It will be at least a month before the federal government decides whether to take farmers back to court for running the border or to appeal the decision that ordered new trials.
Federal senior counsel Horst Dahlem, who argued the case against farmers who bypassed the Canadian Wheat Board and took their own wheat and barley to the U.S., said the Canada Border Services Agency, commonly known as Customs, has to make the decision.
“Once they decide … we consider whether we agree,” he said last week. “We have 60 days in which to seek leave to appeal.”
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Dahlem suggested it would take at least half that time to make the decision.
On May 2 the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal issued a unanimous ruling that allowed the appeals of six farmers and ordered new trials for 16 others.
The 22 were among an original group of more than 60 farmers who in the spring of 1996 tried to take grain across the border to protest the wheat board’s export monopoly.
They were charged under the reporting of exported goods regulations in the Customs Act for failing to produce a wheat board export licence.
Over time, some pleaded guilty and paid their fines while others were found guilty first in provincial court and then in Queen’s Bench court.
Some subsequent appeals were abandoned but 22 appellants chose to take the judicial process as far as they could.
In Ottawa, Conservative wheat board critic David Anderson said the government should announce quickly that it will neither appeal the court decision nor order new trials.
“I can’t imagine the government spending money to reprosecute these cases,” the Saskatchewan MP said. “It came out of an overreaction to a challenge to their power. The government, rather than having a position on the deeper question, was reacting on the fly and it cost farmers a lot of money, a lot of time and a lot of worry for nothing. It would be a waste of public money to pursue this.”
Anderson said because the law has been changed since the original charges were filed, the judgment “doesn’t have much implication for the present.”
Reg Alcock, minister responsible for the board, took the same view.
“I’m not a lawyer but I’m told the changes that were made subsequent to this have taken the ambiguity out of it, so the concern that the court of appeal had would not exist in the same circumstances today.”
Alcock said the government will depend on lawyers’ advice about whether to go back to court.
