Many of us will have our eyes on the polls tomorrow night. In Canada, farmers are waiting to see what lasting impacts the election could have north of the border.
The American-Canadian Business Council says that 70 percent of the Canadian ag sector favors a Biden win. One area they are focused on is the markets and the farm subsidy payments over the last four years.
One expert says that those programs tend to off-set normal market functions, and even if Biden is elected, while he did not start programs to help farmers recover from trade deals and the pandemic, he might find it hard to shut them down.
According to Al Mussell, “If you combine it all in the last three years, it’s $46 billion dollars. Ad hoc programs like the Market Facilitations Payments and now the Coronavirus Food Assistance Programs, you get this lack of adjustment and, ultimately, lower prices... If the victor is Joe Biden, I think Mr. Biden’s going to have a hard time getting out of them. The politics of keeping them in place are all good for the President, regardless whether we have a Biden victory or whether President Trump is reelected.”
Polls in the U.S. have showed Biden leading Trump, but numbers out yesterday put the President ahead of where he was in 2016, which gave him a victory over Hillary Clinton.
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