opinion
Not a week goes by, it seems, without some U.S. politician blithely reciting another lie about the Canadian Wheat Board. It has been accused of everything from Stalinist control of Canadian farmers’ seeding plans to suicidal price-cutting.
So far, Canadians seem to have made little headway with their earnest efforts to counter U.S. misinformation and irrational hostility. Political posturing and vote-getting emotionalism tend to overwhelm voices of reason. In U.S. politics, the phrase “Canadian Wheat Board” seems to rank with “ayatollah.”
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The strange thing is that many Americans approve of the basic concepts underlying the board. Americans, after all, have their own form of orderly marketing and centralized control of sales, in the form of the elaborate Export Enhancement Program and a bureaucratic maze of related farm programs. The powers of U.S. government officials to direct their farmers’ land use, production and marketing in many ways go far beyond anything in Canada.
Also, the amount of taxpayer money put into wheat board operations is insignificant compared with U.S. export subsidies. (Occasionally, there is a year when one of the board’s grain pools has a deficit that is covered by the government; otherwise the board is totally funded by farmers’ grain sales.)
But such arguments have made little impression on U.S. politicians or the farm groups that lobby them.
Could it be that Canadian negotiators are over-estimating the collective intelligence of the U.S. political and media establishments, which spend most of their time on sex scandals?
Instead of trying to explain economics and marketing to politicians, perhaps Canada should simply make a few cosmetic changes in the board to allow the U.S. politicians to claim victory and brag about it.
With slight changes, perhaps including provision for directors to be elected by farmers, the board could keep doing everything it does now.
It might even be worth considering a new name. Something like “Western Canadian Grain Producers Marketing Alliance” would be an awkward mouthful, but that could have benefits.
It would be hard for a rabble-rousing North Dakota politician to get his constituents worked up over a “Western Canadian Grain Producers” organization, or to portray an organization with such a name as an evil bureaucratic empire.
As the old saying goes, a rose by any other name is still a rose.
If the important services of orderly marketing and central selling can be protected by making cosmetic changes in the board, even in its name, perhaps that should be considered.
