The Conservative Party insists that if elected, it will fulfil a long-standing party policy by ending the Canadian Wheat Board export monopoly for wheat and barley, and on domestic sales for human consumption.
Critics have denounced it as a policy that would impose an ideological solution on prairie farmers who consistently elect CWB directors supporting the single desk.
Skeptics wonder if the Conservatives could actually implement the promise, given that the next Parliament is likely to be a minority with Liberals, New Democrats and Bloc Québécois supporting farmer marketing boards.
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Conservative wheat board critic David Anderson says it would not be an automatic policy change.
“I think one part of the promise is that we would sit down with producer groups and the provinces to see how they want to proceed and how far they want to proceed,” Anderson said from his southwestern Saskatchewan constituency where he is running for re-election.
“There is no one saying they want to kill the board. It is about choice and there is no doubt about our party policy on that. However, since this would involve a package of legislative changes, we certainly would do broad consultations.”
Anderson said that one of the questions that would be discussed is whether there should be a producer vote before the details of the new policy are announced.
Conservative leader Stephen Harper left no ambiguity when he included a CWB change as part of his Dec. 21 agriculture policy announcement on a farm near Chatham, Ont.
He said the Conservative Party supports supply management and its three pillars of production controls, import controls and price setting.
But he said Conservative policy on the Canadian Wheat Board remains what it has been.
“Now when it comes to non-supply managed industries like grains and oilseeds, our policies remain the same,” said Harper. “We want to give farmers more freedom to make their own marketing and transportation decisions and to participate voluntarily in producer organizations, including the Canadian Wheat Board.”
At present, the CWB, a federal crown corporation, operates under legislation that includes a way to end the monopoly, including a recommendation from the two-thirds farmer controlled board of directors that the rule be changed, followed by a CWB request to the government.
The legislation would have to be amended and if the Conservatives were in a minority, it would be a tough vote since all other parties in Parliament are in favour of orderly marketing and have explicitly embraced the wheat board monopoly.
“I think it would be very difficult for a minority Conservative government to get that kind of change through the House,” said Richard Gray, chair of agricultural economics at the University of Saskatchewan. “It really would depend on the attitude of the Bloc but they have been pretty supportive of orderly marketing in the past.”
National Farmers Union president Stewart Wells said while an end of the monopoly could be difficult to get through a minority Parliament, a Conservative government could undermine the board in other ways.
It could instruct negotiators at the World Trade Organization to make concessions that would render the CWB ineffective.
“If they instructed negotiators to agree to all kinds of new disciplines to the wheat board, it could have the same effect of making it ineffective,” Wells said.
For the moment, negotiators have instructions to defend the CWB monopoly as non-trade distorting.
