The poor turnouts at pro-Canadian Wheat Board rallies could be a sign of resignation, dejection and worry rather than proof of a lack of interest among farmers, says a leading expert on co-operatives.
“If you’ve been a board supporter and you go to one of these things, it’s a reminder that it’s gone, or it’s about to go. It’s depressing,” said Murray Fulton of the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives at the University of Saskatchewan.
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“This whole thing has become so vicious and so split and so polarized that if someone takes a stand, they’re worried about the situation down the road. It’s too polarized for some people’s liking.”
Rallies opposing the federal Conservative government’s plan to dis-m antle the CWB’s marketing monopolies have not drawn mass crowds of outraged farmers, but instead have been dominated by smaller groups of long-time committed monopoly supporters. This was true of the series of meetings organized by the CWB itself during the summer and at a string of rallies and events organized by others this fall.
At various times in prairie farmer history, farmers have appeared in groups of hundreds or thousands when crucial issues were at stake, such as the Crow rate or low farm incomes.
But there have been few major farm rallies in recent years and many have been wondering about why so few farmers are publicly rallying in support of the CWB. Does it say something about the CWB issue, about farmers’ willingness to protest for anything, or neither?
Fulton thinks most farmers assume the CWB will be killed by the government, so protesting doesn’t make much sense.
“They think it’s a fait accompli, so why bother?”
However, Fulton doesn’t think cooperatives or other farmer-owned or farmer-operated initiatives have gone out of fashion.
Retail co-ops are some of the biggest agricultural input suppliers in Western Canada, credit unions dominate most rural areas and are big forces in cities, and farmers have been willing in recent years to invest money in producer car loading facilities and other farmer-led initiatives.
Fulton thinks the big grain cooperatives, not including the wheat board, might have lost touch with local communities and have allowed co-op managers to make bad decisions.
“Maybe farmers didn’t have enough control of the on-the-board table of what the company’s managers were doing,” said Fulton about the over-expansion of the producer pool elevator companies in the 1990s.
So some farmers feeling alienated from “centralized and quite removed” co-operative grain companies switched their hopes to producer inland terminals and things like producer car loading.
“Where there’s something a bit more local and a bit more immediate, farmers are quite willing to do that,” he said.
