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Crews seeks re-election

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

by BETTER FARMING STAFF

Trenton horticultural producer Bette Jean Crews announced today that she is seeking re-election as the president of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture.

“I had somebody ask the other day (about running). I thought I’d better officially announce it,” says the two year presidential veteran. Later in a two-hour long informal press conference she said the OFA had an “unwritten rule” that election campaigns don’t start until after the first of October.

Crews was accompanied at the press conference, held in a Guelph hotel, by Robert Kalbfleisch, a former career civil servant with Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. Kalbfleisch, now an agricultural consultant, says he is not being paid to help Crews keep her job.

Kalbfleisch says he has a high regard for Crews, citing her instrumental role in setting up OnTrace Agri-food Traceability (Ontario), a not-for-profit corporation which operates the Ontario Agri-Food Premises Registry.

A one-page media release Crews handed out says she has been active with the OFA since 1998. The release says Crews “acknowledges that there is a great deal of unhappiness and anger out there among her members. But she remains adamant in her rejection of quick fixes or cheap theatrics.”

The bottom of the release says: “Authorized by the Campaign to Re-elect Bette Jean Crews.”

Crews says one of her strengths at the OFA is “being able to explain things so that people understand it.” She says she has a good rapport with both the minister of agriculture, Carol Mitchell, and minister of natural resources Linda Jeffrey.

Crews says a highlight of her achievements has been the establishment of the Ontario Agricultural Sustainability Coalition (OASC). She says for the first time Ontario agriculture is speaking “with one voice.”

“Historically,” says Crews, “we have lobbied government for our own issues . . . .. sometimes to the detriment of another organization.”

 The OASC concept works now, she says, because: “at the end it’s because everyone there wants success for the agricultural industry in Ontario.”

Other achievements are the establishment of a National Food Strategy, (“everybody talked about it for a long time before I pushed it”) which aims to “raise the bar” on food prices, and the province’s adoption of the Ontario Open For Business strategy which aims to reduce regulations that impede the competitiveness of Ontario agriculture and other businesses. 

 “I really am getting somewhere,” she says, adding that “it takes more than two years to make that stick.”

“I monitor 140 issues,” Crews says, stressing that she devotes all of her OFA time to the problems in agriculture in this province. BF

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