One of Canada’s most influential business voices has repeated its call to end the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly, arguing that it contradicts a key element of the federal government’s agricultural policy framework and discourages processor investment on the Prairies.
While the wheat board rejects the Canadian Chamber of Commerce stance as contrary to farmer income interests, one defender of the CWB monopoly said the business lobby intervention could help anti-monopoly candidates in CWB elections this autumn.
“I suspect the chamber has done this now to try to influence the election,” said Terry Pugh, executive secretary of the National Farmers Union. “It gives candidates who would dismantle the monopoly the ability to point for support to a third party opinion, one from a group that supposedly understands business.”
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Pugh said he disagrees with the chamber analysis that the end of the monopoly would make the prairie farm economy better.
The resolution, sponsored by chambers in Regina, Red Deer and Calgary, was approved at the national chamber’s annual convention in Calgary. It replaces a 2003 resolution that also called for an end to the monopoly.
“This is a stronger, more clear position than we had before,” said Mike Murphy, vice-president of the chamber.
“The chamber has a position on this because it is an economic development argument and that is our business. There are policies that we believe are slowing investment in an important industry in an important region of the country.”
The resolution said that while most soybean, canola and Ontario wheat production is processed for domestic uses, just six percent of western wheat is processed on the Prairies.
“The lack of value-added grain processing in Western Canada has been largely caused by the CWB monopoly,” said the resolution’s preamble. “It extracts a price premium for domestic processors of wheat and barley resulting in a complex regulated system that increases costs, reduces competitiveness and creates a disincentive to value-added investment.”
It said the monopoly contradicts the APF call for innovation and value-added investment.
Cam Dahl, executive director of the anti-monopoly Grain Growers of Canada, said the chamber intervention in the CWB debate is useful, although he dismissed the notion it was intended to influence the election for CWB directors.
“I don’t think it is timed for the election campaign but I think it is another voice and an important voice,” he said.
“I think the point about it undermining the APF is an important one. It inhibits investment and value-added processing, both APF goals.”
CWB chair Ken Ritter said the chamber opinion will have no impact on the board elections and he saw it as a vindication of the wheat board’s role.
The chamber complained about the board extracting a “price premium” from processors.
“It is the board’s job to obtain the best price possible for producers’ grain and sometimes that goal will be in conflict with processor’s goal of getting product at the best price possible,” Ritter said from his Saskatchewan farm. “We are very supportive of value added, but we’re not going to give our grain away so that others will invest and make money from it.”
