IT IS A classic case of the law of unintended consequences.
This week, the House of Commons will vote to use the federal Accountability Act to make the Canadian Wheat Board subject to information requests through the access-to-information law.
Along with the Liberals, New Democrats will vote against the amendment, rejecting it as part of the Conservative government’s campaign to “destroy the wheat board.”
But if not for the NDP, this amendment would not exist. It began life as a New Democrat proposal.
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Eh? Last June, Winnipeg New Democrat MP Pat Martin, a defender of the CWB that is headquartered in his riding but also an open-government zealot, was responsible for moving an amendment to the Conservatives’ showcase Accountability Act to subject the wheat board to the access-to-information law.
It was approved at a committee studying the bill because Liberal and Bloc Québécois MPs didn’t grasp its significance or the fact that their parties opposed the idea at the time.
Martin thought it was an innocuous proposal that was true to his open-government principles but not harmful to the wheat board, whose commercial secrets would be protected.
“Either you believe in open government or you don’t,” he said in an interview at the time. “We’d be hypocrites if we were demanding that all government agencies and crown corporations should be under the access-to-information law but not the Canadian Wheat Board. I’m comfortable that under the law, any commercially sensitive information will be protected.”
Instantly, the manure hit the conveyor belt, NDP and Liberal agriculture critics went ballistic and Martin was doing a mea culpa, promising to undo what he had done. “I think they are making much ado about nothing but the wheat board has been ringing our phone off the hook since the amendment was approved.”
It seemed like a simple proposition. All opposition parties opposed the amendment and so in a minority Parliament, it would be rejected in the House.
But something happened on the way to the vote. The BQ, with no direct interest in the CWB issue and a strong interest in government accountability, decided this was a change it could support.
The amendment carried, with Conservative smiles all around and Liberal accusations of a Conservative-separatist alliance against a grand old prairie institution.
Fast-forward through the Senate process when the unelected majority reversed the House will and took the wheat board out of the bill before it was sent back to the Commons.
Fast-forward again to this week’s House debate as the Conservatives are determined to salvage as much of the bill as possible so they can go to the voters next year as the gang that opened up government.
Surprisingly, the Conservative-Bloc coalition on that issue held and the wheat board inclusion was reaffirmed.
The vote had not been held when this column was written but Pat Martin undoubtedly followed party discipline and voted against it.
No doubt the Liberals will use the next election campaign to remind prairie voters that the NDP is responsible for added CWB scrutiny under the Accountability Act.
