OTTAWA – Critics of the Canadian Wheat Board’s rich and now-reduced severance policy are barking up the wrong tree by using it to criticize current board commissioners, says agriculture minister Ralph Goodale.
The rules allowing retired commissioners as much as $290,000 in severance were developed in the early 1980s, he told a Commons questioner last week.
“When those severance arrangements were developed, none of the current commissioners was in office,” Goodale told Manitoba Reform MP Jake Hoeppner.
“(He) can point no finger of blame at the current commissioners … because they were not in office at the time when the severance arrangements were put in place.”
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In the Commons, Hoeppner used news of the cancelled deal to criticize the secrecy of the government and the board.
He noted it was a Liberal government in 1980 which first approved the perks.
“Why does the minister not make these perks and privileges retroactively disappear,” demanded Hoeppner.
Without directly responding, Goodale appeared to reject the idea.
“The arrangements under which the current commissioners came into office were legally in effect at the time when their services were engaged by the government of Canada,” he said.
Critics of the board have used the severance package as another opportunity to criticize the way the grain seller operates.
The government, in Goodale’s words, modernized the rules “to bring them into line with other requirements” once the richness of the package was discovered.
