The federal government and Parliament should reject a consultant’s suggestion that inspection and weighing of grain being delivered to transfer or terminal elevators be made optional, said the president of Saskatchewan’s largest farm organization.
Ken McBride, president of the Agricultural Producers’ Association of Saskatchewan, told the House of Commons agriculture committee last week that the so-called “inward inspection” is a protection for producers.
It impedes the ability of grain companies with both inland and export terminals to reduce the value of the delivery at port, cutting money to farmers. Weighing and inspection should be mandatory at both point of delivery and at export, or outward inspection.
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“Without an inward and outward weighing and inspection quantification, there would be no way of determining gains or losses (between delivery and export) other than by information supplied by the company,” McBride told MPs studying proposed changes to the Canadian Grain Commission. “It is interesting to note that the movement towards eliminating inward weighing and inspection services provided by the CGC is largely being championed by those companies that own export terminal capacity.”
He said elimination of grade and weight records at terminal or transfer elevators would “create an extremely negative perception” about the ability of exporters “to treat the rest of the system unfairly.”
McBride appeared before the committee as part of an extensive Parliament Hill review of the Canada Grains Act and the role of the grain commission.
A report from consultant Compas Inc. recommended major changes in how the CGC operates, including a change in governance structure and increased use of contracted private services for inspection.
The APAS president said changes are needed at the CGC and the Compas recommendations are a good start.
“The Compas report has, rightly in our opinion, identified several areas under which the CGC may need to evolve more quickly to streamline processes and practices to ensure maximum value is being provided to the industry and more importantly from our perspective, to producers.”
McBride said he had no problem with a proposal to contract out services as long as standards and system credibility were maintained.
“As far as the contracted part of it, as long as those standards are maintained and we have contractors who do it to the same standards and everybody is grading on the same standards, then contracting … where it puts more grading available to producers … and there’s a cost saving, why wouldn’t we look at that?”
But the proposal to make inward inspection optional as a way to reduce bureaucracy and costs did not pass the APAS credibility test.
McBride said without a record of what deliveries weighed and graded, there would be no way of judging whether companies at export points were short-changing producers.
“If there is no inward weighing and you don’t know exactly what that weight is when you leave, how do you know what it is when it gets there?”
