ALIX, Alta. – Canadian Wheat Board director Jeff Nielsen said he saw no reason to remain on the board after he was suspended for writing an article criticizing the marketing agency.
“With the next six weeks of being totally out of the loop, I thought, really, what was it worth?” Nielsen said Nov. 1, a day after he resigned from the board.
“I have a lot better ability to speak as an individual now that I have resigned than I did as a board member.”
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The board banned Nielsen from attending its November meeting after he wrote in an editorial that he believed meetings the CWB held across the Prairies this summer were not information meetings for farmers but a forum for special interest groups.
He said the board argued that the article broke conflict of interest guidelines.
“I don’t believe I broke any conduct guidelines, yet they brought me up on some items and banned me from the November board meeting, the only one we have left.”
Nielsen said farmers in his district have phoned him since he resigned to support his decision.
“Farmers are tired of the game this board of directors has been playing, spending their money without asking their permission for, fighting a fight farmers want to see resolved,” he said.
“All farmers I talked to who have expressed the same opinion: they want to move forward.”
He said the government’s decision to eliminate the board’s single desk had stalled progress at the board table to develop better marketing programs.
“We’re at a stalemate, we’re at loggerheads between the two groups,” he said during an expansion announcement at Rahr Malting in Alix.
Nielsen was one of two farmer-elected board members who supported a voluntary CWB. The other, Henry Vos, resigned in late October over the board’s decision to fight the federal government’s proposed CWB changes in court.
Nielsen said the board had become polarized over the agency’s marketing monopoly and was no longer debating important issues.
“In the last six months to a year, we haven’t really had those kind of discussions any more. The majority of the board, among themselves, came up with a decision, and some of these meetings have been a rubber stamp of what they wanted to see go forward. They had the majority. To say we felt sidelined in the past year to a year and a half was quite evident.”
He said board members should work with senior management to figure out how to survive in the new grain industry rather than fighting the government.
“We could have been working more providing more options and programs within the grain system,” he said.
“A lot of them have been explored, but when you go too far off the principle of pooling, you scare people.”
