WINNIPEG – Two prominent Canadian historians are battling in court over what the government of the day had in mind when it granted the wheat board a monopoly to sell prairie farmers’ grain.
University of Calgary historian David Bercuson and John Thompson, a Canadian history professor teaching at Duke University in North Carolina are dueling over what prompted Ottawa to set up and maintain the monopoly after the Second World War.
Bercuson and Thompson first butted heads in court last year during a case in Calgary, where the Canadian Wheat Board’s constitutional powers were challenged on the basis of the freedom of farmers to associate with any marketing agency they chose.
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Now they’re giving similar testimony in the Dave Bryan case here. The Saskatchewan farmer is facing customs charges for exporting grain without a CWB licence. He has launched a constitutional challenge arguing the wheat board act infringes on farmers’ property and civil rights.
Not farmer pressure
Bercuson, who was paid by the Alberta government in 1996 to write a history of the wheat board’s monopoly powers for last year’s case, told this trial that farmer support across the Prairies for single-desk grain marketing had little to do with the enactment of the board’s monopoly.
The pro-monopoly views of groups like the Canadian Federation of Agriculture and the three prairie wheat pools “were not instrumental in establishing the CWB’s purchasing monopoly in 1943 nor extending it past the stabilization period into peacetime,” the report said.
But Thompson disagrees.
“Early in the century farm movements formed around the idea of a government-supported, producer-run board to market grain,” he said outside the courtroom.
Intense lobbying effort
“Farmers lobbied ceaselessly for it and gradually the government saw it was compatible with their interests.”
Bercuson’s outright rejection of the role farmers played in bringing about the wheat board’s monopoly should outrage farmers, Thompson said.
“His goal is to portray the creation of the wheat board as manipulation imposed by the federal government.”
In his report, Bercuson says the CWB was extended beyond the end of the war as a temporary measure to let government control wheat prices during a period of “stabilization.”
In 1947, the government publicly claimed the CWB’s monopoly was necessary to fulfill the terms of a wheat contract with the United Kingdom, even when the monopoly was detrimental to producers, he said.
“All I would say to anyone who says the establishment of the monopoly in 1943 was a result of public pressure has not read the documents,” Bercuson said under cross examination by crown prosecutor Chris Mainella.
A spokesperson for the Canadian Farm Enterprise Network, which has raised more than $100,000 to pay for Bryan’s case, said Bercuson’s testimony and report cost close to $30,000.
Thompson said he received just under $5,000 from Agriculture Canada.
