His name isn’t on the ballot, but it is on everyone’s lips in the
Canadian Wheat Board election campaign.
Rod Flaman, the board’s director for District 8 in south-central
Saskatchewan, has become a lightning rod in the vitriolic debate over
the future of the CWB.
Elected as a dual market supporter two years ago, Flaman has changed
his mind.
He says he has seen clear evidence that single desk selling puts more
money into prairie farmers’ pockets and is now convinced that a dual
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market would lead to the board’s destruction.
As someone who not only was elected as a dual marketer but also
participated in illegal border crossing demonstrations in 1996,
Flaman’s emergence as a single desk supporter has attracted attention
in recent weeks.
His conversion has enraged many of his former allies, who have
inundated him with angry phone calls, letters and e-mails.
“Probably three-quarters of the responses I’ve been getting are
positive, but certainly there are people out there who are upset and
angry and have let me know that,” Flaman said in an interview last week.
He has been called an opportunist, a traitor, a turncoat, a
doublecrosser.
He’s been accused of taking a payoff from the wheat board to change his
mind.
He’s even been threatened.
“I’ve had to forward some of those things to the RCMP just to be on the
safe side,” he said. “I don’t want to get into the exact words, but I
consider them personal threats to me and my family.”
Flaman said it’s a sad reflection of how the debate over grain
marketing has moved away from a rational argument over facts to an
emotional argument over philosophy and ideology.
“The problem is it’s a political debate rather than an economic debate,
and when politics comes into it, people throw everything but the
kitchen sink into the argument,” he said.
One of those former allies is Art Mainil of Weyburn, Sask., a longtime
and vociferous critic of the wheat board marketing system who raised
money and worked on Flaman’s campaign in 2000.
Mainil, who ran unsuccessfully in the inaugural board of directors
election in 1998, doesn’t mince words in describing his former cohort,
calling him a doublecrosser who abandoned his friends and supporters.
“He pulled a turncoat on his friends,” he said. “If you did something
like that in the army you’d be taken in and shot by your own men.”
Barry Farr, a Lumsden, Sask., farmer who also worked on Flaman’s 2000
campaign, said when Flaman decided to abandon the platform on which he
was elected, he should have stepped down from the board.
“I’d like to see him resign,” he said. “That would be the honourable
thing.”
Both men said there are suspicions among dual marketers that Flaman was
“bought off” by the wheat board to induce him to switch sides.
“That’s what we think,” said Mainil. “We don’t have any proof but we do
ask the question.”
That drew a heated denial from the board’s president and chief
executive officer Greg Arason.
“There is absolutely no foundation to any such allegations,” he said
from the board’s Winnipeg offices.
“It’s really gotten out of hand,” said Arason. “There is room for
political debate but not for this kind of personal attack.”
Flaman said his decision to become a single desk supporter was prompted
by the evidence he saw in the board’s confidential sales contracts.
As for those who criticize him for changing his mind, Flaman said
elected policy makers have a responsibility to make rational decisions
based on solid information.
“I’d be doing my constituents a disservice if I wasn’t paying attention
to the facts,” he said. “People ask me if I can sleep at night. Well,
if I continued to make stupid decisions based on outdated data, then I
wouldn’t be able to sleep.”
Flaman added he doesn’t want to be characterized as a “staunch
supporter” of the wheat board, saying he still has many criticisms of
the board’s operations and will continue to work for changes to give
farmers more pricing freedom while maintaining the single desk.
As for whether he’ll run again in two years, he said that will depend
on how much success he has in bringing about change from within.
Former District 8 director Terry Hanson, a single desk supporter who
was unseated by Flaman in 2000, said some single deskers remain
skeptical about the depth of Flaman’s support for the single desk.
“He seems to be fairly genuine in having changed his mind, but I don’t
think a lot of people trust yet that he is firmly committed to board
marketing,” Hanson said.
