As it moved across the prairies during the past two weeks, holding public hearings on the future of the Canadian Wheat Board, the Senate agriculture committee became visibly more divided on the issue.
What emerged was a glimpse of the changing political landscape on the Prairies. The Progressive Conservatives, once a party that liked to brag it created the wheat board and defended its monopoly, now seem clearly on the side of ending the monopoly.
Like their Reform brethren, the Tories have decided monopoly marketing is a thing of the past. In the last election, their prairie platform included a vague promise to increase marketing “flexibility.”
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During the past two weeks, a more clear “opting out” Tory view emerged.
As the Senate committee moved from Brandon, through Alberta and Saskatchewan to end up in Winnipeg, Conservative Senators seemed to grow increasingly skeptical of the government decision to maintain the wheat board monopoly, as well as its Bill C-4 attempt to reform the board.
Committee chair and Saskatchewan Tory Len Gustafson reflected that growing skepticism. At the beginning of the hearings, he kept his views on the board monopoly largely to himself. By the end, he was lecturing witnesses.
“If choices aren’t offered to farmers, you won’t have a Canadian Wheat Board,” he told Bill Toews, who attended to speak for the monopoly on behalf of Manitoba’s Concerned Farmers Saving the Wheat Board.
Outside the meeting, Gustafson, who farms near the border in southwest Saskatchewan, said the anger he had heard from some board critics, and the example of Ontario moving away from the monopoly, had deepened his conviction that more reform is needed.
“I begin to wonder if there was a vote taken now on the monopoly if a lot of things wouldn’t change,” he said. “My thinking is that the board could survive if farmers could opt out.”
For their part, the Liberals who toured were more circumspect, trying in some cases to convince witnesses that C-4 is a good first step to give farmers more power but generally trying to avoid appearing to have their minds made up.
Still, it would be a safe bet that most return to Ottawa convinced the legislation is a good compromise and the wheat board monopoly should stay until a farmer-controlled board of directors decides otherwise. Criticism of the inclusion clause and the government control over appointing a chief executive officer may lead the Liberal majority to accept some amendments.
However, Liberal support for the core concept remains solid. “My Canada includes the Canadian Wheat Board,” groused Eugene Whelan at one point.
While the outburst did nothing to convince farmers the Liberals were there to listen with open minds, it probably did reflect the majority Liberal view.
Still, the Senate hearings can be remembered as an occasion when skepticism about a marketing monopoly in a free trade age gained a bit more political credibility.
