Tobacco Farmer Lobby Continues to Push Province

Source from:  Brantford (Ont) Expositor (ca) 06/10/2009

It is a political maxim that when discordant voices won't go away -- despite half-hearted attempts to soothe the disharmony with platitudes offering no commitment -- sooner or later someone has to realize there is something really wrong. Good politicians realize at some point that they really should pay a closer ear to the dissonance. Often, it is not the immediate substance of offending phrases that those in government would prefer to tune out, but rather an underlying dissonance that they are missing altogether, and ignore at their peril. That couldn't have been clearer in the first words of Fred Neukamm after taking over as the new chairman of the reformed Ontario tobacco board in the past week. The Ontario Farmer Products Marketing Commission, which oversees the province's system of commodity marketing boards, moved in with a sledge hammer last Monday. It swept away the old Ontario Flue-Cured Tobacco Growers' Marketing Board with its leadership of 11 directors elected from across Norfolk, Brant, Oxford, Elgin and Middlesex counties, after all of them had taken exit packages from the federal government's $300-million tobacco transition program. The commission set up a new five-member board and appointed three directors immediately, with two more to follow soon. Neukamm, one of the three appointees, immediately gained a mandate as chairman, a position he had held in the old board for four years, before his ouster about a year ago. And what were Neukamm's first words to the media? He said the new board will assume a double role in protecting the interests of about 1,100 former growers who took Ottawa's limited exit package, and will advance the concerns of licensed growers under the new system installed for the 2009 crop year. He made it clear in an interview with this scribe that the new board will spend some of its mandate continuing to lobby for provincial transition funding after Queen's Park earlier balked at joining the federal program. He also said it will continue pursuing a lawsuit that the old board launched against cigarette and other tobacco products manufacturers a few months before its mandate was terminated. "That's the expectation of the community," said Neukamm. "We will be picking up that ball and continuing to fight for the community's interests." The Dalton McGuinty government should pay close attention to that line, "continuing to fight for the community's interests." It lies at the heart of the unsatisfied refrain. Ontario tobacco growers were not just cash croppers in one sector. Because they were concentrated in a few counties, they think of themselves as a "community" -- a term with myriad political nuances. Neukamm knows the deep meaning of that message. From 2006 to 2008, he was a plainspoken, populist, no-holds-barred champion of the tobacco growing community as it was on its way down; a victim of deliberate adverse government policies against smoking and the predatory practices of the manufacturers who were departing Ontario. In tractor rallies, presentations to government committees and protest actions during the period, Neukamm was a rallying point in the fight for those seeking an honourable departure package from Ottawa and Queen's Park for a group of farmers who had built the foundations of a successful rural economy across a swath of counties. When a whole crop sector was being pushed out, so were the economic and social underpinnings of an entire community. The federal program's $285-million quota buyout and $15-million transition seed money barely helped most growers escape the strangling debt-loads they owed finance companies. There is precious little to get going again on a new course. That the province didn't join the relief effort sticks in the craw of many in this area of Ontario, because that level of government also reaped billions in revenues from the tobacco trade during tobacco land's good times, and still does even if the tobacco is now mostly foreign. Haldimand-Norfolk MPP Toby Barrett, a Progressive Conservative, understands that sentiment intimately as he continues to nag away at Queen's Park. So does Brant MPP Dave Levac, who maintains there is still hope for help from his government. So do many other MPPs who represent tobacco land and wider rural areas. It's up to McGuinty and Agriculture Minister Leona Dombrowsky to peer more intently at the score sheet, find the discordant notes, and and change them to create a new harmony. Enditem