Albertan John McKee and Saskatchewan’s Ray Ryland are farmers who stand on opposite sides of the great political divide as prairie producers vote this month on whether the Canadian Wheat Board should have its powers trimmed.
They are entrepreneurial farmers with contrary views on whether the board should continue to control all barley exports and domestic sales of malting barley.
Both say they arrived at their ideological destinations through practical market experience.
McKee, from Stirling in southern Alberta, believes in the open market. He opposes the board monopoly.
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“If the Canadian Wheat Board was gone, we’d still be farmers and there would still be buyers for Canadian wheat,” McKee said after listening to a recent debate on the future of the board.
“They’ve done a lot of good and we don’t need to get rid of them. They’ve got contacts, they do a lot of things, but they’re used to doing things the way they did in 1950. I’m not farming the way my dad did in 1950.”
Ryland, who farms near Eston in central Saskatchewan, has reached a radically different conclusion about how best to market his crop.
“I prefer the board as a single-desk seller because I believe it gets me a premium,” he said from his farm. “It is my choice. Half my income comes from grains and crops not sold through the board and I just find I am more comfortable with single-desk selling. I trust it to work for me.”
This is the core of the question facing close to 80,000 farmers eligible to cast a mail-in ballot in the first-ever producer vote on whether the board should lose some marketing power.
All the ballots must be sent to KPMG Consultants in Winnipeg by Feb. 28. The results could be known as early as mid-March.
Federal agriculture minister Ralph Goodale has said he will obey the wishes of the majority.
Whichever side they favor, all farmers involved in the vote have a story about how they arrived at their conclusions.
For McKee, his journey away from the board and its monopoly started almost 15 years ago when a wheat board official showed up at the local elevator to stop him from unloading malting barley.
Resentment building
McKee says he and his father had received permission to ship a carload of barley in August 1982, even though there were no quotas.
The board representative did not believe them. An hour-long argument ensued at the elevator. “He forbid us to unload those trucks.”
The issue festered with him and he came to resent the board’s export monopoly. In 1993, when the Canada-U.S. border briefly opened to private barley sales, McKee took advantage of it.
Now, living close to the north-south corridor of Highway 4, he wants to be able to do it again.
For Ryland, there was no single moment when he realized the board was his best bet.
“My dad leaned to single-desk selling but it wasn’t a big issue in our house,” says the 48-year-old. “It was when I went farming on my own that I realized the board got me a premium. It is economic for me, not sentimental.”
