REGINA – Delegates to the United Grain Growers’ annual meeting would prefer the Canadian Wheat Board to have a chief executive officer and an elected board of directors rather than appointed commissioners and an elected farmer advisory board.
Eight of 19 resolutions considered at the public company’s annual meeting with farmer-shareholder-delegates dealt with the wheat board.
Other UGG resolutions that passed would strip the responsibility for marketing winter wheat and barley for export from the board; create a separate pool for six-row white aleurone malting barley; and have pooled prices reflect actual freight charges when sales are made to the United States, rather than freight to the St. Lawrence or the West Coast.
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President Ted Allen said delegates’ willingness to question the board has been building: “A few years ago, the questions were hesitant, and diffident, if I can use that word.”
Allen said as delegates’ frustration with the board has grown, their tone has become more insistent.
Allow Alberta freedom
Take resolution No. 20 submitted by the company’s local at Carstairs-Crossfield, Alta. which asked that delegates vote to allow Alberta to opt out of the Canadian Wheat Board designated area.
In speaking to the motion, Mitch Bizon of Boyle, Alta. said if delegates were to pass the resolution, it would give Alberta producers a “very good indication of what could be done in our own plebiscite.”
But Stan Bell of Red Deer said he thought it would be dangerous to ask people from Manitoba and Saskatchewan to vote on his future.
And Rodney Dechant of the Manning local in the Peace River district asked: “What gives Carstairs the right to decide for the rest of Alberta?”
In the end, the resolution was tabled.
But an earlier resolution, which asked to end the exclusive jurisdiction of the Canadian Wheat Board, was carried, though at least a third of delegates abstained from voting.
