Silent majority
letters
To the Editor:
The present system of marketing through the Canadian Wheat Board should be used for other grains as well as wheat and barley. Over the years the CWB has been a very effective, low cost marketer of our wheat and has helped give Canada the reputation of being the premier supplier of quality wheat. Anyone touring the CWB will realize the work they do in developing markets is second to none. An example is how effectively alternate markets were secured when Russia could no longer pay. Canola would be a much more lucrative crop today if the CWB had been given the reins.
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I belong to a local Marketing Club. As a club, we’ve experienced the benefit of both purchasing and marketing products in volume giving us an advantage over an individual farmer.
The Wheat Board monopoly gives all farmers in western Canada a huge advantage in the marketplace, being the only seller of our wheat.
It only stands to reason that the fewer sellers there are of a particular product the higher the selling price. Dual marketers seem to be naive to the fact that the U.S. border will not be open to huge quantities of our grain and that a dual market will only pad the pockets of exporting companies and grain brokers at the expense of the producer.
Dual marketers say we’re afraid of change.
I think as farmers we’re all quite used to change but like most prudent businessmen tend to be resistant if we see it as detrimental to our bottom line.
The CWB has undergone changes in its history and it may need some further operating policy changes but in no way should these changes compromise the ability of the Board to market our grain as effectively as it has in the past.
– Ron Bartel,
Elbow, Sask.
Gun law
To the Editor:
Our new gun law was passed by the Senate while not fully awake. They could not see past the city limits. We have thousands of people out in the wilderness that depend on their rifles for survival. If the government confiscates their rifles, what will they do? Go back to the bow and arrow?
These people were not consulted when the law was being drawn up. This is no surprise, as our government often ignores the public and does wrong. Topmost examples are: Who gives the prime minister the right to disband the nation? Or the right to hand out vetoes over the constitution? Government was not elected to do wrong. Now they think that they have the right to grab what the public owns and sell it for a cheap dollar. Like the CNR grain cars and such.
-Paul Kuric,
Vega, Alta.
CWB issues
To the Editor:
We have now endured at least two years of a campaign by the Western Wheat Growers and their subsidiary organization, Farmers for Justice, to discredit and eventually destroy the Canadian Wheat Board.
During this campaign we have been informed that Bedford barley is a malting variety, that there is a great conspiracy involving the Canadian Wheat Board and Prairie Wheat Pools, Credit Union Central and the Saskatchewan Dairy Co-operative, the quotation of mythical grain prices in the U.S. markets and the fact that you are declared the winner of a court case by having the court assess costs against you. All of this activity and misinformation has been put forward by individuals who claim that they are supporters of the Wheat Board and all they really want is freedom and a dual market which will give us freedom, a dual market and a strong Canadian Wheat Board.
The reason the Western Wheat Growers (the Farmers for Justice) have not directly stated their intention to destroy the Canadian Wheat Board becomes obvious if we review the results of an opinion poll on grain marketing carried out for the Canadian Wheat Board in Alberta during October 1995. When presented with the position that dual marketing would destroy the Canadian Wheat Board, only 29 percent of the 403 farmers polled said they would still support dual marketing. …
The objective then is to create a situation in which the Wheat Board would fail and its failure could not be blamed on the Western Wheat Growers or the governments that advocate their policies or implement their recommendations. The advocates of dual marketing therefore must at all costs avoid the following questions: (1) How would the Canadian Wheat Board function in a dual market without owning any grain-handling facilities? (2) Would the Canadian Wheat Board be placed at a competitive disadvantage in a dual market by not owning grain-handling facilities? (3) In a dual market, would Canadian grain companies provide the Canadian Wheat Board with unrestricted access to the use of their facilities to access markets that the grain companies sought to acquire themselves? (4) With the establishment of a dual market, would the government of Canada continue to guarantee Wheat Board accounts without that guarantee being considered an unfair subsidy in a competitive market? (5) What impact would dual marketing have on the price of malting barley? (6) Could the Canadian Wheat Board continue to price to market in a dual market? (7) Under dual marketing, would all producers, regardless of size or geographic location, have equal access to the premium cash markets? (8) If dual marketing proved to have a negative impact on prairie grain farmers, would the Free Trade Agreements, NAFTA and CUSTA, allow the re-establishment of single-desk selling? …
We cannot have both single-desk selling and open market for wheat and barley. It is also worth noting that the main proponents of open markets are mainly very large farmers who farm in close proximity to the U.S. border. They interpret their size and location as a natural advantage.
This group of farmers see themselves as having the skill and ability to master the complexities of the marketplace. They conveniently ignore the fact that on occasion some of them have been in court trying to recover losses incurred by dealing with unscrupulous grain dealers or had to rely on payments from the Canadian Grain Commission to salvage their incomes. Similarly, 80 percent of all government assistance to agriculture has gone to the 20 percent of farmers who are the largest operators.
The irony of this situation is that if it hadn’t been for the protection from the marketplace that the NFU had fought to have implemented and maintained, many of the farmers who now campaign for freedom and justice would not be farming at all.
If the Western Wheat Growers are successful in creating the open marketplace they desire, I would hope they will not repeat the hypocritical requests of the past and demand that the taxpayers should rescue them from their own ideology when the forces of the marketplace put their operations in jeopardy.
-Fred Tait,
R-5 Co-ordinator,
National Farmers Union, Rossendale, Man.
Bank profits
To the Editor:
The latest to come out the other day is the huge profits made by six of Canada’s banks. The manager of one of those banks had a personal income of $2 million in one year, and those six banks laid off 7,000 employees in one year. Maybe they think that doesn’t mean anything. Well we all know that it means that there will be 7,000 more people on welfare in less than one year and there are a million too many on welfare now, for the same reason, no work. They are rapidly realizing their ultimate goal, and that is everybody on welfare as soon as possible, this is the goal of government and big industry, including the banks.
These huge bank profits made possible by poor service, greed, spurring the lust for excess profits is what created the need for credit unions, and it is this behavior that will create more and larger credit unions.
That is why I went from the bank to a credit union over 40 years ago. …
– Grant Bunce,
Pritchard, B.C.
Health costs
To the Editor:
As for Saskatchewan, we should know as taxpayers what it costs to have these Health Board elections. Maybe the money that was spent on this election could help keep our hospitals open and keep staff at these hospitals instead of closing the hospitals and trying to cram everything and all the patients that need care into one hospital.
People that need surgery have to wait six months before getting their surgery. Yet people in the States say if they need surgery they can have it the next day if needed. Their medical expenses are very high but maybe we should be paying for some of our medical care.
This election that we had was very poorly attended before these boards were elected.
The hospitals had boards that each RM elected one person to sit on the board and were given very little expense.
The government should publish what it costs now to have these boards, how many members each board has, how many boards are there in Saskatchewan and how many meetings each board has.
What does it cost for home care, nurses, etc. to go to the home (travel, car care and salary)? Are they saving anything from this? All these expenses could keep beds open in the hospitals. ….
What would cut down on our expenses would be all the lab work that doctors order and people running to the doctor with a sore finger, etc.
When it’s free, people take advantage of it. Maybe we should be paying a user fee. Then people would think twice about seeing the doctor. This would relieve some stress put on our doctors and give them more time for the sick.
– Elaine Cozart,
Brownlee, Sask.
Picture caption
To the Editor:
Just thought we’d drop you a note regarding your Royal Agricultural Winter Fair picture caption regarding the “ewe-klux-clan.” Although an interesting play on words, it is, in our opinion, racially insensitive.
Although we’re sure The Western Producer meant the play on words in good humor, the inuendo is anything but funny.
It didn’t leave the usual impression of integrity which we have come to expect from the Western Producer.
– Dave and Jewel Fries,
Regina, Sask.
Rail sale
To the Editor:
So the Liberals are jubilant over the CN sale (WP, Dec. 7). Well, I am not.
As reported, the government of Canada sold all of its shares in CN Rail for $2.16 billion.
In order to make the sale, the taxpayers had to absorb more than $1 billion of CN debt. Accordingly, the net benefit to the taxpayers of Canada was a little over $1 billion. This is approximately three percent of Canada’s annual deficit and substantially less than a fifth of one percent of Canada’s total debt. In other words, the sale of CN did practically nothing to address Canada’s debt problems.
Because of its unusual population and geographic characteristics, Canada has always required national institutions such as a national railway, a national airline and a national broadcasting system to link the far flung parts of the country together. …
Now, in return for an insignificant amount of money, Canada has sold its national railway. It is reported that 40 percent of the shares are now owned by Americans. Of course, investors in the shares of CN will demand freight prices which will guarantee a substantial return on their investment.
As if that were not bad enough, the shares were substantially undervalued and investors obtained an immediate cash appreciation. Rather than selling CN, Canada would have been better served if it had nationalized the CPR.
Sale of CN Rail is financial mismanagement at its worst.
No western farmer would take one of his most important assets, say his tractor, and sell it at a fire-sale price which would address less than three percent of his annual cash requirements.
