MPs on the Commons agriculture committee ended last week pondering a fundamental question about the rules for Canadian Wheat Board democracy.
When elections are being held for the board of directors next year, should the votes of large farmers carry more weight than votes of small farmers?
It happens in Australia.
Reform agriculture critic Jay Hill thinks it should happen here.
“There should be some weighting,” he said Oct. 23 after hearing the proposal from Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association president Larry Maguire during hearings on CWB legislation. “A hobby farmer who gets most of his income off the farm will not have the same stake in the decisions this board makes as someone whose whole livelihood depends on what the board does or does not do.”
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Progressive Conservative agriculture critic Rick Borotsik also supports the proposal. He said small producers will more likely be happy to have someone else market their crop but large farmers will want to spend the energy and time to get the best price.
“Does 100 bushels give you the right to as much voice as 100,000?” he asked. “I believe there is an inequity.”
And New Democratic Party MP Dick Proctor said he had no final position but the idea is worth debating. “There is a different stake for hobby farmers compared to full-time farmers.”
Yet Borotsik predicted the Liberals would not allow a weighted vote into new wheat board rules.
Quebec Liberal Denis Coderre called it a “totalitarian line of questioning.”
One person, one vote
Gerry Byrne, parliamentary secretary to wheat board minister Ralph Goodale, said smaller farmers who also depend on board sales would not like a weighted vote. “In the country that I live in, Canada, it’s one person, one vote.”
Marvin Shauf, vice-president of Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, told MPs that Prairie Pools Inc. does not support a vote weighted to production.
“We wouldn’t propose it be a weighted vote,” he said. “If you have a permit book, your vote would have as much weight as anyone else’s vote.”
Supporters of the proposal note that votes by corporate shareholders are weighted to the number of shares held. If the CWB board is meant to be a corporate board, the same rules could apply.
Maguire said 20 percent of grain farmers produce 80 percent of the grain and yet would receive just 20 percent of the say over how grain is marketed under a one farmer, one vote system.
He said if the winter barley vote had been weighted to production, he is certain the 32 percent who voted for the open market would have represented more than half the barley produced.
