SHELBURNE, Ont. – Barring last minute second thoughts, agriculture minister Ralph Goodale will announce this autumn he is rejecting proposals that the wheat and barley export monopoly of the Canadian Wheat Board be weakened.
Last week, Goodale said he will announce in late September or early October acceptance of Western Grain Marketing Panel proposals to reform how the board operates and to give farmers more control over it.
But he is poised to reject the panel’s key recommendation that feed barley, unlicensed and organic wheats be moved outside the board’s exclusive export jurisdiction.
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“Of course, I am still considering the responses I am receiving from the industry,” Goodale said Aug. 22 in an interview during a tour of rural Ontario. “But it is fair to say that is the direction that would seem appropriate on the basis of everything I have heard so far.”
He gave farmers until Aug. 31 to respond to the panel report and said the vast majority of the response has been to defend the board’s marketing powers while accepting the need for a shake up in the way it is governed and operated.
If Goodale sticks to that conclusion, his announcement likely will trigger an uproar in Parliament and a return to defiance of board rules by some farmers who have been trying to force the issue by exporting grain without a permit.
In the House of Commons, Reform MPs will attack the decision. They have been promoting a loosening of wheat board control and plan to campaign next year on a proposal to create a two-year experiment in dual marketing.
Goodale said proponents of a “dual market” system have not persuaded him it could work without damaging the board.
And the Western Grain Marketing Panel proposal that feed barley be removed from the board but malt barley be retained is “unworkable and impractical,” he said.
Goodale said he is “troubled” that his hand-picked panel recommended a partial dual market without providing the analysis to show it could work.
Lead to death
“By making it (the board) optional, are you effectively making a decision that will lead to the termination of the board?” he asked. “There seems to be a compelling body of opinion that would lead to that conclusion.”
Earlier in his tour, in answer to a question from Ontario Federation of Agriculture president Tony Morris about the future of the wheat board, Goodale delivered a broad hint about his decision.
He had asked board critics to offer a precise description of how a dual market could operate, said the minister.
“Every one of the descriptions I have heard is really another way of saying an open market situation, which would necessarily lead, in my judgment, to the severe impairment of the Canadian Wheat Board,” he said. “I am prepared to entertain reasonable, realistic changes that make sense. I am not prepared to throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
OFA members present, who have seen the wheat board issue as a litmus test of federal support for orderly marketing, applauded.
However, Goodale also levelled some criticism at the board itself for being the author of some of its own troubles.
If the board had made a better effort to communicate with farmers in the past, “it might not be facing the challenges and hostility it has faced from some quarters.”
