SASKATOON – The delegate who spearheaded the unsuccessful fight against Saskatchewan Wheat Pool’s share financing plan has resigned.
Stewart Wells of Swift Current was one of two pool delegates to hand in their resignations last week to protest the change in the pool’s structure. The other was 10-year delegate Ron Watson of Lancer.
Wells, a 40-year-old grain farmer and delegate since 1990, became an unofficial spokesman in recent months for pool members opposed to the share conversion.
Wells said he made the decision with deep regret.
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“I’m third generation on the family homestead here and Saskatchewan Wheat Pool has always been a way of life for my family.”
Nothing in common
But since the decision by delegates to approve selling ownership shares in the company on the Toronto Stock Exchange, he feels he no longer has anything in common with the company.
“Saskatchewan Wheat Pool was organized by farmers for farmers as a way of having some control over their incomes and their future,” he said in a press release.
“In my opinion the board of directors has allowed a reorganization of SWP by managers for managers.”
Wells said in an interview he considered staying on to try to press for changes in the plan to make it more palatable to disgruntled members, but eventually decided that would be a wasted effort.
“Given that I really don’t think an individual delegate like myself has any impact on policy or operational affairs within the wheat pool, then it becomes a matter of who am I really serving, ” Wells said.
On a more practical level, Wells plans to cash in his equity and not own any publicly traded pool shares. That will make him ineligible to be a delegate under the pool’s proposed new bylaws.
Watson said the resignation was one of the most difficult decisions he’s ever had to make, given his life-long loyalty to the pool.
“Our truck has never been in another elevator,” he said. “Every bushel I’ve grown went to the pool.”
But he said he simply couldn’t see himself trying to convince farmers not to cash in their equity, which he intends to do himself: “I will not be the one telling those farmers to take their chances on a game as fickle as the stock market.”
Disappointed president
Pool president Leroy Larsen said he was disappointed by the resignations but it was probably the right course of action.
“I’m disappointed because they are both quality young men, but if they personally can’t live with the decision of the majority of delegates, that was the proper thing for them to do,” he said. (The pool’s 137 delegates voted 80 percent in favor of the share offering in mid-July.)
Larsen said he’s pleased with the response he’s had from members to the restructuring. At a recent company picnic in his sub-district, a couple of retired farmers took him to task over the change, but younger members were more positive: “They said ‘at first I didn’t like it but the more I thought about it, the better it seemed to fit’,” he said.
Asked if it’s the job of delegates to talk farmers out of cashing in their equity, the pool president said they have a responsibility to “share the information” they have on the issue with the membership.
