, I was struck by the realization that voters in Ontario don’t think the same way as we do in the West.

In Ontario, they don’t elect governments in, they throw governments out. That may be one reason why each party has to work so hard to get their vote.

So what Dad really wanted to know is if I thought the Conservatives have done enough for the cattle industry. I am both disappointed and ashamed to say that no, they have not.

We have a Prime Minister from Alberta and Agriculture Minister from Saskatchewan - the two top beef producing provinces in Canada, and yet, Western agriculture was barely mentioned during this election. We sat by watching as the Conservatives courted the Ontario vote.

Provincially, I live in an NDP constituency that is almost wholly dependent on the cattle industry. Some of the largest ranches in the province are right here and many are suffering because of unprecedented flooding this past summer. Never before have I lived so onside with the governments of the day and felt so ignored. And never in my lifetime has the situation on the farm been so serious and prolonged. Ranchers are both business owners and “working” men and women. That the Federal Conservatives and Provincial NDP can’t work together towards a solution is difficult for me (and my dad) to understand.

I have voted Conservative all these years because I believed the Tories were the party in favour of ambition and self-sufficiency in agriculture. But as farmers and ranchers continue to subsidize the inexpensive food policy here in Canada, while being hampered by circumstances beyond their control, our self-sufficiency is becoming harder to maintain. The philosophies of the federal government we helped elect may now be working against us. There is a “survival of the fittest” attitude coming from government right now, but we at the grassroots all know that the best cow-calf producers and cattle feeders in this country don’t necessarily have the deepest pockets.

And I can’t help but wonder if farmers in the west started flipping their vote like city folks in the east, if our vote would still be taken for granted. Maybe there is a lesson to be learned from a bus driver who loves cattle.

I don’t have the heart to tell Dad how serious the situation has become for everyone. He’d only worry. And besides, it could send him off on a one-man crusade to save the cattle industry, that quite frankly, would be more embarrassing than the time he began jigging and singing along to a Stompin’ Tom Connors’ song (in front of my friends) when I was fourteen.

But I suppose he’ll find out soon enough, when his copy of Cattle Country arrives in the mail.