Western Producer Ottawa reporter Barry Wilson is travelling the West reporting on key election issues for prairie farmers. This week, he focuses on Saskatchewan.
EDENWOLD, Sask. – The grain marketing choices offered to prairie grain farmers in this federal election could not be more stark. 
The Liberals and New Democrats promise they will defend the Canadian Wheat Board single desk until farmers decide otherwise.
“It is the farmers’ board, not the Conservative government’s board,” said Regina-Qu’Appelle Liberal candidate and CWB director Rod Flaman.
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“The way the government has gone about trying to undermine the board personifies the Conservative style of bullying to get their way.”
The Conservative party is promising that a re-elected government would change the CWB Act to remove the monopoly.
It insists a much-disputed plebiscite last year showed that barley farmers favour the change.
“We will continue to work with western Canadian grain farmers to ensure that the results of their plebiscite are respected and that they are given freedom to choose whether to sell grain on the open market or through the Canadian Wheat Board,” the Conservative agricultural platform said last week.
“It is what we promised and it is what farmers expect us to do,” said Regina-Qu’Appelle Conservative incumbent Andrew Scheer, who acknowledged the obvious point that farmers are split on the issue.
But for all the passion that partisans on the CWB issue bring to the debate, candidates across Saskatchewan say it is not a huge issue for the general electorate.
“It is what drove me into running, but as far as the general riding is concerned, it is not such a big issue,” said Flaman, who was elected a CWB director in 2000 as a monopoly opponent, changed his mind on its value and was re-elected with a larger majority in 2004 as a single desk promoter.
If there is a Saskatchewan riding where the CWB issue should play out strongly, it is the southwestern constituency of Cypress Hills-Grasslands where vehemently anti-monopoly MP David Anderson is running to be elected a fourth time.
His Liberal opponent, farmer and rural municipal politician Duane Filson, said he entered the political fray because of the wheat board issue.
“I am running because I have never been so angry before,” he said.
“The anti-democratic tactics of the Conservatives on this issue are atrocious. For me, it begins and ends with the wheat board.”
The riding contains two prominent wheat board supporters: National Farmers Union president Stewart Wells and CWB board chair Larry Hill.
Yet Filson concedes that in this “ruralist of ridings,” the odds are strongly against unseating the Conservatives.
“At first, I saw it as impossible,” he said.
“Now, I just see the challenge as monumental. But I’ve been told that in a democracy, no election is unwinnable.”
Across the province, Conservative opponents are citing the government campaign against the CWB, including attempting to change the rules through regulation by cabinet order and lifting third party spending limits in the current CWB board elections, as symptoms of a broader Conservative style.
“I’m here to tell Mr. (prime minister Stephen) Harper that the wheat board doesn’t belong to the Conservatives,” Liberal candidate David Orchard said during a candidates’ meeting in Meadow Lake Sept. 25.
“It belongs to the farmers of Western Canada and they should decide free of the undemocratic manipulations the Conservatives are trying.”
In the Prince Albert riding, New Democrat Valerie Mushinski said she uses the CWB issue as an illustration of the slippery slope the Conservatives are heading down as they undermine the rule of law to get their way.
“It is disconcerting to people that the government appears willing to do whatever it has to, to get its way on that issue,” she said.
“And if they can manipulate to undermine that institution, what’s to say they won’t do the same for other institutions or policies that voters in this riding need?”
Randy Hoback, Conservative candidate in Prince Albert and former president of the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association, said farmers who approach him on the issue generally want marketing choice, but mostly they want the issue to be resolved.
“I tell them it is a debate that is dividing farmers and has for years and it has to stop,” he said.
Despite the criticism of Conservative tactics, an Ipsos poll of farmer voting intentions published this week shows 64 percent of Saskatchewan farmers plan to vote Conservative.
