SEVENTEEN years ago, Arthur Kroeger thought he was the man to lead the detailed negotiations over how to end the Crow rate subsidy.
Michael Pitfield, Canada’s top bureaucrat, nixed the idea.
The Alberta-born deputy minister of transport would stay in Ottawa to help fight the political battles over the Crow, Pitfield decreed.
Winnipeg agricultural economist Clay Gilson would lead the negotiations over the nuts-and-bolts of change.
Now, Kroeger gets his chance to be the nuts-and-bolts man, and he clearly is relishing the chance. Now retired from government, the Chancellor of Carleton University has been hired to finesse the details of deregulating grain transportation as proposed by Willard Estey and endorsed in principle by Ottawa.
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“It is fun to be a general manager, as I was as deputy minister,” Kroeger mused this week as he prepared for another whirlwind of prairie consultations. “But it’s also nice to get your hands on something, to work directly with the details.”
By Sept. 1, Kroeger is to come up with a report on how Estey recommendations can be implemented.
Already, there is a political snag. The Canadian Wheat Board disagrees with the proposal to remove the board from Prairie grain handling decisions and is threatening to continue the argument.
Kroeger said he will not entertain wheat board political arguments.
That is one of the landscape changes he has noticed since he re-entered the grain transportation debate.
The wheat board, now with 10 elected directors, sees itself as a much more active policy voice than it was in 1982.
The other major difference he notices is the changed face of the prairie wheat pools.
During the Crow debate, the Liberal government saw the three pools as powerful farm groups, in addition to being farmer-owned grain handlers. “We certainly saw them as speaking for their farmer base in each of those provinces.”
Kroeger said he has found a different situation in 1999. Two of the pools have amalgamated in Agricore, Saskatchewan Wheat Pool sells shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange and the two companies have plans to expand commercially into the territory of the other.
“My sense is that they have moved much more from being farm groups to being grain companies,” he said. “I’m sure they still say they represent farmers but I see more of a commercial interest. And the wheat board sounds much more like a farm group.”
With these early impressions, Kroeger begins an intense three months of massaging sometimes conflicting commercial and ideological interests.
Through it all, he sees his role as managerial rather than political.
But Kroeger also should never discount the ability of politics to complicate things.
In 1983, despite the best laid plans of government, a powerful political revolt that united Quebec and some prairie farm interests blew Gilson recommendations out of the water and delayed final abolition of the Crow subsidy by a decade.
Political power sometimes breaks out when the bureaucrats and managers least expect it.
