A director of the Canadian Wheat Board says the agency made a mistake by hiring someone with close ties to CWB minister Reg Alcock to be the board’s first senior adviser for government relations.
“The optics of this are just horrible,” said Rod Flaman of Edenwold, Sask.
“Here we are trying to distance ourselves from government and now we have this backdoor situation that nobody can ignore. No matter what the process was whereby we acquired this individual, it’s the wrong person.”
But other board directors and officials defended the hiring of Avis Gray, saying she won a fair and open competition for the job and is highly qualified to act as the liaison between the marketing agency and federal and provincial governments.
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Director Bill Nicholson of Shoal Lake, Man., said he’s satisfied with the process and the decision to hire Gray, who served as co-chair of Alcock’s re-election campaign in the June 28 federal election.
The government had no input or influence in the hiring process, he said, and had no advance knowledge of the decision to offer the job to Gray.
“It has maybe created a bit of a target because of her history and previous work with the minister,” he said.
But Nicholson insisted that history doesn’t mean there was anything improper about the hiring, nor that the board’s activities will somehow be directed by Ottawa.
“She works for the Canadian Wheat Board, not the government,” he said.
Bigger picture
Flaman said he doesn’t question Gray’s qualifications or suggest there was anything untoward about the hiring process. What he does question is the wisdom of the selection, given the contentious political atmosphere in which the board operates.
“It appears to have backfired on us, in spite of our best intentions, and perhaps we should have foreseen that,” he said, referring to criticism of the hiring from at least one farm organization.
No matter how well the board explains its decision, the reality remains that the successful candidate has extremely close ties to the minister responsible for the CWB.
“Unfortunately people aren’t going to listen to the rationale,” said Flaman. “They’re just going to look at it on the surface and say this smacks of patronage.”
One group that has already done so is the Western Barley Growers Association, a persistent critic of CWB operations. The organization issued a News release
news suggesting the hiring of Gray represented the payment of a political debt to Alcock over the government’s handling of the 2002-03 wheat pool account deficit.
Barley association president Doug McBain acknowledged in an interview the organization has no proof of that, but said it’s a matter of putting two and two together.
CWB president and chief executive officer Adrian Measner said there is “absolutely no truth” to the barley growers’ allegations.
“It is simply an allegation with no factual basis and it certainly is annoying,” he said.
Gray got the job as a result of an executive search carried out by an outside consultant and an evaluation of a short list of candidates by an internal committee of senior board managers.
Nicholson was also angered by the WBGA’s release, saying they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with making such unfounded allegations.
“People like the barley growers should be forced to put up or shut up,” he said. “It’s a typical attack on the part of their organization.”
He added that it stands to reason that anyone hired for a government relations position will have some sort of history of involvement in the political system.
“The idea that you could hire someone for that position who has no background in the political structure is hard to imagine,” he said.
McBain questioned why the board needs a government relations adviser since it already has a federal cabinet minister to which it reports.
“As wheat and barley growers, we don’t have to lobby with the federal government departments,” he said. “We’ve got our own guy at the cabinet table.”
But Measner said the cabinet position is simply the technical vehicle by which the board reports to Parliament and isn’t meant to be the voice of the board to government on policy issues.