EDMONTON – He comes not to bury the board, but to praise it.
Alberta agriculture minister Walter Paszkowski paints himself as a staunch supporter of the besieged Canadian Wheat Board, a friend who is gravely concerned with its health.
“Change doesn’t mean death, it means continuing life,” he said during a recent interview. “I think the board provides some very useful services. I wouldn’t want to lose those.
“I think the majority of farmers would very likely continue to use the board.”
That is, if they are given the choice of marketing their wheat and barley through the board or with a private company, the key demand of Paszkowski’s crusade against the board’s present monopoly.
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Ignoring producers’ demands
Paszkowski repeatedly attacked the board’s structure and federal agriculture minister Ralph Good-ale’s unwillingness to immediately accept the Western Grain Marketing Panel’s unanimous recommendations and the results of an Alberta plebiscite that Pas-zkowski insists reflects a producer desire for dual marketing.
But while he has been a foe of board supporters and consistently fought against farm groups and governments that have stood behind the board’s present structure, Paszkowski said he doesn’t want to pull Alberta out from under the CWB umbrella.
“I don’t think it would be a useful function for Alberta to withdraw from the board,” he said. “At this stage I think it would be wrong, unless the wheat board chooses not to change, in which case it will probably self-destruct.”
Paszkowski said the board now holds back the development of prairie agriculture because it promotes bulk grain exports and does not foster value-added processing. And it’s in processing that future prosperity lies, he said.
For days, Paszkowski has been repeating, like an agricultural mantra, two statistics: In the past five years, world trade in bulk commodities has declined by eight percent, but trade in processed goods has increased by 137 percent.
The writing is on the wall for economies that rely on bulk exports, he said.
Paszkowski said if change happens now, Canadian agriculture will be set to reap great rewards in the future. But if the board is not changed to allow competition, it will wither away and Canadian producers will be left behind by competitors.
Competition forces change
“It’s a known fact that the only way you can generate efficiencies is through competition,” said Paszkowski about the assumption underlying his arguments.
He said the Canadian grain system could have been overhauled and been made “efficiency driven” when the Crow Benefit grain transportation subsidy was ended, but the government merely tinkered with it.
Change now is still possible, and Paszkowski relishes the thought of being handed the scalpel.
“I would love the opportunity of sitting down and being given the opportunity of restructuring, making the changes that would make it more volatile, more viable, and better address the changes and the needs of the changing environment.”
The Crow, to Paszkowski, is a harbinger of what will happen if the board is not changed. Prairie producers were offered $7.2 billion to end the annual federal Crow payments, but that offer was turned down, said Paszkowski, in reference to buyout figures once rumored to be on the table during the Crow debate.
“We said we didn’t want to change,” he said ruefully. “We settled for $1.6 billion. That’s what we have here.”
At the core of Paszkowski’s crusade seems to be the philosophy of change or die.
“We have the opportunity to develop our own destiny here. We can make the changes, rather than having someone making the changes for us …. If we don’t change we’re going to get left behind, because the rest of the world will change.”
