Agriculture minister Gerry Ritz has vowed to change the Canadian Wheat Board voters’ list to eliminate voters who deliver little or no grain to the board.
Farmers who produce just 20 percent of CWB deliveries “control 80 percent of the votes and that is an untenable situation,” he said in the House of Commons May 14.
“We will seek to rectify that.”
Ritz also used a question from Saskatchewan Conservative MP David Anderson during a House examination of Agriculture Canada spending plans to argue that the CWB is losing its relevance.
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“The wheat board just cannot understand this free market idea,” said the minister responsible for the CWB.
“Its analysis is somehow flawed. That leads to the reality in Western Canada that the wheat board is becoming less than viable.”
Ritz said prairie farmers are planting fewer acres to board grains as they try to get out from under its control.
Ritz’s comments capped a day of CWB bashing on Parliament Hill by Conservative MPs.
Earlier, wheat board chair Larry Hill and president Ian White were called before the Commons agriculture committee for a hearing on agricultural competitiveness.
However, the Conservatives on the committee also included on the witness list representatives from Western Canadian Wheat Growers’ Association and Grain Growers of Canada, which oppose the CWB monopoly.
Liberal agriculture critic Wayne Easter accused the Conservatives of “trying to stack the witnesses against a marketing institution.”
The arguments of the wheat board antagonists were, as expected, critical.
The CWB typically earns less for farmers than they could get from the open market, wheat growers president Kevin Bender told MPs.
“In the face of all this evidence, the wheat board continues to boast that it captures a premium for prairie farmers and yet year in year out, the returns the wheat board provides are invariably lower than returns provided by the open market,” he said.
Hill responded that last year, the board sold durum at an average price of more than $12 per bushel, which he said was far higher than most American open market sales returns.
For Conservative MPs, the issue was that the board lost close to $90 million in its contingency fund last year as it tried to hedge sales made through producer payment options programs and earned more than $200 million less than it could have on sales.
When board representatives tried to defend their record, particularly against accusations from Conservative MP Anderson, they typically were cut off as more accusations were piled onto the record.
Conservatives focused on a report that the CWB commissioned from a consulting group made up of analysts who once had worked for the board.
The report, still unpublished except to the board and Ritz, analyzed the contingency fund losses.
Conservative MPs demanded the report be provided to the committee.
White said much of it could be tabled but not parts that contained commercially sensitive information.
For the Conservatives, that was evidence of a cover-up.
When Easter demanded that board officials be allowed to answer the accusations, Anderson responded: “You don’t have to protect the wheat board. What we want here is simply for them to release a report that deals with their losses. I don’t know why you would hide that from farmers.”
The committee meeting ended in stalemate and anger. A Conservative motion to force production of the report remained on the table.
