Bloc Québecois agriculture critic André Bellavance said he was playing “devil’s advocate,” but it was a question many westerners would appreciate.
Why, he asked Oct. 24 at the first House of Commons agriculture committee hearing on the Canadian Wheat Board issue, should Quebec farmers care?
The CWB does not affect Quebec products, as agriculture minister Chuck Strahl sarcastically noted when Bellavance raised the issue in the Commons. So why were representatives of Quebec’s Union des Producteurs Agricoles there as the first witnesses to argue against government plans to end the CWB monopoly?
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UPA leaders said it was a question of supporting collective farmer action, supporting colleagues affiliated through the Canadian Federation of Agriculture and supporting the idea of farmer control.
“It’s more the concept,” said UPA second vice-president Denis Bilodeau. “In Quebec, we are of the opinion that the CWB could be modernized, but if we can bring improvements, it should be done collectively. Farmers should decide.”
He said UPA supports the Quebec model that has seen farmer-controlled marketing boards created for most products. UPA said analysis of marketing boards that have been dismantled or made voluntary show few survive because of market power inequality.
Quebec and Ontario critics of the federal government’s wheat board policy also regularly try to link action against the monopoly with an impending attack on supply management.
During a House of Commons debate the day UPA was before committee, former Bloc Québecois agriculture critic Louis Plamondon made the connection.
“It seems to me that attacking the Canadian Wheat Board is a first extremely dangerous step,” he said.
“When it is attacked, it is a first step toward further attack, no doubt, on supply management, which serves very well the interests of Quebec and also many parts of the western provinces and Ontario.”
New Democrat Tony Martin from Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., drew the same conclusion. Ontario farmers, he said “know that once we get rid of the wheat board, which does not have much impact on them, next comes supply management.”
In committee, Conservative MP David Anderson denied the allegation.
“The Conservative party has been clear in our support of supply management,” he told the UPA leaders. “We remain clear in our support of supply management.”
In the Commons, agriculture committee chair Gerry Ritz said comparisons between the wheat board and supply management are “apples and walnuts.”
The Saskatchewan MP repeated earlier Conservative arguments that his party considers supply management “voluntary” and the CWB mandatory so that is why it can support the first but not the second.
“The supply managed sector is voluntary,” he insisted. “If I decide I want to get into the sector, I buy some quota and I’m in business. If I want to grow grain in Western Canada, I am under the wheat board.”
In Ontario, a group of milk producers have been in court for years trying to win the right to produce milk without being under the marketing control of the provincial dairy board, which they consider a monopoly.
