“It’s yours and mine; so don’t tear the old wheat board down; there’s not another like it in this old world round,” the Carlton Quack Grass Band sang on July 27 in a Saskatoon park as denim-clad farmers clapped in rhythm to a washtub bass.
The folksy scene contrasted with the closed-door, RCMP-guarded meeting across the street that attracted more tailored suits than blue jeans.
In some ways the two groups couldn’t have been more different: the well-dressed set was attending an invitation-only meeting to talk about how to dismantle the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly while the more casually clad music lovers were rallying in defence of the monopoly.
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But the two groups also shared a fundamental similarity: they were both made up of grain farmers.
The two sides have clashed before, mostly in the 1980s and 1990s when the anti-CWB monopoly forces were at their loudest.
Signs of those old battles were evident in Saskatoon last week.
The old messages and even some of the old players returned to the public stage to fight for and against the role of the wheat board in western agriculture.
Manitoba farmer Fred Tate took to the bandstand to sing the praises of the service he receives from the wheat board and the role it plays in the grain industry.
He had less positive words for the farmers he saw as his opposition inside the hotel across the street.
“We tried a simple quarter ounce of that active ingredient common sense in the tank mix that we thought had killed the weeds that are the Western Canadian Wheat Growers. But it turns out that with a little nurturing by some big corporations, those weeds have re-emerged as a crop the federal government now wants to harvest,” he said.
Re-emerging was high on the agenda, with former federal Progressive Conservative party leadership candidate and Saskatoon area organic farmer David Orchard taking to the microphone to compare the federal Conservative government’s actions on the CWB to the party’s actions in general.
“The Conservatives are a branch office of the Bush administration in the United States. They want to hand Canada over to the American government and Canadian agriculture is part of that gift,” he said.
“They want to hand over the role of the (CWB) to U.S. multinational grain companies. That’s a gift you can’t take back.”
Tom Jackson, a farmer from Killam, Alta., who wants an end to the CWB, drove his truck 350 kilometres to Saskatoon so he could unfurl on its side a Farmer’s for Justice banner from the 1990s anti-CWB fight.
After duct tape modifications to paste over references to then prime minister Jean Chrétien, he said “finally western Canadian farmers are being freed from federal government bondage under the CWB. Those board supporters in the park over there are just stuck in the past.”
Saskatchewan agriculture minister Mark Wartman added fire and brimstone to the rally in the park when he addressed the crowd that eventually swelled to 250 farmers and CWB supporters.
“Federal governments have helped Saskatchewan farmers reduce their returns by $1.5 billion in the past two decades. This province’s economy can’t stand any more of the kind of help this government is offering us today,” Wartman said.
“Just across the (U.S. border) there is just the kind of open market that Mr. Strahl is calling for and they have far less value added processing than we do. The CWB can’t compete in an dual market, it’s a myth, and it’s a myth Saskatchewan farmers can do without its benefits,” he said.
As a second generation CWB activist supporter, Martha Robbins added her youthful farm voice to the event.
The daughter of former NDP provincial leadership and federal MP candidate Nettie Wiebe told the rally that despite the Conservative party’s commitment to democratic rights and referenda, “in the case of farmers the government would be willing to make an exception.”
Federal agriculture minister Chuck Strahl told media later in the day that he believed government MPs were elected with the help of farmers in all but four CWB districts and that in itself was a referendum on the issue.
“We are keeping our campaign promise on dual marketing,” he said.
Wartman said the federal government is being duplicitous when it comes to being elected on single issues.
“When it came to breaking the campaign promise of removing natural resources from the transfer payments calculation, the prime minister said governments are elected for a variety of reasons and voters don’t elect governments for any single issue,” Wartman said.
