The Canadian Wheat Board wants prairie farmers to find some things to agree on about grain transportation.
With debate about the Estey report producing the usual division of opinion among prairie farm groups, the board invited six farm organizations to a meeting in Saskatoon March 30 to talk it out.
“What we said is let’s get together and identify if we have any areas of common ground to come together on,” Ian McCreary, chair of the CWB’s transportation committee, said before the meeting.
He said the board planned to put forward its proposal for a detailed review of railway costing as something that everyone might agree on.
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“And we’re encouraging others to think of things that may cross the boundaries between the groups in order to get as strong a voice as possible.”
The groups invited to the meeting were the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association, the Prairie Farm Commodity Coalition, the National Farmers Union, Keystone Agricultural Producers, Wild Rose Agricultural Producers and the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities.
The groups were to hear presentations from Terry Whiteside, a U.S. transportation consultant, and Kevin Doyle, chief executive officer of Sultran, a Calgary-based sulfur company.
The wheat board has published its own action plan for reforming the transportation and handling system but McCreary said the meeting was not designed to promote that plan.
“We’re hoping to get farm groups at some point to sign on to our action plan, but we’re not there yet,” he said. “We just want to find what common ground there is.”
The board also invited its grain handling agents to a meeting April 9 to talk about operational and logistical issues raised by the Estey report.
