A racy Canadian Wheat Board advertisement featuring a 1960s image of a cowgirl sitting on a fence showing some thigh made it onto the House of Commons floor yesterday.
It’s time to get off the fence about enrolling in CWB pools, said the ad. The iconic image of a cowgirl with her skirt pulled high by a fence barb was the draw.
Following the lead of the National Farmers Union and Friends of the Canadian Wheat Board that said the leggy image was demeaning, New Democratic Party opposition MPs demanded in Parliament that the ad be killed.
And they insisted that since agriculture minister Gerry Ritz appointed the existing CWB directors, it is his job to tell them to pull the offending image.
“The new CWB ad symbolizes the Conservative agenda, setting farmers and women decades back,” Churchill, Man., New Democrat Niki Ashton said. “Since the minister appoints the directors to run the show, will he tell his buddies to take the ad down or is this really how he sees western Canadian men and women?”
Ritz said the CWB had tested the ad with consumers and found the reception overwhelmingly positive.
He said the real issue is that while the board solicits customers to get off the fence about how to market their grain this year, most farmers have had a year of “unprecedented success” in the six months since the CWB export monopoly ended Aug. 1, 2012.
