Mayor, MP advocating for Brandon research centre jobs

Mayor Jeff Fawcett said he will be pitching Brandon as a place to centralize federal agricultural research staff while the workforce is affected by cutbacks.

The Brandon Research and Development Centre has a few selling points that make it attractive as a hub for the future, such as the quality of the facility and the breadth of land available to it, Fawcett said.

The site could be a good option to centralize staff, he said, and he will be looking to see if that is possible.

“I want to be one of the cities that says, ‘Build on us over time,’” Fawcett said on Thursday.

“Is there an opportunity, over time, to position our site as a long-term hub? Not unlike what was done with CFB Shilo as a military base?”

Agriculture Union president Milton Dyck visited the Brandon facility last Saturday and said he is expecting roughly 10 positions to be reduced. The centre employs 87 staff, including 14 researchers, according to its website.

The full effect of federal cutbacks is not yet clear, and Dyck said union members across the country were dealing with uncertainty.

The federal government introduced the cutbacks as part of a plan to reduce program spending and administrative costs by about $60 billion over the next five years.

Fawcett pointed to the impending closure of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s research farm in Portage la Prairie due to the cutbacks as an example of how the federal workforce is changing. If these types of impacts lead AAFC to reorganize its staff, Brandon wants to be a base to build around, he said.

Fawcett told the Sun he reached out to the federal agriculture department, as well as Manitoba Agriculture Minister Ron Kostyshyn, to advocate for Brandon and communicate concerns.

“We are an agriculture hub,” Fawcett said. “The best game plan is to sustain a long-term research facility.”

The City of Brandon will also look at options to tie the local research with post-secondary education in the area, he said.

Brandon-Souris Conservative MP Grant Jackson told the Sun he is also advocating for the Brandon facility.

Jackson said on Thursday he had spoken with federal Agriculture Minister Heath MacDonald to pass on concerns he has heard from residents, and that he will work with the agriculture critic in the Progressive Conservative party to outline how the cutbacks will impact Canada.

“(We) are going to continue to work with him to try to pressure the Liberals to see the mistake that this is,” Jackson said. “More of that advocacy work is coming as we put the statistics together, so there should be more on this to come, but we’re not going to let it go.”

Jackson said agriculture should be among the last departments to face cutbacks today due to threats to Canada’s sovereignty. He said agriculture and national security should be top priorities in conserving federal staff positions.

“Given the world that we’re living in today, I think it’s important that we keep people in those two sectors for sovereignty reasons, to keep them working. Food security is a critical part of sovereignty,” Jackson said.

“We believe in reducing the size of the bloated civil service that the Liberals have created over the last 10 years, (but) we would not have started with agriculture.”

Jackson called the cutbacks part of a long-term pattern of neglect toward federal agricultural research. In a public statement earlier this week, he noted that the federal civil service has grown while staff positions at the AAFC shrunk in the past decade.

The federal Liberals’ plan includes reducing the public service by approximately 40,000 positions from a peak of 368,000 employees in 2023-24.

» cmcdowell@brandonsun.com, with files from Abiola Odutola