Charlie Mayer says the debate about the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly is distracting the grain industry from discussing crucial issues.
It’s a debate that still consumes him even though he quit farming 10 years ago and left politics 15 years ago.
“Producers have a choice: either you sell to the wheat board or you go to jail. That’s the choice you have. I got exercised about that,” said Mayer in a question session following his speech to the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg.
“In an open society, where we’re secular, we tolerate all kinds of things. I do not understand why people do not take serious umbrage with a marketing monopoly. That’s the issue. It’s not the board, it’s the monopoly.”
Read Also
Agriculture ministers agree to AgriStability changes
federal government proposed several months ago to increase the compensation rate from 80 to 90 per cent and double the maximum payment from $3 million to $6 million
Mayer’s speech focused on issues he said are not being adequately discussed by farmers and industry because of the debate over the wheat board monopoly. Those issues include how to produce high volume feed wheat for the ethanol industry, how to meet the needs of food processors, how to supply the booming Chinese market, how to produce pasta for the American market and what role segregation and identity preservation should have in the grain system.
But it was clear that Mayer did not envision a mellowing of the debate by any means other than killing the board’s monopoly.
“I don’t understand this. Why do we accept a monopoly with this?
“We have choice on where to hold this meeting – different hotels. We’ve got choice on the clothes we buy. You go to a grocery store and you’ve got 17 or 150 choices of crackers. We’ve got choice in everything. Can you imagine what women would do if you had a marketing board for Italian shoes?”
Mayer countered the arguments of pro-monopoly activist Doug Chorney by saying that the 1998 reorganization of the wheat board on semi-democratic lines did not remove the unfairness of the monopoly situation.
“You’re never going to have accountability if you have a monopoly. The way you’re going to have accountability is if you have choice,” said Mayer. “The marketplace drives accountability and choice gives accountability. The fact that you have elected directors administering a monopoly in my view changes nothing.”
Some grain industry members in the audience were surprised by the list of issues that Mayer said are not being discussed.
“I think a lot of those discussions … do happen,” said Adrian Measner, former chief executive officer of the wheat board, during the question session.
He said the wheat board regularly talks to millers and bakers and pointed to institutions like the malting barley technical centre in Winnipeg that regularly hosts groups of foreign grain purchasers and processors to work with the
Canadian industry.
He said the wheat board is in the process of establishing a technical centre in China.
Mayer said in his speech that he knew from his years as wheat board minister in Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government that the wheat board had many competent employees and that it could survive well without its monopoly.
He raised a number of post-monopoly proposals that he said farmers should consider, such as those put forward by Blair Rutter of the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association and consultant Gary Pike, which he said showed ways the board could be organized and financed.
But Mayer said as long as the wheat board monopoly exists, it will be a distraction.
“The industry, in my view, isn’t doing it because we’re tied up arguing about a monopoly. And maybe the monopoly serves us. But until we have a discussion with everything on the table I don’t see us looking down the road to make decisions that I think are going to affect us.”
You can listen to Mayer’s speech in its entirety on the Frontier Centre for Public Policy’s website, here.
