The dawn of the new crop year Aug. 1 could signal the dawn of a new era in the prairie grain handling industry.
The directors of Manitoba Pool Elevators and Alberta Wheat Pool last week unanimously recommended that their two companies merge into one, creating a new prairie-wide grain handling co-operative.
But the final say won’t come until July 31, when the pools’ 152 delegates vote on the proposal at an unprecedented joint meeting in Winnipeg.
“In the end it doesn’t really matter what my feelings on this are,” said MPE president Charlie Swanson. “It’s the delegates that will decide.”
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One of those delegates, Kay Guthrie of Reston, Man., said last week he doesn’t know how the vote will go.
“I haven’t made up my own mind yet,” he said. “I have to keep an open mind until I get all the facts and meet with the local members.”
While the decision is fraught with historic and emotional implications, Guthrie said the determining factor will be the bottom line: “It will either make good business sense or it won’t. As far as I’m concerned, that’s what it boils down to.”
Alberta Pool delegate Randy Zutz of Stony Plain said he has been too busy haying and doing field work to give the merger proposal much thought. And he hasn’t heard much from local members, who have been equally busy.
“What I feel about it, I won’t know until I get down there to Winnipeg and talk to everybody about it,” he said in a telephone interview from his tractor cab.
The two pools’ boards of directors gave their stamp of approval after meeting in the Manitoba capital for three days last week to review the business plan describing the structure and operation of a new merged company.
That plan, along with a thick package of background information, has been mailed to all delegates, who over the next couple of weeks will meet with local members to determine the level of grassroots support.
The 80 delegates from MPE and 72 from Alberta Pool will gather at the Winnipeg Convention Centre on July 30 to discuss the plan.
The next day, the final day of the crop year, they will vote, with each organization requiring a two-thirds majority to carry the day.
“I think this is a pretty historic meeting, no matter what the outcome,” said Alberta Pool chief executive officer Gordon Cummings.
The business plan calls for the creation of a traditionally financed co-operative, although full details were not available at press time.
An interim board and interim set of delegates would be created and would spend a year developing the new company’s democratic structure, including such things as voting districts, membership and voting rules.
The business plan makes no recommendation on four issues: the location of the head office, the new chief executive officer, the new president or the name of the new company.
Cummings said that for all the detailed work and analysis that was done, the recommendation to go ahead with the merger turned on one simple consideration.
“In the end, we think the organization we create will be able to better serve the farmers of Western Canada,” he said.
