The Canadian Wheat Board and CWB minister Chuck Strahl appear headed on a collision course over the government’s gag order on the marketing agency.
The wheat board has rejected a request from Strahl that it remove a contentious document from its website.
The minister sent a letter to the board Nov. 17 asking it to remove from the website its response to the federal government task force on how to move from a single desk to an open market system.
Strahl said the document, which has been public for a month and reported on in the media, violated an order imposed on the board Oct. 5, which directed the agency not to spend funds on “advocating the retention of its monopoly powers.”
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Strahl’s letter said the spending included such things as the salaries of the people who prepared and posted the document, along with any other resources expended in the process.
A CWB spokesperson said the agency obtained external legal advice that the document in question and its posting on the website does not violate the order.
“As a result we will respectfully decline the minister’s demand that it be removed,” said Maureen Fitzhenry.
Strahl said in an interview Nov. 27 he hadn’t yet seen a formal communication from the board on the subject and couldn’t say what the government will do next.
“I’ll have to see in detail how they’ve responded and consider my options,” he said.
“Certainly department of justice lawyers state it clearly contravenes the order-in-council.”
He added that the board shouldn’t spend farmer’s money on outside lawyers or fritter away its energies on “stuff that doesn’t really matter.”
“They should really be giving their head a shake on this,” he said.
The board’s interpretation of the directive is that to contravene it, three conditions must be present: the expenditure of money, advocacy, and advocacy of retention of the single desk.
In the opinion of the board’s legal advisers, those conditions do not apply to the document or the decision to post it on the website.
In the document in question, the board describes the reasons the task force’s proposed successor to the single-desk CWB could not succeed in an open market and is critical of the task force’s proposals.
In answering a series of questions posed by the task force, the board prefaced each one by saying the question falsely assumed that the CWB would continue to exist in an open market environment.
The document criticizes the task force plan and describes the benefits the agency believes it now provides to farmers, but nowhere in the document does the board specifically advocate “the retention of its monopoly powers.”
