Parliament Hill becomes the focal point this week of the increasingly acrimonious debate over the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly as the House of Commons agriculture committee holds three days of emergency hearings on the issue.
Summoned to committee hearings are prairie provincial agriculture ministers, farm leaders on both sides of the issue and Regina communications consultant Mary-Lynne Charlton, who tried to drum up business writing anti-monopoly letters on behalf of farmers and farm groups.
Agriculture minister Chuck Strahl will be before committee the week following, on Nov. 2.
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The committee hearings, forced on the reluctant Conservatives by the opposition majority, were called for by Liberal agriculture critic Wayne Easter, who also precipitated a two hour House of Commons debate Oct. 18 on the committee report that demands a producer vote before any changes to CWB legislation.
Easter used the House debate to denounce Conservative efforts to develop a plan to abolish the board’s monopoly and deny a commitment to a producer vote.
“From its actions to date, it would appear that the government is prepared to use any device up to the very line of legality in an effort to undermine the Canadian Wheat Board,” Easter charged.
Conservative speakers insisted they simply were bowing to the will of the majority of farmers who want choice in how they can market their grain.
Prime minister Stephen Harper responded to the critics Oct. 18 by referring to the 1943 decision by the government of William Lyon Mackenzie King to change the wheat board from voluntary to monopoly.
At the time, King faced strong pressure from the prairie farm community to make the move, although he was reluctant.
“Years ago, the Liberal party took away from western Canadian farmers the right to market their own wheat,” said Harper.
“Then a leader of the Liberal party came along (Pierre Trudeau), having monopolized that privilege, and said, ‘why should we sell your wheat for you?’ We in this party are going to make sure that our farmers are never subject to that kind of arbitrary behaviour by a future Liberal government.”
Last week, the CWB issue became an unusually prominent topic on Parliament Hill.
On consecutive days, Liberal leader Bill Graham and NDP leader Jack Layton made the issue of a farmer vote on CWB their lead question during question period.
As MPs debated the issue in committee and on the floor of the Commons, the rhetoric and accusations often became extreme.
Winnipeg New Democrat Pat Martin, whose downtown riding includes CWB head offices, called the government approach to denying farmers a vote fascism.
“It is pure ideological madness,” he said. “It is an ideological crusade that the Conservative party has undertaken really to do the Americans’ dirty work for them.”
In committee, Ontario Conservative Larry Miller contrasted the voluntary Ontario Wheat Board with the monopoly CWB and called the latter “bordering on communistic.”
In the Commons, Strahl ridiculed Bloc Québecois support for the CWB monopoly by wondering which Quebec farm products the anti-Canada separatist party would like to see under the jurisdiction of the national monopoly.
