RALPH Goodale might be forgiven if he sometimes wonders whether he should have listened a little more closely to Rick Borotsik and Dick Proctor.
During debate on Oct. 7, 1997, on Goodale’s Canadian Wheat Board Act reforms, Bill C-4, Goodale said he was turning the direction of the board over to farmers through their 10 elected directors but because of its financial guarantees, the government still needed a “window” into the board.
For that reason, he willed that one-third of the board still would be appointed by Ottawa, including the president and chief executive officer.
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Proctor, then NDP agriculture critic, said his party opposed the idea of a government-appointed CEO.
“We believe this gives the government too much control over a board of directors that should really be accountable ultimately to the farmers and it gives the government too much control over the day to day operations of the wheat board itself,” the Saskatchewan MP said.
Manitoba Progressive Conservative critic Borotsik, an opponent of the monopoly, went further in his criticism that day in the House of Commons.
“There should well be an elected board of directors. I agree with that,” he said. “Of the 15 board of directors who have been identified, all 15 should be elected by the producers, not appointed by government.”
But the Liberals of the day had a majority government and Goodale prevailed.
The result is a hybrid organization, not quite private, not quite public and with a significant opportunity for the minister of the day to interfere if he chooses.
Goodale apparently assumed that Canadian governments always would support the monopoly despite the fact that two of the opposition parties facing him that day opposed the monopoly.
An irony of that day is that Goodale used his speech to rage against some of his political tormentors on the board issue.
He included the “gaggle of political drifters” who formed the Saskatchewan Party and that “funny bunch” at the National Citizens’ Coalition “that would not know a bushel of barley from a handful of rice.”
As it turns out nine years later, the president of that “funny bunch” is prime minister Stephen Harper and he has appointed an agriculture minister who chooses to exercise the ability to meddle that he inherited from Goodale, no doubt at the behest of Harper.
This week, Strahl is expected to do what Proctor said he should not have the power to do – fire the CWB president.
And by appointing anti-monopoly directors to three of the five government-appointed positions that Borotsik said should not be subject to ministerial whim, Strahl has significantly shifted the board position on the single desk to something close to an even split.
That government involvement and the fact that the CWB still reports to Parliament through the minister also allowed the Conservatives to impose the access-to-information law on an unwilling board even if it is no longer strictly defined as a crown corporation or a government agency.
Goodale said government financial guarantees justified the “window” that he created. However, at the time the Ontario Wheat Board had a monopoly and government guarantees – and it also had an entirely elected board.
Without that gift in Bill C-4, the minority government would be having a much more difficult time doing what it is trying to do.
