Categories: Andrew Coyne, Capital Read

You pay them to leave

by Andrew Coyne on Tuesday, August 18, 2009 1:44pm - 12 Comments

Prostitutes? Consultants? No — pork farmers.

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  • dan in van

    Seems to me they could have cut the cost of this program significantly had they just started with some neg-ads and 10-percenters calling hog producers 'people who like swine and algonquin park', then let the MsM do the rest… or encourage them to travel abroad and lock all the embassy doors when the airport security refuse to let them enter their country.

    • scf

      Your comment: Funny? Interesting? Thought-provoking? No, no, and no.

    • cwe

      Your comment: Funny? Interesting? Thought-provoking? Yup, yup and yup. More clever than anything babies have to say? Also, YES.
      P.S. You're pretty good, too, AC.

  • http://intensedebate.com/people/Crit_Reasoning Crit_Reasoning

    Ironically, political pork is being used to reduce production of Canadian pork.

    • scf

      When the industry picks up again, they'll probably pay them to increase production.

  • finn

    Preston Manning once noted that Stephen Harper tended to retreat when things when things went wrong. This seems to be his government's style. Trouble at Chalk River?–get out of producing isotopes. Trouble with pork?–pay people to stop raising pigs.

    • Darrell

      It's not a retreat, it's an unblinking advance in the opposite direction.

  • Blammo

    I think the gov't did the same thing for lobster fishermen back in the spring. Absolutely ridiculous.

    • http://intensedebate.com/people/Stewart_Smith Stewart_Smith

      It is truly ridiculous to pay lobster fishermen to stop producing pork.

  • tobyornottoby

    Most of these hog operations bear little resemblance to a farm. They are factories in the field with managers and employees and investors, but pretending they are run by struggling Ma and Pa pitchfork got these businesses exempted from all sorts of environmental scrutiny, and produced massive goverment subsidies for the processing plants that ramped up to buy their factory pigs, and to train the immigrants brought in to work in both the barns and the processing facilities.

  • RagingRanter

    Handing out pork to stop the production of pork. There's irony in there somewhere. (Not clever irony mind you, just the standard, run-of-the-mill kind.)

  • Ian

    how about some sympathy – these poor people have been "devastated by overproduction"

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