The Liberal Senate majority last week voted to remove restraints on the Canadian Wheat Board that the House of Commons had tried to impose through the Accountability Act.
In one of many votes that stripped the Conservative centrepiece legislation of some of its power, a Senate committee removed a clause that would make the CWB subject to the access-to-information law, minus commercially sensitive information.
The amended Accountability Act now will be sent back to the House for reconsideration. The Conservative government will try to get the clause back in, although it is far from certain that it will have the support of the Bloc Québecois that allowed the amendment in the first place.
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Liberals MPs, who opposed inclusion of the wheat board in the act from the start but saw New Democrat Pat Martin agree to support it during committee hearings and then Bloc Québecois MPs voting with the Conservatives to include it in the final bill, declared last week’s Senate decision a victory.
It was a caucus decision, Liberal Commons House leader Ralph Goodale told an Oct. 26 news conference.
“The books of the wheat board already are open but they should not be more open than their commercial competitors,” he said.
Liberal leader Bill Graham said access-to-information laws should not apply to the wheat board because it is a commercial enterprise.
“The wheat board is in the business of selling wheat on behalf of farmers and we should be finding ways of helping it, not getting in its way,” he said at the news conference.
Critics of making the CWB subject to access-to-information laws say it would give board enemies another tool of harassment.
The Senate decision to take the wheat board out of the Accountability Act provided the Conservatives with fodder for arguments against Liberal secrecy, the Senate and the CWB monopoly.
Prime minister Stephen Harper said farmers should have a right to use access-to-information rules to find out how their money is being spent.
“We put the wheat board under access-to-information in the Accountability Act,” Harper told the Commons. “The unelected Liberal Senate took it out. That is a disgrace. The wheat board should be subject to access to information.”
Treasury Board president John Baird accused the Liberals of “hiding behind the unelected Liberal Senate to do its dirty work. … What do Liberals have to hide at the Canadian Wheat Board?”
Agriculture minister Chuck Strahl also waded into the attack in the Commons, saying, “I don’t know which is worse, the fact that the Liberals do not think farmers should know what is going on or the fact that farmers lost their right to know by an unelected Senate.”
The following day during question period, Liberal agriculture critic Wayne Easter fired back, arguing that the Conservatives acted against legal advice that the wheat board should not be subject to the act because it is not a government agency.
