The Progressive Conservative party policy on the Canadian Wheat Board is to support the board, make it more accountable to farmers and to give individual farmers more ability “to get the full benefit of their opportunities,” a senior Conservative official said last week.
“We support the board,” PC campaign policy chair Roxanna Benoit said May 15 from Ottawa. “What we want to do is to give the board more flexibility and to give farmers the opportunity to get the full benefit of the opportunities they see. But we want to be sure the board is protected.”
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Benoit said that does not necessarily mean a dual market or a voluntary board.
It was a political position that left farm leaders last week disagreeing over what is being promised.
And comments from leader Jean Charest did not clear up the confusion.
The party policy, released May 12, proposes after consultations with farmers to add more flexibility to the Canadian Wheat Board “to allow producers to take full advantage of the opportunities available to them.”
Missed opportunity
A background paper praised the efforts of the former PC government in taking oats away from the board “against considerable opposition” and criticized the Liberals for not giving barley farmers the right to choose a voluntary board in last winter’s plebiscite. “The option of dual marketing, which is favored by many growers, was not allowed on the ballot.”
Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Jack Wilkinson read the program and concluded the PCs are proposing a dual market.
“I don’t know how else you could interpret that but as a dual market,” he said. “It strikes me as a code for dual marketing.”
Ken Edie, Manitoba Pool Elevators vice-president and spokes-person for Prairie Pools Inc., read the program and concluded that as long as the consultations are serious, farmers will opt for a single-desk exporter that is more flexible.
“The commitments Mr. Charest made are certainly laudable statements which would be welcomed by farmers,” Edie said in an interview from Winnipeg May 14. “If they are serious about consultations first, then the other things will flow.”
Asked directly at a news conference May 13 if dual marketing or a voluntary board is being proposed, Charest did not say.
“The idea here is to allow the wheat board more flexibility in recognizing niche markets,” he said in Ottawa.
Open more doors
“Those are areas in which we would like to see them be able to take more advantage of those new opportunities and allow producers to do that while at the same time recognizing the strengths of the wheat board and some of its advantages.”
Later, party spokesperson Tom Van Dusen said the proposal “looks like dual marketing but I really wasn’t that close to writing this.”
Benoit, who helped shape the platform and was an aide to former agriculture minister Charlie Mayer in the previous Tory government, said the PC proposal is to end the divisiveness which has grown between those who want to get rid of the board and those who want to keep or strengthen its monopoly.
“There is a lot of ground between these positions that we would like to help farmers find,” she said.
The PC platform also promised to consult farmers on the future mandate and operations of the board and to make the board accountable by ensuring a majority of directors are farmer-elected.
The Conservative policy paper says by failing to reform the wheat board, the Liberals have left it “in danger of becoming irrelevant. It is not meeting the changing requirements of the agriculture and agri-food business.”
During his news conference, Charest praised the wheat board for its record. The CWB was established in 1935 by a Conservative government.
“We recognize that the wheat board has been very successful in the international market place and the (single) desk selling from country to country,” he said. “Those are strengths we would like to see preserved.”
