On April 5, 1939, Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King finally was ready to concede defeat in his attempts to get rid of the Canadian Wheat Board.
As he sat down that night to write in his famous diary, after three years of trying to abolish the wheat board created by his Conservative predecessor R. B. Bennett, King finally conceded that western farmers liked the board.
To abolish it, he wrote, “will cost us many seats in Western Canada … . It will be, I fear, a sort of suicide to proceed with it.”
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An election was coming, the Liberals needed the West and politician King changed his mind, leading a government that reaffirmed the wheat board in 1943.
The incident is part of a report for Agriculture Canada, written by an American-based, Winnipeg-born academic who argues against the view of many anti-CWB campaigners that it was imposed on farmers by crafty bureaucrats and politicians for government purposes and without farmer support.
Support was strong
John Thompson, director of Canadian studies at North Carolina’s Duke University, argues the opposite was true. His analysis comes in a report prepared during the summer.
He was contracted by Agriculture Canada to analyze an anti-CWB report prepared for the Alberta government by Alberta academics David Bercuson and Barry Cooper.
Thompson was paid close to $5,000 for his work.
He charges that Bercuson and Cooper allowed their “pro-open market bias” to taint their history and analysis in order to produce an anti-wheat board polemic.
“They chose their evidence selectively from a narrow range of sources so as to make the monopoly CWB appear to have been imposed upon prairie farmers by a callous and manipulative federal government whose goal was to dominate wheat marketing in Canada,” he writes.
Then, Thompson cites historical evidence that he says contradicts that interpretation of history. Through much of the first half of the century, farmers had to organize and agitate to convince reluctant politicians to act.
And there are lessons from history that are relevant to the current debate over the future of the board.
“At some future date, a majority of western Canadian producers, speaking directly and/or through their elected representatives, may decide that a monopoly CWB is no longer the best answer to the complex question of how to market their wheat crop,” writes Thompson.
“But contemporary Canadian grain growers who want change should not delude themselves about the past to justify new directions they might wish to take in the future. A rationale for ending the CWB monopoly in the 1990s cannot be found in the history of the creation of that monopoly between 1919 and 1967.”
He also argued that promoters of a “dual market” or a voluntary board can take no comfort from history. In years when the board was voluntary, high prices meant the board received little grain and low prices meant the board received most of the grain and had to rely on the federal government to pick up losses.
“The crop years of 1935-36, 1938-9, 1939-40, 1940-41, 1941-42 and 1942-3 demonstrate that when the wheat board lacks a monopoly, a ‘lose-lose’ situation is created from a public policy perspective,” he writes.
George McLaughlin, a Winnipeg-based executive in Agriculture Canada’s adaptation and grain policy directorate, said the analysis was commissioned because “Bercuson and Cooper made some statements that we thought should be investigated by another academic.”
He said the report will not be widely distributed but will be available on request.
