Why This Green Could Not Vote Red

Calvin Neufeld | Jun 12, 2025

As the last Green Party candidate for Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston – now minus “Kingston” – I feel an obligation to explain to the people of this riding why I could not run again in the 2025 election, and why I could not join the exodus of Greens endorsing the Liberals.

After my run in the 2021 federal election, I discovered through Access to Information that the Liberal government attempted to use my political candidacy to block my investigation into Kingston’s prison farms.

Government emails reveal that in August 2021, when I became the Green candidate, a member of Prime Minister Trudeau’s Privy Council Office (PCO), Gilbert LeGras, instructed the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) to use my candidacy as a pretext to shut down my media inquiries about the prison farms, to “divert future requests” from me, and to report me to CSC Commissioner Anne Kelly and Elections Canada Investigator Nicholas Alexander. This, despite LeGras’ admission that he could find no rule that would prevent a candidate from engaging in journalistic inquiries or “advocating a certain position.”

The “certain position” that triggered such sensitivity in the Prime Minister’s inner circle was my critique of the plan for Canada’s prison farms to supply China’s infant formula industry. My investigations have exposed the details of this clandestine scheme, concocted by the Liberal government, to farm thousands of goats at Joyceville Institution to sell milk to Feihe International.

The government emails further show that in May 2022, long after my candidacy, CSC alerted the Privy Council Office to another media request from me: “Sharing for PCO awareness that CSC will be responding shortly to the following media call from a reporter… Calvin Neufeld.” My question was whether CSC’s goat farming plans had been cancelled. This time, PCO advised CSC to use my former candidacy to divert my media requests.

Even long before my candidacy, the Liberal government had been fighting my investigations. In 2019, when the prison farm program was being launched, a CSC official emailed Public Safety requesting “clear direction” from the Minister’s Office to “absolutely not allow” my media access.

At the same time, Kingston’s Liberal MP Mark Gerretsen publicly accused me on his Facebook page of promoting a “random conspiracy theory” and a “wild theory substantiated by no factual evidence whatsoever.”

It took me six years, but I finally obtained the factual evidence – the proof – of what Gerretsen rightly termed a conspiracy. Government emails and official briefing notes dating back to 2016 and 2017, previously redacted in Access to Information releases, hail the “many advantages” of prison farms “selling raw goat milk to Feihe International Inc.”

In light of the uncovered documents, Gerretsen’s “wild” dismissal of the plan is difficult to reconcile with minutes from a 2017 meeting in which Gerretsen promoted the “good opportunity” for prison farms to supply goat milk for Feihe, to say nothing of his 2019 public statement defending the “opportunity for the correctional institution to play a role” in Feihe's operations, which he and other officials afterwards downplayed as “speculation.”

During the 2021 election, I shared some Access to Information documents with our Liberal candidate Michelle Foxton, and explained how the addition of cows had been a public relations strategy to distract from the “goats that inmates will use to make infant formula for Chinese babies” (quoting PCO staffer Christine O’Nions). But instead of taking the moral stand that prisons should not be exploited for private industry, Foxton joined Gerretsen in promoting the cow dairy cover story, obscuring the industrial goat farm plan, and she joined Gerretsen in pushing to reopen a commercial slaughterhouse at Joyceville Institution to keep prisoners killing for a few dollars a day so that local farmers can “realize more profitability in their businesses.”

The 80-cow barn at Joyceville Institution, which took CSC three years to plan, then three years to build, has racked up a price tag of $19.5 million, including taxes and design fees. Industry experts estimate that an equivalent barn would have cost approximately $1 million.

Heading into the 2025 election, Gerretsen, Foxton, and our recent provincial Liberal candidate Rob Rainer, all toured the new federal cow barn with friends and colleagues, taking promotional pictures. When Conservative MP Scott Reid toured the barn, bringing Kingston’s Conservative candidate Bryan Paterson and me as his guests, CSC refused to let us take pictures. To be clear: Joyceville Institution was – at that time – in Reid’s riding, not Gerretsen’s, but only Gerretsen and Liberal candidates were allowed in with cameras.

A bigger picture emerges. A Green candidate was denied the right to ask questions, a Conservative MP and a Conservative candidate were denied the right to take pictures, but the Red carpet was rolled out for Liberals. The reason: controlling the prison farm narrative.

Piggybacking on the theme of partisan control is the reason why this riding is now minus “Kingston.” After Reid questioned the prison farms nine times in the House of Commons in the first six months of 2022, asking how commercial prison milk production complies with Canada’s human rights obligations, Gerretsen began lobbying on Facebook, successfully, for Elections Canada to redraw the electoral map, placing Joyceville Institution in his riding, not Reid’s, as of this election.

In the context of all of this, I had to weigh my choices in this election. My investigation into the prison farms is ongoing, as I prepare to publish the second edition of Prison Farms Exposed: Revelations from Access to Information, so I turned down the invitation to run again. I could not risk giving this Liberal government another opportunity to use its vast federal powers to keep its skeletons in the closet and to obstruct the freedom of the press and citizens’ right to know.

If Foxton had denounced the Liberal plan to commercialize prison farms and industrially farm goats for China, and if she had opposed the exploitation of prisoners in traumatic, dangerous, and criminogenic slaughter work, she might have earned my vote in this election. Instead, while claiming to champion progressive values and affordability, she promoted commercial prison dairy and slaughter enterprises, and posed for a photoshoot in a 20-million-dollar taxpayer-funded distraction of a cow barn.

That is why this Green could not vote Red in this election. And since the Green paper candidate who replaced me endorsed the Liberals, my vote could find no home there. That left me with two choices: the NDP with its commitment to labour rights and social justice, and Conservative MP Scott Reid who has listened, reviewed the evidence, and delved into the moral and financial sinkhole of the prison farm program.

During her campaign, Foxton accused Reid of being an absentee MP who rose in the House of Commons to question what we should call King Charles. Did she fail to notice the 18 times that Reid has risen to question the prison farms? Was Reid neglecting his parliamentary duties when he filed nearly a dozen Order Paper questions that have unearthed the cow barn costs, the projected operational losses, the millions spent on other farm building renovations, the millions spent on farm staff salaries, the millions spent on consultants, the millions spent on procurement, the half million spent on cattle, the “12 – 16” prisoner farm jobs created by the investment, and the fact that the prison milk is now being pooled with commercial streams sold to the public since CSC has no use for it?

And during her visit to the Joyceville prison farm, did Foxton fail to notice the new manure lagoon, tucked behind the cow barn, sized for the waste of the thousands of goats to come?

Only one candidate in this election was concerned about the enormous financial, environmental, and ethical costs of the prison farms, but Foxton told the people of this riding that Reid “doesn’t care about you.”  That, I know for a fact, is untrue. I am far from Blue, but I consider myself privileged to be represented by an MP of Reid’s experience, dedication, integrity, and care.