IT IS A complicated, nuanced, clever, practical and so far successful strategy that federal agriculture minister Chuck Strahl has been employing to manage a potentially explosive political issue for the Conservative government in the rural Prairies: how to deal with the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly issue.
His impatient friends are the greatest threat to the strategy’s success. Ending the monopoly has been a bedrock position of the Conservatives and their founding component parts for years. The Reform party adopted it as a founding policy in the 1980s and the Progressive Conservatives joined the parade a decade later.
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As president of the National Citizens Coalition, now-prime minister Stephen Harper regularly raged against the CWB monopoly as a throwback to a statist, almost Stalinist, age. So anti-monopoly zealots can hardly be blamed for believing that the new Conservative government should move quickly to fulfil the promise, to meet the expectation.
In reality, it would be impossible in a minority Parliament and to raise the issue would be to create a political storm that would detract from Harper’s five priority issues that he wants to accomplish to show governing prowess on the road to a majority. In other words, Harper doesn’t want the CWB issue as a distraction as he works to prove he is a mainstream leader worthy of a majority next time.
So Strahl, new to the issue as a British Columbia MP with no previous CWB experience, is left holding the bag. He has done it well with a simple, repeated, credible message. The Conservatives are committed to ending the monopoly, he says, but it cannot be done instantly. It requires consultation, study, caution and “measured” steps.
In other words, it is coming but not just now and not as dramatically as CWB critics want or expected.
Strahl makes the reasonable point that there are so many issues swirling around the wheat board, its practices and future that it is impractical to move only on the monopoly issue.
And while the Liberal opposition will demand full Conservative support for the board, despite a clear Conservative anti-monopoly position and a clear majority of prairie farm votes for Conservatives, the Liberal all-or-nothing position has its weak points.
After all, it was the Liberals who agreed at the World Trade Organization to end the financial guarantees on initial payments and export sales that have been key CWB tools.
Strahl’s real double-edged message is, “give us a majority and watch us move, but not now.”
And that is why he is urging patience for impatient prairie farmers who expected fast Conservative action. Don’t test the system by running wheat across the border, Strahl urged anti-board farmers last week. We will move when we can. Give us time.
And that is the Achilles heel of this strategy. What if the anti-board Conservative supporters decide to force Harper’s hand by running the border, defying the government to ignore it or to enforce a law it does not support? Since one of Harper’s five priorities is stronger law and order, it would be unseemly for justice minister Vic Toews to ignore a blatant violation of an existing law.
Harper and Strahl can only hope their anti-CWB supporters are as patient and strategic as they are.
