The Conservative decision to make the Canadian Wheat Board subject to the Access to Information legislation has not been the disaster board supporters predicted, but it has cost farmers lots of money.
During the first year, dealing with the access-to-information system cost the CWB more than $400,000, according to a board report filed with Parliament.
Board communications manager Maureen Fitzhenry said last week many of those were start-up costs for staff training, software and staff time working on requests.
Now that the system is in place, she predicted costs will fall, depending on the volume of requests.
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“My guess is that it will be about half that on an ongoing basis,” she said Nov. 28.
In the report to Parliament, the board said information requests required the equivalent of 2.9 employees.
However, it has not resulted in the flood of requests the board feared.
The CWB was forced against its will to be under the authority of the act beginning April 1, 2007, because the Conservatives said it wanted the board to be more transparent for farmers and its critics.
Board officials and supporters predicted a deluge of information requests that could force the CWB to make public information that would help its competitors. They also predicted the volume of “nuisance” requests would consume significant board staff time.
In fact, during the first 20 months of the new regime, the CWB has received not more than two dozen requests for information.
In 2007-08, 14 requests were received, many of them broad questions that would have required many hours of research to answer.
Fitzhenry said when the questioner was informed of the time required and the $10-per-hour fee, many of them dropped the matter. Last year, 11 of 14 requests were abandoned.
She said the number of requests so far this year is similar to last year’s level.
At the time of the raucous debate over the government determination to include the CWB under the government’s Accountability Act, Conservative critics of the board had high hopes it would let farmers shine a light on some of the board’s waste or bad practices.
Saskatchewan MP David Anderson, a wheat board monopoly opponent and parliamentary secretary to then-agriculture minister Chuck Strahl, said although the board’s commercial secrets would not be subject to the new rules, its administration would be.
“Farmers will be able to find out what is going on there,” he said. “They will finally also be able to find out the role of (former Liberal agriculture and wheat board minister Ralph Goodale) in putting farmers in jail in the 1990s.”
Strahl predicted farmers would use it to get evidence about high wheat board administrative costs.
The reality is that so far, few farmers have cared about their new power to ask for board information.
