Mother Nature has thrown the federal government a bone on Bill C-234.
Manitoba’s weekly crop reports show harvest 2023 ran ahead of the five-year average pretty much from the get-go. There were still some soybeans, corn and sunflowers to come off as of Oct. 17, as well as regional patches of canola. But, for the most part, farmers have had much worse harvest years.
We could, for example, have seen a year like 2019.
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The ‘memories’ function of my Facebook account recently dug up a photo I had posted Oct. 13, 2019. In it, I’m standing in full ski pants, jacket and winter gloves, thigh-deep in snow. It was taken after a storm that swept through Manitoba over the Thanksgiving long weekend, which scattered neighbours’ cattle, buried the windward side of houses and sheds and generally made it hard to move anywhere or do anything.
That was after a wet period that had already pumped the brakes on harvest.
Fall 2019 was ugly. People were silaging in the snow. Big swaths of cropland were left unharvested, some of which had to be burned the next spring. Crop was taken in tough. It earned the nickname ‘the harvest from hell.’
Grain drying was in high demand. As well as the sheer volume to be dried, much of that wet grain had to spend longer in the dryer than normal.
It’s hard to imagine a worse year to kick off a federal carbon pricing scheme, if the goal was to get farmers to accept the already unpopular policy. Poor harvest conditions handed plenty of ammunition to those who wanted an exemption for dryers.
The Keystone Agricultural Producers asked farmers to share their grain drying bills. KAP later estimated the carbon tax had cost corn growers in the province about $1.7 million.
In 2020, a letter from Manitoba’s deputy ag minister to the federal deputy ag minister estimated that Manitoba farmers had paid between $2 million and $3 million in carbon tax for grain drying and up to $5 million when heating for greenhouses, potato storages and livestock housing was added.
More telling, at least to me, was that the Green Party was among those calling for a grain dryer exemption. An interview with the party’s ag critic in 2020 echoed many of the same arguments put forward by KAP.
Grain drying fuel is farm equipment fuel and should be taxed the same. Farmers don’t have a choice; there are no realistic clean fuel options they can switch to.
A federal grain dryer exemption bill later died in 2021, but the concept was revived in Bill C-234. That bill, in the form passed by the House of Commons this spring, would exempt propane and natural gas used for grain drying or barn heating and included an eight-year sunset clause, after which time the exemption would be reviewed. It’s been touted as a transitionary measure to give industry time to develop viable clean fuel options.
In June, farm groups across Canada tried to light a fire under Ottawa to get the bill through the Senate before Parliament’s summer break. The goal was to get it in place for harvest, KAP president Jill Verwey said.
It got past second reading, but couldn’t clear the Senate’s standing committee on agriculture and forestry before the deadline.
The committee started its consideration of the bill in September. It has since been brought up in six meetings, and it’s not done yet.
On Oct. 19, during a heated clause-by-clause examination, senators voted to amend the bill, removing exemptions for building climate control. Besides being panned by bill proponents, that alone will send the bill back for required approval by both the lower and upper houses of Parliament before it can move ahead.
Other clauses still have to go under the microscope. As of press time, the next meeting was scheduled for Oct. 24. (UPDATE: Carbon tax exemption bill C-234 clears Senate committee)
The easy harvest is sort of a good news-bad news scenario for getting this thing done. Agriculture is not dealing with the rush on grain drying that it faced in 2019. At the same time, that past urgency lent a certain weight to calls for an exemption.
If Mother Nature had been less kind this fall, senators and MPs would be getting a lot more angry calls, emails and tweets.
