Federal agriculture minister Chuck Strahl says that by the beginning of the next crop year, he wants to have transformed the Canadian Wheat Board into a voluntary marketer competing with other grain trade players.
In the winter, he will tell farmers what he plans so they can make their spring seeding decisions accordingly.
By the beginning of the marketing year, he wants the new rules in place.
“That is my hope and I hope before then,” Strahl said in an Oct. 19 interview.
“If it’s going to change, or not change I suppose, they (farmers) want to know by the next crop year (Aug. 1, 2007). It makes a difference on what they are going to plant and how they are going to market, so certainly by next August, I think it’s fair all around that people know with some certainty what the road ahead looks like.”
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Strahl made his comments as the majority parliamentary opposition geared up for a fierce fight to oppose the Conservative plans to end the CWB monopoly.
The issue figured prominently in question period last week. This week, the Commons agriculture committee holds three days of extraordinary hearings on the wheat board issue.
In the Commons this week, the opposition is expected to combine to defeat a private member’s bill from Saskatchewan MP and agriculture committee chair Gerry Ritz that would allow farmers selling wheat or barley to farmer controlled, value-added plants to bypass the board.
Meanwhile, Liberal House leader and former wheat board minister Ralph Goodale said in an interview the government should expect court challenges if it ignores CWB Act requirements that a producer vote be held before the board mandate is changed.
“I think court challenges are a real possibility because the act is very clear that a vote is required.”
Farm leaders from the Prairies and the Canadian Federation of Agriculture were on Parliament Hill last week to demand a farmer vote before any change is made.
“If the CWB is deregulated, it will not be an experiment and if it doesn’t work, we can’t return to single desk status,” CFA president Bob Friesen said in an interview. “It would be irrevocable.”
In the face of a parliamentary and extra-parliamentary opposition digging in for a fight, Strahl refused in the Commons to concede that a farmer vote will be necessary to make changes. He said he is waiting to assess advice from a task force report this week or next on how to move toward a strong wheat board that operates in an open market – something critics of the plan call impossible.
In the interview, the minister noted he has the power to make regulatory changes as well as order-in-council appointments.
“There are other things I could do there as well, but we’ll wait for the task force report and what they suggest but again, fairly quickly I hope to lay out a plan not with an end result necessarily but with a time line on how we are going to move through this.”
Some critics saw that as a threat to begin replacing government appointees on the CWB board of directors with open market partisans to tilt the board toward a majority in favour of change. That already has happened with one of the five government appointee positions.
But Strahl also said the wheat board could take some actions that would deflect some of the criticism and offer more marketing choice, including allowing organic grain producers to keep a premium beyond the pool price and to allow farmers to sell to processing plants without buyback costs.
“A lot of farmers tell me that if the wheat board would just exercise the authority given to it and give some freedom to them, that would probably be the end of the discussion for many of them,” said Strahl.
Critics fire back that the Conservatives are not giving the CWB credit for the flexibility it has added to the system and the additional changes it is proposing.
