The federal Conservatives’ legislation to end the Canadian Wheat Board is another example of a free market ideology trumping common sense and sound economic policy.
As a farmer’s daughter growing up on a wheat farm in Saskatchewan, I heard the stories of the Great Depression and how free markets cheated my family of its last good wheat crop before the drought hit. While the grain cars were rolling east – there was no port of Churchill then – the stock market crashed. Grain that had been worth something as it left the fields of Saskatchewan became worthless by the time it got to port because of the market speculators that brought us the Dirty Thirties.
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We are heading there again, if unrestrained financial markets are not brought in check around the world. Everyone who has followed what the financial sector has done, just from 2008 on, knows that. Europe teeters on the brink again, and in every country, it’s the ordinary people who will be asked to take the hit….
The Harper government doesn’t see this pattern because they believe marketeering freedom is the only freedom worth defending. They are about “keeping the free market faith” and building in our great north a little replica of the mess (former American president George W.) Bush and his band of cronies made of the American system.
Why put any stress on our farmers to run their own marketing board when we can gamble with grain, whether we know how to grow it or not, through the auspices of Monsanto, Cargill and the like?
“We worked so hard to build the wheat board,” says our mom, age 93, when we tell her of Harper’s plans. But what does a farm woman know after a lifetime of working the land, raising and preparing most of the naturally good food we ate as kids?
It’s big agri-business, not farmers, who know what is best for the breadbaskets of the world, and no doubt we will all be better off when agribusiness owns those breadbaskets….
We will be free market free then, not having any other choice in the matter. Please, Canadians, say no to this sell off.
Mary I. Nokleby,Calgary, Alta.
John and Brenda Nokleby,Kindersley, Sask.
