An all-day parliamentary debate last week on an opposition motion to preserve the Canadian Wheat Board often morphed into a debate about supply management.
Niki Ashton, a New Democrat from Churchill, Man., triggered the all-day debate Oct. 25 with a motion that called on the government to drop legislation to end the CWB monopoly because “farmers have a democratic right to determine the future of their own supply management tools and marketing boards.”
The opposition motion came a day after the Conservative majority won a vote to approve in principle Bill C-18 that will end the single desk Aug. 1, 2012. Ashton’s motion was defeated Oct. 26 by a vote of 150-126.
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Ashton injected supply management into the debate by questioning whether it will be the next Conservative target.
“Does this government also have an agenda for supply management?” she asked.
“Even though today the government claims that it is not talking about abolishing it, it has been saying the same thing about the Canadian Wheat Board for months. It says it will listen to what farmers have to say. Does the same go for farmers in Quebec and Ontario?”
She also said the Freshwater Fish Marketing Board is a single desk.
“If this (ending the single desk) is the government’s agenda on the wheat board, will it be the government’s agenda when it comes to freshwater fish?”
Opposition MPs from Quebec and Ontario returned to the theme during the debate that the wheat board decision is a stalking horse for future government action against other farmer marketing boards.
Agriculture minister Gerry Ritz called opposition remarks about Conservative designs on supply management a “contortion to make a false connection” and “desperate scare tactics.”
The CWB monopoly and the supply management monopoly are not comparable, he said.
“The two issues are further apart than apples and oranges,” he said in the Commons. “It is actually apples and walnuts. There is no link.”
He said dairy, poultry and egg farmers strongly supported supply management boards when they were created and remain supportive. Western grain farmers, on the other hand, want options.
Ritz also said supply management boards do not receive federal funds, “where the Canadian Wheat Board in the last years has taken $1.3 billion from the public purse to backstop some mistakes that it made.”
A government official later said that is the amount the federal government has had to spend to support pool deficits in the past 42 years.
“Since 1969, the federal government has covered CWB losses of $1.3 billion, the most recent of which was in 2003 when the federal government had to backstop the board with more than $80 million of taxpayer money.”
And then there are differing rules for wheat farmers in different parts of the country.
“The Canadian Wheat Board is a regional monopoly,” Ritz said. “Supply management is national in scope.”
Liberal agriculture critic Frank Valeriote wasn’t buying the Conservative argument.
“We would be foolish and nave to think that our supply managed industries, poultry, dairy and eggs, are not already now being lined up in the sights of the government for their demise,” he said.
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