In the rhetorical tug-of-war over the future of the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly, it was business as usual last week as news from Ontario seeped west.
Reports that Ontario’s planned November plebiscite over the future of the Ontario Wheat Board marketing monopoly has been cancelled in a controversy over the rules left both sides in the prairie debate claiming their side had been bolstered.
The vote was cancelled Sept. 17 amid debate over the rules of the vote, which specified that if the board monopoly received less than two-thirds of the vote, it would be demolished.
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For CWB advisory committee vice-chair Wilf Harder, cancellation came as a relief.
Opponents of the wheat board on the prairies have noted that if the same rule had applied to the barley vote earlier this year, the board would no longer have jurisdiction over barley exports or domestic malting barley sales. Supporters of the board garnered fewer than two-thirds of the votes in the plebiscite which re-affirmed the board monopoly.
“We had a lot of concern about the vote,” Harder said in a Sept. 19 interview. “If this two-thirds rule had held, there would have been increased pressure on the Prairies to judge the wheat board on the same basis. That is insane.”
For Larry Maguire, president of the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association and an advocate of an end to the board marketing monopoly, the message was exactly the opposite.
“Cancelling the vote doesn’t mean anything at all,” he said. “Whether they vote or not, the rule of two-thirds has been established. If it is the rule in Ontario, why can’t it be the rule here?”
He predicted a backlash among Ontario wheat farmers who have decided the monopoly is not in their interests.
Require export permits
For Harder, the relief came from more than the fact that the precedent of a two-thirds threshold had been avoided. He said if Ontario wheat farmers had voted to end the export monopoly of their board, it would have meant the Canadian Wheat Board would have to issue export permits to individual Ontario exporters.
“That isn’t the case on the Prairies and that would simply have increased the pressure,” he said. “I think the decision was the correct one.”
