The candidates and the audience had their fair share of trouble maintaining decorum at the North Battleford federal all-candidates forum put on by the Battlefords Chamber of Commerce.
Insults, boos and apologies were all on display at the event, held at Third Avenue United Church Monday.
But so were substantive discussions of the issues facing voters in Battlefords-Lloydminster over the course of the two-hour forum.
The event covered a range of topics ranging from pipelines to First Nations, agriculture and environmental issues, infrastructure spending to the Senate and ethics in government.
The forum included participation by four federal candidates — Conservative incumbent Gerry Ritz, NDP candidate Glenn Tait, Liberal Larry Ingram and independent Doug Anguish. Green Party nominee Mikaela Tenkink was invited, but did not participate.
Not surprisingly, a major topic at the debate was the dismantling of the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly that took place during the previous term.
All the opposition candidates lamented the end of the Wheat Board but it was Tait who visibly lost his cool in his response.
He hurled a personal insult at the agriculture minister, which stunned the audience and the other candidates on stage.
“I gotta think, when I’m talking about Gerry Ritz sometimes, because I understand his mother’s a very nice person and have no reason to believe she wasn’t married when he was born,” said Tait.
That remark drew immediate boos from the audience and calls of “out of order!” Tait then got emotional.
“We lost eight billion dollars, my money, my organization!” Tait said of the Wheat Board. “I voted for these people, I told them how to market my grain, they marketed it for me on my behalf, and it’s gone, against the wishes of two-thirds of grain producers.”
He blasted the government’s move to kill the Wheat Board monopoly. “They did it against our wishes, it was economic stupidity and, as I said before, technically unlawful,” said Tait. “It’s my money, it’s gone.”
Forum moderator Brendon Boothman reminded all candidates to “keep their comments in line.”
Tait later publicly apologized for his remarks.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I do apologize,” said Tait. “I do get emotional about the Canadian Wheat Board. I had it, it was in my hand and I valued it, and it was taken away.”
Ritz’s own response on the Wheat Board question was also a passionate one as he defended the decision to end the Wheat Board’s monopoly.
“I didn’t do this arbitrarily. I didn’t decide with my ‘good buddy the Prime Minister Stephen Harper’ that we were going to do this,” said Ritz.
“We actually consulted broadly with farm groups across western Canada, with the provinces that were affected, came to the consensus the vast majority wanted this to happen. I get letters every week from farmers saying ‘here’s what I’m getting now, it’s better than it was.’ Farm net income is up for the last three years to historic levels, the farm debt to asset ratio has never been better and our exports are back where they should be.”
Another heated agriculture-related topic was genetically modified organisms, and this time it was Ritz who felt the heat.
The opposition candidates all voiced various levels of disapproval for GMOs in their responses. Ritz, however, drew several boos when he said “as a party we have a position that we’re in favour of GM. It’s working well, biotechnology and innovation are what’s going to feed the world.”
It was not just the candidates who felt the wrath of some of those in attendance. At one point moderator Brendon Boothman even got in hot water when urging audience members to “go to the girls at the side and fill out your question card” in order to pose questions at the forum.
“Could you refer to them as women and not girls?” one woman responded near the front.
Given some of the issues with decorum at the meeting, it was perhaps notable that decorum in Parliament was raised as a topic.
Ingram raised the idea of “levelling straight-out fines” at MPs to deal with the issue. Tait suggested the Speaker should have “a bigger hammer.”
Ritz said decorum “could always be better,” but was actually better than it used to be. He noted a lot of people made judgments based only on what they see in Question Period, which Ritz called a “schoolyard brawl.” He noted behaviour was much better in committees.
Anguish’s response was particularly memorable. He said he would instruct all the people in his ‘party’ to maintain decorum, “because it’s only me, and I want to represent you.”
The former Battlefords-Meadow Lake MP and former MLA had some memorable lines at the debate.
In his opening remarks Anguish said he “came out of retirement to put Gerry Ritz into retirement.” That prompted Ritz to later turn to Anguish and say that his wife is “actually probably going to vote for you now.”
Later, the independent candidate also had a memorable three-word response to a question posed about getting more youth involved in politics.
“Talk to them,” said Anguish.
Ingram expressed a similar sentiment in his response to the same question, while observing the composition of the crowd who’d shown up at the forum. He said he had hoped for “a few less shiny heads and a few more long ponytails in the group tonight,” he said.
Overall, the audience was clearly made up of committed supporters of the various candidates, something Ingram noted in his closing remarks.
Ingram asked the audiences for a show of hands to see if anyone had changed their minds as to who they were going to vote for.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” said Ingram, to laughs from the audience.
