The government of Alberta has formally climbed on board the Kroeger transportation train.
Premier Ralph Klein last week publicly called on the federal government to move quickly to bring in changes based on the report by Arthur Kroeger.
“I urge your government to accept and implement the recommendations of Mr. Kroeger as a package and as soon as possible,” he said in a letter to prime minister Jean ChrŽtien.
Klein’s intervention in the transportation debate was welcomed by a coalition of farm groups that supports a deregulated, commercial grain system and an end to the Canadian Wheat Board’s role in transportation.
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But it also prompted Alberta’s general farm organization to accuse the provincial government of being
blinded by its ideological opposition to the wheat board and being out of touch with the seriousness of the economic crunch facing grain and oilseed producers.
“They’re forgoing dollars and cents for philosophy,” said Rod Scarlett, executive director of Wild Rose Agricultural Producers.
Klein sent the letter to ChrŽtien following a Jan. 27 meeting with a number of pro-Kroeger farm groups.
“We are confident that the cost savings from such changes, if fully implemented, would put hundreds of millions of dollars annually into the hands of farmers across the Prairies,” Klein said in the letter, adding that a majority of Alberta’s farm groups also support Kroeger.
The province’s decision to support the Estey/Kroeger proposals was welcomed by Greg Rockafellow, chair of the Prairie Farm Commodity Coalition.
He said the proposals put forward by Kroeger and Estey would help relieve pressure on farm income without resorting to using taxpayer dollars.
“The heavily regulated transportation system is pushing its inflated costs, to the tune of over $300 million per year, onto farmers,” he said in a press release.
Rockafellow led a delegation of PFCC members into a Jan. 27 meeting with Klein, agriculture minister Ty Lund and infrastructure minister Ed Stelmach.
They presented the politicians with a policy paper saying the system must be reformed to improve customer service, increase accountability and maximize competition, all with the ultimate goal of reducing farmers’ costs.
Lund said in a news release following the meeting that if the federal government doesn’t bring in the proposed changes, “it only worsens the current difficulties our producers are experiencing.”
However, Wild Rose said that if the province was really concerned about reducing farmers’ costs, it would support the alternative proposal put forward by Wild Rose, Keystone Agriculture Producers of Manitoba and the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities.
That so-called “farmers’ proposal” would place a lower cap on railway revenues than Kroeger, bring in regulations designed to foster competition between the national railways and retain the CWB’s role in transportation.
Scarlett said he was somewhat surprised by last week’s announcement, since the province had been a leading voice in calls for a lower revenue cap, productivity sharing with farmers and increased rail competition during the Kroeger discussions.
He thinks the provincial government is so “hung up” on getting the wheat board out of transportation that it’s sacrificing measures that would reduce rail costs and directly improve farmers’ bottom lines.
“They have one thing on the agenda and one thing only,” he said. “They have forgotten about the effect of the economics of this on producers.”
Wild Rose said Kroeger’s revenue cap proposal alone could cost producers more than $500 million over the next five years, compared with its proposal.
