When he looked at the Canadian Wheat Board annual financial report that confirmed record returns to farmers last year, agriculture minister Gerry Ritz saw a glass one-eighth empty rather than seven-eighths full.
Ritz used the occasion of tabling the CWB annual report in Parliament Feb. 11 to highlight almost $90 million in losses booked against the contingency fund rather than the record $7.2 billion that wheat, durum and barley producers earned through board sales in 2007-08.
The losses came as the board hedged against up-front producer pricing options as commodity prices fell.
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“The loss this year is on top of the nearly $40 million the board lost in the same way in its programs last year,” Ritz said in the House of Commons in an unusual intervention Feb. 11.
“Clearly, the board has not learned from these mistakes and has compounded the problem, continuing with the same risk management practices.”
The government criticism of a report that chronicled record farm returns left CWB supporters angry.
“I just think it is disappointing that a great year for farmers gets turned by the government into a bad news story,” said CWB chair Larry Hill. “The hedging losses happened in a very volatile commodity market. We saw the problem and made changes to our risk management programs. The government has been fully briefed on the changes and yet they made an issue of it.”
Hill said he did not want to speculate about why.
Opposition MPs were not reluctant to speculate.
They said the Conservatives are frustrated at their inability to get legislation through Parliament to end the board monopoly, so they take any opportunity they can to criticize the CWB.
“It is a clear indication of their frustration at not being able to move forward on their intention to undermine the board,” said NDP wheat board critic Pat Martin. “It just shows that while they have dropped for the moment any hope of weakening the board through legislative change, this is still a top-of-mind issue for them behind the scenes.”
Liberal agriculture critic Wayne Easter said it was an inappropriate attempt by Ritz to criticize an organization he has a duty to represent and defend.
In the House of Commons, Conservative MP David Anderson, parliamentary secretary to Ritz on the CWB file and a fierce opponent of the single desk, complained about the board’s performance.
“Last year’s loss should have been a serious red flag that management needed to make some changes,” he said Feb. 11. “Instead, the CWB carried on with the same risk management practices setting farmers back upwards of $130 million over the course of two years.”
