Rural development

That desire for a return to free trade was on full display in Regina yesterday, where federal officials and local manufacturers gathered at Degelman Industries.

Federal Secretary of State for Rural Development, Buckley Belanger, announced targeted federal support to help prairie manufacturers adapt to trade disruption, saying the government is taking its cue directly from local enterprise.

So when we talk about building a resilient Canadian economy, we are getting the inspiration from the private sector and the folks that are here today, uh, you know, receiving that recognition that they are expanding new markets, they're providing new, um, uh, services or in some cases, new technology.

And, um, uh, it, it fits really well with what we're trying to do as a Canadian government.

So w- what does this look like? How has Ottawa delivered for our province, and what can be done to support in our province? We heard some announcements last week in that regard, and there's actually a couple more happening today.

Here to talk about that is Saskatchewan's only Liberal MP, Secretary of State Rural Development for the federal government, uh, MP Buckley Belanger.

And I'm gonna say Belanger-

[laughs]

Yeah.

Okay.

Um, we're chatting today with Buckley Belanger, who is a Saskatchewan Liberal MP, our only Liberal MP for the province, also Secretary of State Rural Development.

So, uh, do you feel...

Out of 36,192 houses sanctioned in the state since 2024-25.

Construction of the remaining 19 SAVAM 92 units is underway across the state, Rural Development and Panchayats, Minister Tarunpreet Singh Sant said.

The state has also received a separate INR 360 crore package for reconstructing and repairing homes damaged in recent floods, targeting around 30,000 affected houses, of which 28,020 have already been sanctioned.

In VITs, AUM rising to INR 7.3 lakh crore in April-June.

So again, she's finding a lot of the same things that other arbitrators have found when it comes to this return to office policy.

Well, to that point, how does this decision compare with the decision that Rural Development Agency employees won before a different arbitrator last week?

This was interesting, too.

About 135 employees, uh, again, filed the grievance through, through, uh, AFSCME, and they...

All these practical things that make the wheels go around in a community were facilitated by USDA, and it was with staff who knew how to navigate and had the trust of the local community.

Senator Peter Welch of Vermont, the top Democrat on the Senate Subcommittee on Rural Development, said in an interview, "It's something that was working, was working well, and was very cost-efficient, and now it is being demolished." Trump administration officials have defended the staffing cuts as voluntary and necessary to trim a bloated agency.

We don't have the money in our budget to pay for all of the employees that were hired in the prior administration.

Steven Vaden, the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, said in a congressional hearing in July.

Likewise, Mr. Trump's budget for the next fiscal year proposes a nearly five billion dollar cut to the Agriculture Department, essentially eliminating programs for beginning farmers, conservation, and rural aid.

Some of the steepest cuts have fallen on a part of the Agriculture Department responsible for improving the economy and infrastructure in rural communities, leading to long delays in aid for residents and charities alike.

The sub-agency, known as Rural Development, has lost about one thousand seven hundred workers or more than a third of its staff since the Trump administration took office.

In New Mexico, questions directed at the agency office often languish for weeks, as do approvals of key documents with emails and queries bouncing among staff members scattered across the state and in Washington, said Lorenzo Alba Jr., the executive director of Casa de Peregrinos, an anti-hunger charity in the area.

So even the FSA is like, doesn't know what to do with us.

But then you go to a commercial lender and they're like, or even the SBA or Rural Development, and they're like, "Well, you're an ag operation.

We, we defer to other, you know, USDA programs like the FSA for that." And I'm like, "Well, that's great, 'cause the FSA referred me to you."

Mm-hmm.