Western Producer staff
During a long career as a lawyer and government-appointed native land claims negotiator, Tom Molloy figures he has learned some conciliation skills.
The 55-year-old Saskatoon lawyer is going to need all the skills he has accumulated during the next six months as he leads the federal grain marketing panel.
If its recommendations next summer are to have any chance of becoming a road map for the next generation of grain marketing rules, the panel must maintain its credibility with the players and partisans from both sides.
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It must appear to be fair and open to all sides. It must not appear to be working to a hidden (or as in Alberta’s case not-so-hidden) agenda.
And since agriculture minister Ralph Goodale has appointed a panel mix that almost certainly will not be able to agree, the majority must be able to make clear recommendations based on what it has learned, aside from the ever-present political debate.
For all nine commissioners, accomplishing this will be a tall order.
For Molloy as leader, it will be the main challenge.
He says his years since 1982 as a part-time land claims negotiator have taught him to deal with “divergent views and conflicting interests” in the search for solutions to thorny, philosophically-delicate, historically-loaded and politically-charged issues.
Last week, if he didn’t already know it, Molloy got a glimpse of the fact that in the grain marketing probe, he faces more of the same.
The most direct challenge, when he appeared before MPs on the Commons agriculture committee, came from Reformers who suspect Ottawa already has made up its mind to preserve the wheat board’s monopoly. It is a suspicion he will find in spades in Alberta.
Kindersley-Lloydminster MP Elwin Hermanson was blunt.
You are a known Liberal, he told Molloy, and a longtime “confidante” of the agriculture minister. Both were young Liberal lawyers when former University of Saskatchewan law dean Otto Lang was the provincial Liberal godfather.
Molloy deflected the question by saying he should be judged by the result, not the past.
Then came a broadside from the other side of the spectrum. Pro-board Liberal MP Wayne Easter is uneasy that the panel, containing as it does some board skeptics, will at best produce a mixed review that will undermine the board.
He held up a copy of an information package prepared and distributed by the panel and complained that it was not pro-board enough.
He called on the panel to be more of an orderly marketing partisan. “I’m disappointed that the wheat board isn’t profiled more than it is,” he said. “There are some misconceptions out there.”
Molloy bobbed and weaved his way around that direct challenge as well, but he knows those two strains of argument will haunt the process until it is complete.
How he and the panel cope with suspicions on both sides will determine whether the eventual panel report becomes part of the solution or merely part of the debate.
