The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Trust Me To Sell Your Wheat What do you want for Christmas? A lot of wheat and barley farmers in the prairie provinces want to see a change in the Canadian Wheat Board. The Conservative Party promised in the last election campaign to end the monopoly power of the Winnipeg-based organization. Most farmers have been Conservative supporters ever since Trudeau uttered his true but tasteless comment "Why should I sell your wheat?" decades ago, then followed it up with the National Energy Policy, alienating the oil patch. This was followed up by Chretien's long gun registry fiasco, further dooming the Liberals to western obscurity, where they remain today. Now the Liberals want to support the Wheat Board's monopoly on wheat and barley in the western provinces. Western farmers must sell all bushels of these two grain crops to the Wheat Board, which seeks out the best market price and pays it to the producers. Other farmers, mainly in Ontario and Quebec, are not bound by this law and can sell to whomever they want. Supporters of the board, which is totally financed by farmers, claim they get the best deal possible and fear that the loss of the monopoly will mean the end of the board Ð and the the cushy, high-paying jobs in Winnipeg. This has got the Manitoba NDP excited and its Agriculture Minister, Rosann Wowchuk, wanting to hold a provincail vote among farmers, which of course doesn't mean a thing as it is a federal matter. The Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association, a 36-year-old group, is Alberta-based and solidly behind the Conservative plan. The president, Cherilyn Jolly-Nagel, claims: "We don't need the CWB giving another sales pitch telling us how wonderful the monopoly is. What we need is for them to provide us with the best possible returns and focus on becoming a keen competitor in a market choice environment." She added that 54 per cent of western farmers no longer support the monopoly in spite of the huge money the board has spent promoting itself, referring to a CWB survey of wheat growers that showed 47 per cent want a dual market, 45 per cent support the CWB, and seven per cent want to eliminate the board completely. She also stated that prairie farmers should have the same marketing freedoms as farmers everywhere else in Canada. Other CWB critics blame the monopoly for providing no incentive for investors to invest in processing wheat in Western Canada, and note that only three per cent of our wheat is processed here. Farmers, of course, pay for the shipping abroad of the grain. They also point out that over 60 per cent of canola is processed in Western Canada, as canola marketing is competitive. Wayne Easter, the federal Liberal Agriculture Critic (from PEI, no less), attacked the Conservative agriculture policy and raved against allowing farmers a choice in marketing their grain. He conveniently forgot that back in 2002, the Liberal-dominated agriculture committee recommended that "the board of directors of the Canadian Wheat Board authorize, on a trial basis, a free market for the sale of wheat and barley." Guess what? Easter himself participated in the committee hearings! A dozen years ago, more than a dozen farmers defied the Wheat Board monopoly and sold their grain across the border for $8.50 a bushel rather than the $3.50 they were offered by the CWB. They were charged and convicted for illegally transporting grain to the US, and more than a dozen went to jail for refusing to pay the fines, some for six months. Federal Agriculture Minister Chuck Strahl, in a Winnipeg speech, said there will be a vote of barley producers next year but that the wheat vote would not take place until at least 2008. He also insisted that Winnipeg would remain the centre of the grain industry, monopoly or not. Grain or no grain, monopoly or choice, I would like to wish all readers a very merry Christmas (even though it is not politically correct in some circles to say this). May you get all the presents you hope for and have a very enjoyable holiday. Roger's Right Corner runs Wednesdays.
