Unless the government offers prairie grain farmers some marketing choice outside the Canadian Wheat Board, the reformed board could become too polarized and political to be effective, a critical senator told wheat board minister Ralph Goodale last week.
Elections to the new board of directors will become ideological contests over monopoly marketing rather than debates about good operations of a $6 billion sales corporation, Winnipeg Conservative Terrance Stratton said.
And board meetings will become debates about political choices, rather than marketing opportunities, he said during a Senate agriculture committee meeting May 5.
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“I’m just worried about a gun fight at the OK Corral,” Stratton said.
He referred to stories about an Alberta court case involving an aboriginal farmer trying to move grain across the board to an Indian Reserve in Montana. It is another example of arguments raging around the issue of choice and the wheat board monopoly, said the senator.
The minister was unmoved.
He said such choices are best made by farmer-elected directors, rather than Ottawa-based politicians and bureaucrats.
“As messy sometimes as democracy can be, it is better than any of the alternatives,” said Goodale.
It was his last visit to the committee before senators started work
May 7 to write a report on the legislation and then to give the bill clause-by-clause scrutiny.
The legislation, Bill C-4, is expected to be sent to the Senate with amendments by the end of this week.
A Senate debate will follow and if the amendments are approved, it will be sent back to the House of Commons. It will then join the queue of bills awaiting approval and the journey back to the Senate during the final three weeks before the House adjourns for the summer.
Adding, removing crops
One issue on which senators are expected to make recommendations is the government proposal that the legislation include detail on how crops can be added or subtracted from CWB jurisdiction.
The idea that the board monopoly could be expanded through a farmer vote has raised some controversy and Goodale has said he would not object to removing the clause.
He suggests the government propose changes in the mandate, but that it could only be accomplished through a farmer vote.
Goodale told the committee his proposal would for the first time make clear rules for expanding or diminishing board jurisdiction. A farmer vote would be required.
In the 1970s there was a farmer vote on adding rapeseed, he said, but the Conservatives removed oats in the 1980s simply by cabinet order.
In 1993, when the Conservative government tried to do the same with barley, the prairie pools went to court and won a judgment that a cabinet order was not sufficient.
Winnipeg Conservative Mira Spivak wondered if this would tie the hands of a future government or CWB minister who wanted to end the monopoly. She used as an example the possibility that Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association president Larry Maguire could some day be in government.
He ran for the Conservatives in Brandon in 1993.
“If, God forbid, Larry Maguire became the minister of agriculture, he could change the mandate and that would stand?” asked the senator.
Goodale, engaged in an increasingly bitter letter exchange with Maguire over the monopoly issue, said farmers would have to approve any proposal to end the monopoly.
