AHEAD OF THE HEARD
It doesn’t seem like much in the overall budget picture but for a small department even a little cutback can hurt significantly. Alberta Agriculture is facing a budget cutback of $16 million. The department will also lose 23 positions, but it probably won’t be any senior civil service positions in the department. Those folks tend to look after themselves when cuts need to be made. One hopes that the highly paid advisor job that was specifically created for defeated Ag Minister Evan Berg will be first on the hit list. The Agricultural Financial Services Corporation will see nine offices closed and 17 positions eliminated. That shouldn’t be too hard for the corporation to carry out, it’s a well- managed organization. The AFSC is the agency that also manages crop insurance and other weather-related financial disasters; administrative contingencies are in place in case billions are suddenly needed.
The Alberta Livestock and Meat Agency will see a $4 million cut to their budget. Cuts to such agencies tend to hurt more being the funding is used for research and marketing purposes. It’s been proven time and again that investment in those two areas returns many times over in increased productivity and profitability. New jobs and tax income is the main benefit.
Two promotion giants that got clipped a bit were Edmonton Northlands and the Calgary Stampede. Both are deemed to be agricultural societies and saw their annual grants reduced by $2 million each. Both agencies promote agriculture to city folks, but their main functions are as massive entertainment and show venues with operating budgets in excess of a hundred million dollars each. They should be able to absorb the cuts easily. The other much smaller ag societies across the province will not see any cutbacks – that’s a good move being those groups can least afford cutbacks.
One expects that Alberta Agriculture like other departments saw the cuts coming and made plans to deal with the cuts. The department is no stranger to cutbacks and endless reorganizations. In size it’s a ghost of its former self from the glory days back in the eighties and nineties. Back then there were district agriculturists in every town and village across the province. Commodity production and marketing specialists filled entire floors of office buildings. There were even district home economists, ag engineers and livestock technicians of every stripe from horses to goats. All of those folks are long gone and the department was shrunk down to what it is now. Its present size makes cutbacks particularly hard to absorb. One ponders would more job losses in other huge departments be more efficient. The problem is political, of course, the optics of cutbacks is what drives some of these decisions. City voters and urban media get upset with cutbacks to Health, Education and Welfare but could care less about the fate of agriculture services and research. That means cutbacks to the more obscure departments may be proportionally more severe. However the reality is that even if you totally eliminated Alberta Agriculture, it would not have much impact on the overall provincial deficit.
Rural and small town Alberta are not as affected by department cutbacks being the farming population continues to decrease mostly through consolidation. One could argue that non-farming citizens actually benefit more from ag research being much of it directed towards food processing. That sector employees thousands of people across the province many of them in small locales where any employment is critical to the local economy.
However rural residents will be affected by increased taxes and fees. More fuel taxes in particular can hurt being citizens outside of the big cities have longer distances to travel. Cutbacks in health services can also hurt more in the countryside where services are already pretty slim. Premier Prentice recently touted a new study on the delivery of rural health services and implied that things needed to improve. With the recent budget deficit that study will be getting a one-way trip to the dusty files room. Before it goes on that trip it will be waved in front of long-suffering voters just prior to the upcoming election.
In the scheme of things the real disaster in rural Alberta is not more taxes and cutbacks; it’s the loss of jobs from the downfall of oil prices. Many small towns are highly dependent on service jobs generated by the energy industry. Those losses are felt almost immediately and take a long-time to return. It’s going to be a tough few years ahead for rural Alberta.