WINNIPEG – Farmers fighting Ottawa’s power to monopolize export sales of prairie grain were claiming victory halfway through a heated legal battle that got under way here last week.
But as the trial moved into its second week, the crown began presenting its evidence, arguing that the courts have always upheld the board’s authority to regulate grain trade.
Saskatchewan farmer Dave Bryan is trying to have the Canadian Wheat Board Act declared unconstitutional.
A victory for the Central Butte farmer could call into question the board’s power to control wheat and barley exports.
Read Also
Alberta crop diversification centres receive funding
$5.2 million of provincial funding pumped into crop diversity research centres
The case could have come to an abrupt halt Feb. 12 when the crown asked judge James Smith to dismiss the constitutional challenge, arguing that the defence’s evidence had nothing to do with the Customs Act charges faced by the Saskatchewan farmer.
But Smith said the case is an unusual one, and while he’d have to weigh the evidence carefully, it would all be considered.
At one point, federal lawyers told the court that the issue of how farmers feel about the wheat board is irrelevant to Bryan’s charges, a comment that infuriated one of Bryan’s supporters.
“It’s like we’re peasants who are supposed to grow grain, turn it over to them and shut up,” said Russ Larson, one of more than a dozen producers who show up at the trial each day. “The peasants aren’t supposed to stand up and revolt but that’s what’s happening.”
Larson is a member of the Canadian Farm Enterprise Network, which raised over $100,000 from farmers to help pay Bryan’s legal bills.
Bryan’s lawyer, Art Stacey, unfolded his case by asking Smith to throw out Customs Act charges Bryan faces for selling his grain to the United States without a wheat board export licence in 1996 and 1997.
He said Bryan didn’t get the wheat board licence because grain is the property of the farm who grows it, and property rights fall under provincial jurisdiction.
While the wheat board act may have originally been established to regulate trade and commerce, which is a federal power, its actual effect is the expropriation of prairie farmers’ property, Stacey said.
“They don’t lose their land here but they lose the value of their land because there is no opportunity to use it other than how the board dictates.”
Other defence witnesses included farmers who blamed the wheat board’s buy-back program for lost sales. The program requires farmers to sell wheat to the wheat board, then buy it back before they can sell it for export.
The crown’s witnesses to be heard this week includes an expert historian, an American sociologist and an official with the wheat board.
Bryan said outside the courtroom it’s about time Canada’s blurry grain marketing rules were put to the test.
“The legislative and judicial sides of government have been passing this back and forth like a hot potato and it’s time somebody made a ruling on this matter of property rights.”
