United political right hastens doom for CWB - Opinion

FEW in the House of Commons are as dogged, as tenacious, as uncompromising as Canadian Alliance Yorkton-Melville MP Garry Breitkreuz.

His most celebrated cause has been the assault on the cost and bureaucratic bungling of the gun registry.

But Breitkreuz, like many of his Alliance colleagues, also has been a consistent critic of the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly and last week he aimed his Question Period slings and arrows style toward the CWB.

He referred to access-to-information applications that produced information on Arab militant fund-raising activities in Canada. “Yet at the same time Canadians cannot find out about the Canadian Wheat Board activities. It is exempt from access to information.”

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He said farmers and opposition MPs cannot find out “why farmers received less for their wheat last year than the going world price. Why are the activities of the Canadian Wheat Board more secretive than our spy agency?”

CWB minister Ralph Goodale put on his game face and lectured his long-time tormentor about how open the board is compared to its private sector competitors, how it is audited and how it is accountable to Parliament.

“If (Breitkreuz) is at all interested in really getting answers to his questions, I invite him to call the Canadian Wheat Board and its auditor before a standing committee of this House and get every bit of information for which he could ever ask,” said Goodale.

Not since national CCF leader-turned-federal-Liberal-senator Hazen Argue strode the halls of Parliament as CWB minister terrorizing the last government of Pierre Trudeau with his pro-farmer rhetoric has the wheat board had such a strong advocate in national government as Goodale.

Since he will have a prominent role, perhaps even as deputy prime minister, in the Liberal government of Paul Martin, that solid defense of the wheat board will remain government policy for at least a few years.

However, the Breitkreuz intervention should remind us that when the Conservative Party of Canada emerges this winter to replace the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada and the Alliance, the new and strengthened opposition party will be unbendingly hostile to the board monopoly.

It also will represent the vast majority of prairie rural seats in the House of Commons, at least until the next election.

If Canadian parliamentary democracy works as it always has, the Liberals one day will be replaced in government by the opposition. Yes, someday even federal Liberals and Alberta Conservatives will be exiled to the benches on the Speaker’s left, as Alberta Socreds were in 1971, Ontario Tories were in 1985 and federal Liberals were in 1957.

The current decade-long “one party state” so bemoaned by the opposition and its media supporters pales in comparison to Alberta’s 32-year Tory reign or other historic Canadian political runs.

Still, on the day the federal Liberals are deposed, it will be the beginning of the end for the wheat board monopoly, if it hasn’t ended already because of farmer board-of-directors elections or international trade agreements. The new party certainly will be board hostile.

Changes in political alignments this winter hasten the day when the CWB monopoly is an historical footnote.