The Canadian Wheat Board hasn’t left the grain industry building yet, but in some ways it seems like it has. And Gerry Ritz gave it a kick in the rump last week to speed its progress out the doors. I guess in a few months we’ll have to get used to the idea that the board, like Elvis Presley, has left the building and isn’t likely to come back for an encore.
It was pretty weird for me to be covering the University of Manitoba Transport Institute’s Fields on Wheels conference last week and find virtually no CWB presence there. Generally there are a few boardies there, which makes sense because it’s the key grain transportation and logistics conference held in Winnipeg every year and the board’s been central to most things that happen in the prairie grain logistics industry.
But earlier that week Gerry Ritz made the announcement that he was amputating the cash advance limb from the wheat board and grafting it onto the Canadian Canola Growers Association, and the Working Group on Marketing Freedom issued its report the same day, so the board had a lot of real-world stuff to deal with and probably not a bunch of time to sit around a meeting room talking about long term implications of something it’s desperately trying to manage on a day-by-day basis.
Still, it was odd to spend the day hearing about implications of the CWB’s demise and not hear anything from the board. There were railway types, grain company execs, port reps, farmers, but none of the folks who are doing the business that everybody else in the commercial grain trade is getting ready to divide up, like the spoils after a successful pirate voyage.
This will likely become the way the thing evolves, especially if the government keeps doing things like the cash advance switcheroo. The board will not just become less and less central, but it will begin looking to everyone like a lame duck, like something left in the past.
Which no doubt is the way the government wants it to seem.
I had two big hopes Friday for Fields on Wheels: that Gerry Ritz would show up, and that CWB CEO Ian White would show up. Either one could have said something that upset somebody’s applecart, and after all, that’s what news is all about. They were both on the program. I found out Thursday that Gerry wasn’t coming, so my hopes switched to Ian for something newsy. But Ian cancelled too, so everything became long-term-analytical in nature. Very interesting, but not explosive.
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So this week I’m reliving most of the presentations, which I and a helpful and cheery assistant recorded at the conf, and trying to melt them down into handy and digestible chunks.
Still, I’m hoping that sometime there will be a head-to-head, or at least in-the-same room, clash of board supremos and Ritz. Perhaps Gerry Ritz and board chair Allen Oberg could be tricked into a cage match to settle the ideological and political dispute.
If that doesn’t happen, we’ll be living through this weird process in which a giant element of prairie agriculture gets amputated with neither the patient nor the surgeon in the room at the same time.
