The prairie farmers standing before Ottawa reporters last week demanding less secrecy at the Canadian Wheat Board insisted they had no larger agenda.
“Our direct point is right to the end of secrecy of the wheat board,” George Fletcher, chair of the Prairie Centre and past-president of the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association, told reporters.
“We have no quarrel with the wheat board other than that. It is the secrecy we are quarreling with.”
Fletcher was in Ottawa as part of a tour by the recently formed Committee to End Secrecy at the CWB, demanding that the board be made subject to federal freedom of information laws and its books open to the auditor-general of Canada.
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On Parliament Hill, defenders of the wheat board scoffed at the claim that the secrecy campaign is not part of a broader attack on the board’s monopoly.
New Democratic Party agriculture critic Dick Proctor called the committee conspiracy theorists intent on destroying the board.
“They would weaken the board until there is nothing,” he said. “They believe in any conspiracy theory they hear about the board. They have a much larger agenda.”
Wheat board minister Ralph Goodale said in an interview he also sees the secrecy campaign as part of the broader effort to weaken the board.
That is not what the farmer lobbyists were saying.
They insisted the changes they advocate would help reduce anger at the board.
Committee representatives demanded that information about board sales be made public after three years, that details of salaries and benefits for board employees be available and that more detail be made public about board finances.
“We believe that by putting the wheat board under freedom of information laws, it would defuse tensions in the West,” said farmer Jim Ness. “It would be the simplest thing the minister could do to ease tensions.”
More than most
Goodale insisted the board is more public with its information than any of its private sector grain company competitors. He said his wheat board reform legislation would answer the demands for more information.
It would create a board of directors two-thirds elected by farmers that would have full access to board books.
“With that full knowledge of the Canadian Wheat Board, those directors will be in the best position to assess what information should be made public and what … should remain confidential,” he said. “That is one of the virtues of this legislation. In future, it will not be a government decision on confidentiality. It will be up to directors of the corporation to make those judgment calls.”
