Single desk marketing of western Canadian wheat has received a ringing endorsement from a national political organization.
But it’s an endorsement unlikely to have much influence with the federal Conservative government.
The Communist Party of Canada, or CPC, last week issued a statement calling on prime minister Stephen Harper to keep his hands off the wheat board.
And it called on organized labour to join with the pro-CWB farmers in a fight to save the single desk exporter of western wheat and barley.
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“The plan should be opposed by farm, labour and other people’s movements across Canada through united, powerful protests that will ensure Harper is blocked in Parliament from carrying out this serious threat.”
The statement said replacing the single desk with an open market would be a serious blow to family farmers and Western Canada as a whole.
“Eliminating the CWB would mean handing marketing control of a large part of Canadian wheat to U.S.-based corporations and strike another major blow to Canadian sovereignty,” said the statement distributed by CPC central executive committee member Darrell Rankin.
Rankin, also leader of the Manitoba provincial communist party, said in an interview the national party has a couple of hundred members in Western Canada, including “a handful” of farmers.
He said the CWB issue provides an opportunity to build an alliance between farmers and workers, which has always been a fundamental goal of the party.
The statement accused the Harper government of doing the bidding of multinational grain companies, while the CWB acts on behalf of farmers by gaining better prices in world markets and by standing up against powerful railway and grain company interests
Rankin said at the very least, farmers should have the opportunity to vote in a plebiscite on the future of the board.
CWB spokesperson Maureen Fitzhenry declined to comment directly on the CPC statement.
However, she did say that the issue of the CWB’s future shouldn’t be treated as an issue of ideology or philosophy, but rather a question of which kind of marketing system provides the best returns for farmers.
“It’s not an issue of communism, of capitalism or any ‘ism.’ It’s a question of economics and the financial survival of western Canadian farmers as producers and businesspeople,” she said.
