LILLEY: Carney silent as China blasts Canada's canola industry

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Canola, the yellow flowering plant that gives so much colour to prairie fields as you drive across the country, is worth more as an industry than auto, steel and aluminum combined. You wouldn’t know that based on the actions, and lack of reactions, from the Carney government.

China just slapped Canadian canola seed with a 75.8% tariff on top of existing tariffs of 109% on canola oil and canola meal.

This is a product that has an economic impact of $43 billion per year for Canada’s economy. You would think that this would result in outrage from Canadians, especially the Elbows Up Brigade that are forever lamenting Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canadian steel, aluminum and auto production.

There has been no statement from Prime Minister Mark Carney, his industry minister Melanie Joly has been silent and the statement from his ministers in charge of agriculture and international trade was weak at best.

“Canada is deeply disappointed with China’s decision to implement provisional anti-dumping duties in its self-initiated investigation into imports of canola seed from Canada,” said a statement from ministers Heath MacDonald and Maninder Sidhu.

China takes about $5 billion worth of canola products each year and is our second biggest export market after the United States.

Is the Carney government refusing to take the same kind of strong stance they do with other industries because this is a product grown on the prairies, far from the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal triangle that runs Canada’s political and media establishment or is this because they can’t scream Orange Man Bad and yell about Donald Trump?

“Of course,” Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said when asked if he thought the Carney government would have responded by now if China had tariffed an Ontario or Quebec product.

“I mean this, this Liberal government couldn’t care less about the West. They disrespect its main industries,” Poilievre added, “Liberals don’t care about Western farmers and Western producers.”

Poilievre asked why the federal government was standing behind the financing of the decision by the B.C. government to buy four ships from China. B.C. Ferries, an entity that is wholly owned by the British Columbia government is buying four new ferries from a state owned Chinese shipyard and the federal government is financing the deal.

“I believe the first thing we should do is cancel the billion dollar federal loan,” Poilievre said Thursday in Saskatoon.

“Mark Carney is giving a billion dollars of ship building contracts through a taxpayer funded loan to the Chinese government and the Chinese economy. That is crazy at a time when they’re targeting our farmers.”

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe was trying earlier this week, to no avail, to explain how important this crop is to Canada’s economy.

“We’ve estimated about 12 million acres of canola seeded in Saskatchewan just this year,” Moe said.

“To put this in context, this $43 to $45 billion canola industry, Canadian canola industry that we have employing just over 200,000 people, that is significantly larger than the steel industry, the aluminum industry and the car manufacturing industry combined, it’s about the same size as the Canadian forestry industry, of which we saw significant supports for just this past week.”

Despite their size, despite their impact on the economy, despite the jobs on the line, the canola industry hasn’t seen any elbows go up, they haven’t seen the supports offered to steel or forestry. The Carney government has been near mute on this file, in part I believe because they don’t win enough seats in Western Canada, in particular Saskatchewan.

Western alienation, western separatism is a real and growing issue and one that the Carney government needs to deal with. Not giving the same support to a major industry because it is based in an area the Liberals don’t do well in won’t solve the problem.

Neither will the fact that more support has been offered to the electric vehicle industry, which still doesn’t really exist in Canada, than has been offered to a very real and thriving canola industry.

Canada needs better than this.

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