As Parliament opened for its pre-election session Sept. 18, opposition critics were preparing their assault on Canadian Wheat Board minister Ralph Goodale.
The Prairies are in the harvest season and once again, the grain transportation system is facing political snarls.
“I told you so,” will be their first instinct. When they left Ottawa for their constituencies in June, the government had pushed through new grain transportation legislation and the critics were insisting it would not work.
“What are you going to do about it?” will be their first question. “We told you the wheat board still had too much say over the system.”
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Goodale, as a first instinct, will want to avoid direct government intervention, urging both sides to “grow up and act like adults,” as he told them last June.
But the grain industry battles are trouble for Goodale and the election-bound Liberals.
He will be working as hard as he can behind the scenes to get the two sides talking and the new legislated rules working smoothly before winter sets in.
And he likely will be sending a very blunt message to the grain companies – quit trying to re-fight political battles that you lost.
That is one curious feature of the current stalemate between the wheat board and the grain companies. The companies are insisting that one of the flaws in the system is that they are not considered the “shipper of record.”
But it is not a complaint they should be directing at the wheat board.
It was government policy to make the CWB the shipper of record. It is to Ottawa that a complaint should be made.
Last June when the Liberal majority was rushing Bill C-34 through the House of Commons transport committee, grain companies proposed they be designated the official shipper.
This, they said, would then give them more authority when negotiating terms and penalties with the railways.
Canadian Alliance MPs took up the cause and moved an explicit amendment.
Government lawyers said it was a bad idea, the Liberal whips went to work and the Liberal majority defeated the proposal, even though some of them were privately supportive.
That is how the arrangement came to be in the legislation.
It is not Canadian Wheat Board policy that it can change in a tender call. It is government policy that would have to be changed in legislation or regulation.
When the bill cleared committee, chair Stan Keyes, a Hamilton MP with some clear doubts about the government plan, said he would make sure the committee stood watch to see if the new regime is working. At the time, CA MP Roy Bailey predicted chaos.
“This creates a system that will not work,” he said. “That will become evident. We’ll have to go through this all again in a year or two down the road.”
Unless this glitch is worked out, the prediction will come true sooner rather than later.
If the stalemate continues, does the government have the time and the political will to reopen this file during the winter for one last debate, while foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy, a key CWB defender, is still in cabinet?
Over to you, Mr. Keyes.
