Quebec farmers have been protesting since December. Is anyone listening? [Video]

On Monday morning in Sherbrooke, Que., dozens of tractors slowly rolled along a stretch of road between the regional offices of Quebec’s farmers association and the Agriculture Department a few hundred meters away.

“It’s pretty hard to get farmers out of their farms, because they’ve got so many hours to put in, but to see them going out, it means that there is really something going bad in farming right now,” said Benjamin Boivin, a corn and wheat farmer in Quebec’s Estrie region, east of Montreal, who was out protesting on Monday.

Government aid programs no longer match the needs of the province’s farmers — only one per cent of Quebec’s provincial budget goes to agriculture, and most of that money funds a tax credit to help farmers pay municipal taxes, he said.

Martin Caron, president of the official body that speaks for Quebec farmers — Union des producteurs agricoles, or …