The government has more than tripled the amount of money allowed in the Canadian Wheat Board’s contingency fund, which has started another front in the war to change the CWB.
Agriculture minister Gerry Ritz issued a directive that all CWB profits from non-pool market transactions, including hedging, producer payment options and currency transactions, must go into the contingency fund available for the voluntary successor to the single desk CWB.
He raised the maximum first to $100 million from $60 million, following a CWB request for a $90 million cap, and then to $200 million.
Opposition members in the House of Commons wondered whether it will become a way to pay for CWB wind-up costs and whether the money should go into pool accounts.
Ritz insisted it is money that would not traditionally go into pool accounts and the government is being prudent to give the CWB successor a capital base.
“As a government, we took this prudent measure to protect the future of western Canadian farmers, Canadian taxpayers and of course, the new voluntary wheat board,” he said.
Then he said if the money went into the pool accounts, it would become more cash for board chair Allen Oberg and other pro-monopoly directors to use to fight government plans to change the CWB.
“We want to ensure that Mr. Oberg’s sticky little fingers stay out of that, as they have been dipping into the pool accounts of farmers, spending tens of millions of dollars buying ships, spending like drunken sailors,” he said in the Commons.
Opposition critics replied that the government is building the contingency fund as a way to pay for Ritz’s obsession to kill the CWB.
