After years of vowing to kill the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly and months after setting Aug. 1, 2012, as the execution date, the Conservative government wants to find out what it will cost.
Agriculture Canada is advertising for an audit to prepare two reports that determine how much taxpayers will be on the hook for winding down the wheat and barley monopoly.
The winning auditor will be paid between $500,000 and $1 million to figure out potential liabilities, including employee severance and pension costs, potential legal costs for broken long-term contracts and other costs as well as offsetting CWB assets.
Read Also
Crop estimates show mixed results
Model-based estimates used by Statistics Canada showed the 2025/26 crop year has seen increases in canola, corn for grain, oats and lentils production while seeing dips in spring wheat, durum wheat, soybeans and barley in comparison to 2024/25.
The call for bids was issued Aug. 11 and will close Aug. 25.
For critics of the Conservative plan, the call for a financial accounting is proof that the Conservatives made the CWB decision based on ideology and without any financial analysis of whether it made economic sense.
A CWB analysis reviewed by the accounting firm KPMG concluded the costs will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. During a summer meeting, board officials told Grain Growers of Canada it could be in the $300 million range.
“The government’s fanaticism to abolish the Canadian Wheat Board may cost us hundreds of millions of dollars, never mind the impact on the well-being of prairie farmer incomes,” New Democratic Party CWB critic Pat Martin said.
“The taxpayers may be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars to fulfill the ideological wet dream of (prime minister) Stephen Harper.”
CWB chair Allen Oberg said it is clear the government has not calculated the costs of ending the monopoly or how the board could transition into a competitive market player.
“It’s fair to say it’s going to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars and this is something we don’t think farmers should pay for and the federal treasury is going to be on the hook for that,” he said from his Forestburg, Alta., farm.
He said the government should wait for the early September results of a CWB-conducted farmer plebiscite to see what the majority of farmers want.
Oberg said none of the scenarios studied by the CWB show the end of the single desk returning as much value to farmers as the current model. “This really is in the government’s hands.”
Critics also saw language in the call for tenders that they say is a glimpse of the real Conservative agenda.
The call for bids does not use the public Conservative language about ending the monopoly, but hoping the CWB survives. It says the objective of the audits is to “provide assurance that the financial reporting is up-to-date and that all financial transactions have been accurately recorded in order to determine the potential financial impact of the repeal of the Canadian Wheat Board Act and the dissolution or winding up of the CWB.”
Legislation to repeal and replace the CWB Act will be introduced once Parliament returns in mid-September.
“That language is a far cry from the Conservative public line,” said Martin. “Clearly the government is contemplating more than just a voluntary CWB. It is contemplating the elimination of it.”
At Grain Growers of Canada, which supports elimination of the single desk, executive director Richard Phillips said it was prudent for the government to wait to do a financial impact study since financial implications and conditions change.
“I’m not sure a review done earlier would be very valid today with new information,” he said.
He suggested some of the costs for employee severance and pension liabilities could be limited by giving the board’s 400 employees priority for other government jobs “There will be liabilities, but the extent is unclear so it is a good idea to get an independent assessment of that.”
Martin said the fact that the government announced the decision first and now is trying to figure out the financial implications later is “our worst fears realized” that it was a decision made without an economic cost-benefit analysis.
“It is frightening that it is only at this late date that they will assess what the economic impact is going to be of dismantling the wheat board,” he said.
