The Bloc Québecois, which won 54 Quebec seats in the June 28 election, including most rural seats, says the minority Liberal government must promise to maintain agricultural marketing boards if it wants to win Quebec support.
Leader Gilles Duceppe made it one of the BQ’s five demands in a Sept. 29 letter to prime minister Paul Martin.
He said the government program for Parliament should include “an expressed intention to maintain the marketing board system for agricultural products.”
In a later appearance on CBC television, Duceppe said he includes the Canadian Wheat Board in that condition, since its monopoly marketing powers are under attack at the World Trade Organization.
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“I don’t think we should drop out of the next round of the WTO negotiations. Of course not,” he said. “But we want Canada to be very clear that we won’t accept change to the way of managing agriculture.”
He said Canada has to stand firm in its support of the CWB because the board has been vindicated in WTO rulings. Meanwhile, the United States and the European Union, which are targeting the wheat board, continue to shower their farmers with trade-distorting subsidies.
“We have to reply to the Americans with examples (of their subsidies) instead of accepting to consider this (marketing boards) as a kind of subsidy, when it is not.”
Duceppe compared the U.S. attack on marketing boards with its crippling duties on Canadian softwood lumber, duties that have been found questionable both by WTO and North American Free Trade Agreement panels.
“We have to fight back and we have to use every means permitted by international commerce law to intervene,” he said. “We have not done that.”
Meanwhile, BQ deputy leader Michel Gauthier recently used a speech in rural Quebec to cite BSE fallout as another reason why Quebec should be independent from Canada.
He said Ottawa treats all of agriculture as one and the effects of one BSE cow in Alberta affected the whole country, including Quebec farmers.
Gauthier said beef and dairy producers in an independent Quebec would not have been affected and would still be able to sell their cull cows for pre-BSE values. Quebec would be able to declare itself a BSE-free country and be isolated from the effects.
“If Quebec was a country, not a single farmer would have lost a quarter on the cull cow file,” the BQ House leader said.
