SASKATOON – The Canadian Federation of Independent Business – a private, small business lobby group promoting free competition – wants a greater voice in agricultural policy making.
The federation recently released a survey of its 2,000 prairie agriculture business members showing an overwhelming majority favor allowing producers to market grain in the domestic market without Canadian Wheat Board involvement. About 470, or 24 percent, of those polled responded.
“Obviously this is not a Gallup poll,” said Dale Botting, executive director of the CFIB prairie region.
“It’s a poll of our membership and our mission statement is to promote free, competitive enterprise. You get more of a pro-market orientation from a group like ours than you might, say, from the National Farmers Union.”
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A large majority of the 2,000 agribusiness members are farmers, he said. The organization began to conduct polls of its agricultural members because they asked for it, he added.
Unhappy with representation
Big farm organizations focus on transportation, marketing and safety net issues, Botting said.
“Those big three issues tended to consume these organizations, but on other issues – be it labor law or environmental law, local assessment policy and so on – a lot (of CFIB members) said they were not happy with what they were getting from their other farm groups.”
In the December questionnaire, the federation asked about attitudes to environmental liability and labor standards.
Almost 78 percent of those responding said people who unwittingly and innocently buy contaminated property should not be legally liable if sued over the polluted condition of the land.
A large majority also think farm workers should be excluded from labor standards legislation limiting hours of work and requiring pay on overtime hours.
Botting is now studying the relationship between CFIB agricultural members and their financial institutions.
“I’m scoring the banks from a farmer’s perspective. … Also we’re evaluating how they feel about factors in the banking relationship in terms of collateral requirements, service fee issues and the knowledge of the sector – whether they know agribusiness very well,” he said.
The bank study should be released in June.
