A union whose members help keep Canada’s grain trains moving has some sombre advice for prairie farmers fighting the battle to keep the Canadian Wheat Board.
Forget it.
“The fight for the board is basically lost,” said Darrell Richards, of the transportation consulting firm Transport Concepts. “Farmers should realize that and move on.”
Richards, once a Parliament Hill aide to onetime NDP transport critic and wheat board defender Les Benjamin, helped the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees of the United Transportation Union write a brief on wheat board reform legislation now before Parliament.
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The brief was sent to the House of Commons agriculture committee studying the legislation.
The union argued that wheat board reform is only a delaying tactic by the government to slow down market forces and globalization tendencies unleashed by the 1995 elimination of the Crow Benefit subsidy and the rail regulation that went with it.
“Since the elimination of the Crow Benefit, the government has been trying to slow down the logical outcome of the restructuring it set in motion,” said the union’s brief. “We believe that the government has already recognized that the industry will be deregulated but it is concerned about the political implications of too rapid a transition.”
The union recommended prairie farmers accept the inevitability of the end of the wheat board’s single-desk monopoly and try to prepare themselves to compete.
Union advice
The workers offered several recommendations to farmers:
- Create a private international marketing agency that would give them some clout.
- Create a regional transportation system for grain, combining short-line railways, trucks and the existing rail system.
- Work to co-ordinate their farmer-owned elevator system to provide grain for the export system.
Richards said in an interview it would be like the farmer-controlled attempt to create an export co-operative in the 1920s – a scheme which went bankrupt and led to creation of the wheat board.
But he said two major prairie grain players likely would not be part of any new post-CWB arrangement.
“With the multinational investment in United Grain Growers, it likely would not be involved,” he said. “And it may even be too late to have the Sask Pool involved.”
