Saskatchewan Wheat Pool members are pulling the company in opposite directions and the board of directors is trying to find some way of balancing in the middle, say two former board members.
It explains the board’s decision to fire the head of the company’s grain group, Bruce Johnson, and ask for the resignation of chief executive officer Don Loewen, while still holding true to the company’s modernization plans, say Harold Yelland and Tom Lowes.
“It’s a tight-
rope,” said Yelland, a Porcupine Plain, Sask., farmer who served on the board from 1974 until last year.
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“If you stray off course, somebody’s going to try to push you back on or push you off.”
Yelland and Lowes said pool directors must deal with farmers who don’t want wooden elevators closed and those who want Sask Pool to modernize even more quickly than it is.
They said the pool has had no real choice other than to move to high-volume concrete elevators, but has incurred the wrath of many members who see their local elevators closing.
“There’s an awful lot of upheaval in the country, but I think in a time of change that’s natural,” said Lowes, a director from 1993 to 1999.
“I think (removing Loewen and Johnson) was a major, major mistake.”
He thinks Loewen and Johnson were doing a good and necessary job and should have been left in place to do it. It will be hard to find good people to replace them, Lowes said.
Yelland supports the board’s decision, even though he admires Loewen and Johnson.
“Maybe they missed the mark,” said Yelland, who supports the pool’s elevator centralization and modernization program called Project Horizon.
The program is a good one, but he thinks the company may not have explained the reasons for its decisions well enough and perhaps should have waited for full member support before going ahead.
By breaking with Loewen and Johnson’s leadership, the board of directors is probably signaling it wants to rebuild its relationship with producers, Yelland said, calling that move a good idea.
“There is a minority of people who will never be happy,” said Yelland. “But there are a lot of people in the middle who are looking for a new attachment or proof that the pool is still the organization they want to deal with.”
He said the pool needs to be the farmer’s representative.
“We need to get back into the position where you’re the one that farmers look to for more than just good service and competitive prices, to speak out on the farmer’s behalf,” said Yelland.
Lowes thinks removing Loewen and Johnson to calm upset producers sends the wrong signal. It will encourage people who don’t care about the future of the pool to continue undermining it.
Lowes acknowledges that board members may be trying to calm the upset in the country while sticking with a modernization program, but he said any slowdown would be a mistake.
“For the last two or three years that I was a board member we were accused of moving too fast, but it was because we were so far behind,” said Lowes.
“We probably moved too slow.”
He probably lost his own delegate’s position because he supported the board’s decision to close a wooden elevator in his sub-district, Lowes said.
