For more than 30 years, members of the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association have been dreaming of the day when the Canadian Wheat Board would no longer be the single desk seller of wheat and barley.
They don’t want to wait much longer.
A number of wheat growers members attending last week’s annual convention privately expressed impatience and frustration with the federal government’s stated go-slow approach to dismantling the CWB monopoly.
But officially, the organization was reluctant to be critical of new CWB minister Chuck Strahl.
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Asked if the association would feel betrayed if the government drags its feet on its promise to end the single desk, association president Cherilyn Jolly-Nagel said that will depend on the outcome of future discussions between the association and the minister.
“I need to clearly understand what the timeline is, what the hesitation is, what their reasons might be for not implementing it by Aug. 1, before I would say I was disappointed,” she said.
While Strahl has indicated the government won’t move quickly on the issue, she said the association is comforted by his repeated statements that the new government will fulfil its campaign pledge to bring in an open market system.
The association released a paper outlining its views on how to go about ending the single desk and implementing an open market.
It rejects arguments that change can be made only by amending the CWB Act after a favourable vote by producers, saying the cabinet can instruct the board through order-in-council to issue export licences to anyone who asks and to allow direct sales to domestic processors.
Hartley Furtan, an agricultural economist from the University of Saskatchewan, told the wheat growers that ending the single desk is complicated.
The CWB Act requires a vote by producers to end the single desk, he said, and warned that changes that could be interpreted as putting the pool accounts at risk of going into a deficit could lead to legal action.
He also dismissed the notion that the board could operate effectively in an open market, predicting it would “fade away” and become an insignificant player.
“Lots of farmers are sitting on the fence on this, and they don’t want to see a major wreck,” he said.
