WINNIPEG – When Canadian Wheat Board staff refused to allow NDP candidate Pat Martin to be photographed in the CWB head office lobby for fear of being labelled partisan, the four-term MP got cranky.
“I’m out there busting my butt to save this place,” he complained to the communications officer sent to deliver the bad news on an early October morning. 
“These guys want to destroy you and you won’t let me have a picture taken?”
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Indeed, this 52-year-old former construction labourer and union activist has made defence of the CWB a central theme of his re-election campaign in this inner city Winnipeg Centre riding.
At the core of the campaign is the argument that if a re-elected Conservative government stripped the CWB of its single desk power, the agency could not compete and more than 400 jobs would be lost in the riding where the board is located.
If the CWB went down, other grain industry players including grain companies and the Canadian Grain Commission could well move away, he argued.
“I really think this is a make-or-break election for the board,” he said.
“If the Conservatives win, it will be gone and there will be no going back. And that would rip the economic heart out of my riding.”
Martin is also pounding on the theme that what he calls underhanded tactics by the Conservatives to undermine the CWB could be used by the government against any agency or program it opposes.
“People know about that in my riding and it makes them angry,” he said.
“And it makes them wonder what else this government will do against other programs or institutions that we cherish.”
This seems an unlikely riding to feature a debate about agricultural politics.
Winnipeg Centre is completely urban and one of the poorest ridings in Canada. Also, as the former political home of CCF icons J.S. Woodsworth and Stanley Knowles, it is known more for its labour and poverty politics than its agricultural debates.
However, Martin said that for the first time, residents of the riding are realizing that the stable jobs offered by the CWB for more than 70 years can no longer be taken for granted.
“They are coming to realize just how important those jobs and that grand old prairie institution are to downtown Winnipeg,” he said.
“Even if they don’t live in the riding, those CWB employees come downtown, shop downtown and spend their money downtown. And having it here attracts other agriculture-related jobs that really have no overwhelming reason to be here other than that the board has made this the centre of the grain trade.”
In the last Parliament, Martin was named the NDP CWB critic, and his campaigning has been against both the Conservatives who want to end the monopoly and the Liberals who Martin says cannot be trusted to stand up to the Conservatives on the issue.
His campaign is also trying to build support for a decades-long fight to convince the Canadian Pacific Railway to move its switching yards from downtown to the airport area. Winnipeg and the Manitoba government are lobbying to create an inland container port in the airport area that would accommodate trainloads of containers shipped from the congested West Coast to be sorted and forward shipped from the Prairies.
Other cities in Alberta and Saskatchewan are also dreaming of being designated the site of the inland container port.
