SASKATOON – One of the Canadian Wheat Board’s most respected and effective defenders has resigned.
Harvey Brooks, head of corporate policy for the marketing agency since 1991, is leaving the board at the end of July to join the faculty of the University of Alberta.
“Anytime you lose a person of Harvey’s capability and background, you’re losing a lot,” said the board’s chief commissioner Lorne Hehn. “He’s definitely going to be missed.”
The departure of the 39-year-old native of Rosthern, Sask., comes at a critical time in the board’s history, with the report of the Western Grain Marketing Panel complete and a constitutional challenge to the board’s authority scheduled to be heard in court in Alberta this fall.
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“It’s a bad time to leave because there’s all sorts of interesting stuff going on,” Brooks said in an interview. But he added the career opportunity at the university is too good to pass up.
Brooks was approached to fill a newly created co-operative chair in agriculture marketing and business, in the department of rural economy. The tenure-track position is jointly funded by the university and a group of commercial interests, including Alberta Wheat Pool, United Farmers of Alberta, the Co-operative Union of Canada, Federated Co-operatives Ltd., Alberta Pork and a number of poultry and egg producer organizations.
“I’m not leaving the grain industry and not leaving the Prairies,” he said, adding he still intends to contribute to the ongoing debate about the future of the wheat board, an organization he joined as a price analyst in 1983.
In recent years, Brooks has been a key figure in preparing the board’s position in trade disputes with the U.S. and European Union and for government reviews like the Canada-U.S. joint commission on grains and the Western Grain Marketing Panel. He traveled to farm meetings across Canada and in the U.S. to explain and defend board policies.
“I can say with some confidence that this job I’m in now will probably be the best job I’ll ever have,” he said. “It’s a tremendous blend of strong conceptual work and then very pragmatic implementation and operational kind of work.”
Brooks said he’s confident that the board has a long, strong life ahead of it, as long as some changes are made to restore to farmers the feeling that they own and control the marketing agency. He added some of the legislative changes proposed by the board would go a long way to accomplishing that.
Strong yet flexible
He said the difficult task facing the board is to try to provide flexibility for farmers who want it while still maintaining the basic strength of the system.
Brooks said the recent debate about the board over its accountability to farmers and its monopoly on export sales of wheat and barley has been frustrating because it’s often based on misunderstanding or misinformation, and on emotion, not reason.
“You know what the talk is on coffee row and you know that if you were there you could straighten it out, tell the other side of the story, and at the end of the conversation they’d be thinking in a different way, even if they didn’t totally agree.”
