Ottawa’s marketing choice task force did not analyze the benefits or dangers of ending the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly because that was not its mandate, MPs were told earlier this month.
Nor did it analyze, verify or challenge wheat board claims that the monopoly provides between $530 million and $655 million in additional revenue to prairie farmers each year.
“The task force didn’t deal with that part of what the wheat board provided because that’s not what we asked them to provide,” task force chair Howard Migie told Liberal questioner Wayne Easter during a Nov. 2 appearance before the House of Commons agriculture committee.
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The task force, which federal agriculture minister Chuck Strahl appointed to find ways to provide marketing choice for wheat and barley, asked the board how a transition to a competitive market could be technically accomplished. The wheat board refused an invitation to have a seat on the task force.
“In addition, they chose to provide information which was answering a different question than what we asked and so we didn’t as a group try to determine whether or not we would agree with the numbers that were provided,” Migie said.
His comments came during a Parliament Hill session during which opposition critics and a national farm leader ridiculed the task force report that was released after a month of meetings with invited industry players.
Easter said the report was based on political assumptions rather than evidence. It would be welcomed in the United States as a road map to dismantling a Canadian grain marketer that the Americans have tried for more than a decade to destroy, he added.
New Democrat Alex Atamanenko said the report on how to end the CWB monopoly was proposing a “revolution with unknown consequences.”
Liberal Paul Steckle accused the task force of “working in a bubble of faith” rather than assessing facts and reality.
And Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Bob Friesen said the task force presumption that the wheat board can be converted into a farmer-owned grain company that can compete with multibillion-dollar private and multinational companies is a joke.
“If I may be frank, it barely passes the laugh test,” Friesen said.
In aggressive questioning, Easter made it personal with Migie, a long-time senior Agriculture Canada bureaucrat who worked as a key adviser to then-Liberal wheat board minister Ralph Goodale when the CWB Act was rewritten in 1998 to give farmers more power.
“If we lose that single desk selling, you know Howard your credibility’s on the line,” said the veteran Liberal MP and former president of the National Farmers Union.
“If we lose the wheat board, you know under trade law we can’t get it back. This is not about beliefs. This should be about evidence, facts, analysis. That’s what it should be about.”
Migie said the political criticism of the task force was misplaced. The task force was given the job of examining how to convert the monopoly into a competitive grain seller, not assessing the Conservative policy.
“That is a different question than what this group was asked to do,” he told Easter.
“It’s very appropriate in my capacity to be assisting the minister and the government to implement policy. That is really my job.”
