By Jeff Carter

I had the opportunity to meet the Ontario Liberal Party’s leader recently. Bonnie Crombie served as the federal MP for Mississauga-Streetsville from 2008 to 2011 and with an endorsement from outgoing mayoral legend Hazel McCallion, was elected as the Mayor of Mississauga in 2014, serving in that capacity until last year.
Crombie was in Dresden in an effort to shore up the interest of the candidate for the Lambton-Kent-Middlesex (LKM) by-election, Cathy Burghardt-Jesson. She also offered words of support for Dresden’s effort to oppose the large recycling and landfill project proposed just north of the community – as did all eight LKM candidates running.
Crombie’s appearance in Dresden appeared to have minimal impact on the by-election results, even in Dresden where a large majority cast their ballot for Conservative Steve Pinsonneault. Overall, Pinsonneault received close to 60 per cent of the vote while fewer than one in four voted for Burghardt with fewer than a third of eligible voters casting a ballot.
I took the opportunity of having the Liberal leader within my sights to suggest that she “not forget us” once she becomes premier. In response she nodded toward Burghardt-Jesson, thus deflecting the comment, a clever response; a simple “yes” would have been better appreciated.
I tell this little story to emphasize the challenge before rural Ontario’s communities. We are under siege. In Dresden, it is the dump being thrust upon the community. In Wilmot Township, the Region of Waterloo is threatening expropriation of 770 acres of prime farmland for an industrial park. Outside St. Thomas, another 1,500 acres of prime farmland was taken from Central Elgin for Volkswagen’s electric vehicle battery plant. Proposals for wind farms and battery storage are proliferating across the landscape and only after a furor of opposition was raised did Premier Doug Ford reverse his decision to allow housing developments in the Greenbelt last fall.
Other developments worth watching is the progress of Bill 185 – the Cutting Red Tape to Build More Homes Act – and the new provincial planning statement.
According to the organization Environment Defense, “If people in Ontario don’t speak up, the government might push through two new laws that could see a lot of the province’s farmland, forests, wetlands and habitats marketed for destructive suburban sprawl development. … both Bill 185 and the provincial planning statement prioritize low-density sprawl over densification in existing neighbourhoods…”
Finally, according to the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, upwards of 300 acres of farmland was being lost on a daily basis in 2021 according to census information, a trend that continues to this day.
Meanwhile, hunger increases in Ontario and throughout Canada. Food banks are catering to more hungry mouths than ever before while farming remains a precarious occupation, often reliant upon vulnerable migrant workers, a kind of third-class of Canadian citizenry who live and work in Canada and yet are denied the full benefits of being here. Now, the federal government is proposing to address the issue of made-in-Canada hunger by following the U.S. example, expanding school food programs with a billion-dollar, five-year program in an era when the issue of debt, government and personal, remains unresolved.
If Canadians wish to build food security a fundamental shift in direction is needed rather than band-aid solutions. Farmland and food production need to be valued.
That is already achieved to a degree through Canada’s supply-management system which connects the prices farmers receive to their cost of production. An imperfect system, perhaps, but one which has helped maintain a certain level of prosperity within agricultural communities.
The idea of fair prices for what farmers produce needs to be extended beyond supply management with the realization that investments made at the farm level have a multiplier effect benefiting not just the farm community but the entire economy. This is similar to the vision of Henry Ford who increased wages, understanding that his factory workers were also potential customers for his vehicles.
“There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.”
Change doesn’t come easily.
A good first step is to provide a voice for all segments of Canadian society. If food security is to be addressed, for example, surely the farm community should be part of the discussion. Simply expanding competition among grocery retailers, as proposed by the federal government, is an interesting idea but corporate domination of food trade exists beyond the interaction between retailers and consumers. There is an uneven distribution of power between grocery retailers and their suppliers through such measures as the fees charged for shelf space and the cost of food waste carried largely outside the retail space.
I’ll leave the final word to the late Ralph Ferguson who served as the MP for Lambton-Middlesex and worked diligently to change the food system through his Compare the Share research: “I believe the taxpayer should not have to subsidize farmers’ incomes … there is ample room within the present price structure for the farm to earn a fair share from the marketplace.” ◊