Victor Berezowski’s feelings of Christmas cheer took a hit last week.
The 77-year-old retired farmer’s spirits were dampened by the news that Saskatchewan Wheat Pool will soon formally, finally and officially no longer be a co-operative.
For farmers like Berezowski, who have spent their lives as committed and loyal pool members, that was hard to hear.
“I’m mourning the demise of the wheat pool,” he said in an interview from his home near Pelly, Sask. “It’s a sad day.”
His father, an original contract signer, used to cycle across the province selling memberships, while Victor has been a member since the early 1950s.
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But while he was saddened, he wasn’t surprised by the pool’s Dec. 14 announcement that it intends to consolidate all of its shares and notes into a single class of publicly traded voting shares.
Back in the mid-1990s, Berezowski was part of a group of pool members who fought against the company’s decision to begin selling shares in the company.
“At the time when we were working to stop the privatization, we stated that this is what it would come to,” he said. “Now it’s happened.”
Brian Oleson, an agricultural economist from the University of Manitoba with an interest in co-ops, said last week’s announcement is probably of greater interest to the investment and business communities than to those in the co-op movement.
For them, the pool’s decision just represents the final inevitable step in the road on which the company embarked a decade ago.
“The patient died a long time ago,” said Oleson. “This is just the funeral.”
The pool said while its business operations will no longer be operated as a co-operative, it is not abandoning its co-op roots.
As part of its proposed restructuring, the company will provide funds to set up a new co-operative that will provide members and customers with a role in the company’s business plans and governance, through “farmer advisory councils” and at least four seats on the pool’s board of directors.
Sask Pool president Terry Baker said the decision to formally end the co-op business structure was a difficult and emotional one for many board members, especially those with long ties to the pool.
“This is not something we just decided in one day,” he said. “We’ve been working on it for months and months, but we’re solidly behind it.”
The pool president also has no doubt that it will make a lot of people in Saskatchewan unhappy.
“SWP is an organization that almost everybody in Saskatchewan, farmers and others, feel they have ownership in,” he said. “There is always a great deal of upset on all of these kinds of decisions.”
Brett Fairbairn, a historian at the University of Saskatchewan and an expert in co-operatives, was skeptical over how much influence the new pool co-op will have on the company’s business operations.
“I don’t put much stock in those advisory structures,” he said, adding that a company totally owned by shareholders, as the pool will be, is interested only in maximizing profits and returns for those shareholders.
“There is only a certain amount of things they’ll find it advantageous to do for the benefit of farmers,” he said.
