Canada expects to win the latest American challenge to the Canadian Wheat Board and it will fight any American attempt to restrict Canadian grain shipments south, says a senior government trade official.
The U.S. government will announce the results of the challenge on Jan. 22.
“We know that they have no basis to take any adverse measure against Canada,” Claude Carriere, director general of the government’s trade policy bureau, told the Senate agriculture committee on Dec. 5.
“We have to wait and see on Jan. 22 what the results will be, but we expect they will not take measures to restrict our trade. We will not restrict our trade and if they do take measures, we will contest them vigorously.”
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But federal trade minister Pierre Pettigrew warned senators and Canadian farmers not to expect the Americans to take no for an answer, no matter what the Jan. 22 ruling says.
He said it is not a question of educating the Americans about how the wheat board system works. The Americans don’t want to understand.
“We are educating them all the time,” he said.
“It is not always that they do not understand. Sometimes you only understand what you want to understand and in Washington, that seems to be a very important part of the process.”
He said it is possible that future international trade agreements will limit a country’s ability to continually launch trade cases based on the same evidence, as the United States has done nine times against the wheat board.
For now, though, there is little Canada can do other than defend itself, he said.
“We will do everything we can to continue to push our points, but sometimes the protection is pressured by producers, so they make themselves take another attempt at it, however frustrating it is.”
Meanwhile, the Senate agriculture committee urged the government to meet with American officials “to discuss a long-term resolution to American concerns about Canada-U.S. grain trade.”
However, key members of the committee quickly conceded that the likelihood of satisfying the Americans is small, short of promising to get rid of the wheat board’s export monopoly.
“There is a misguided misconception down there that we have some kind of a big conspiracy up here to take over their markets,” said Liberal senator and committee vice-chair Jack Wiebe.
“They probably wouldn’t be satisfied short of getting rid of the wheat board, but what we’re recommending is that the government keep working on this to convince the Americans to stop the constant investigations.”
