One thing you have to admit about the Canadian Farm Enterprise Network is that it is enterprising. So creatively enterprising, in fact, that it has developed a strange new form of logic in which today’s wheat marketing system can be likened to racist oppression of Japanese Canadians a half century ago.
How does one get there from here? According to a CFEN statement last week, it goes back to a 1947 lawsuit in which a farmer challenged wheat board powers. The lawsuit failed, and wheat board powers were decisively confirmed in the law of the time, which is not a fact CFEN would normally tend to publicize.
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What got the network excited (so excited that it promised the news media “startling” news about the origins of board powers) were some of the arguments federal lawyers used to defend the board.
Among those arguments was the observation that courts had earlier upheld the federal government’s legal power to confiscate the property of Japanese Canadians in wartime without compensation.
The CFEN release called that confiscation “an atrocity against one group of Canadians” and said the effect on farmers of wheat board legislation “may soon be seen in that same light.”
For that comment, CFEN owes Japanese Canadians an apology. Their undeserved and unnecessary loss of property during the Second World War represents something far more traumatic than quibbles over whether some farmers could earn a few more cents a bushel without the board.
It is also pure bunk for CFEN to claim that the old court ruling concerning Japanese Canadians is the “moral foundation” of the wheat board’s authority.
Technical legal issues can be important. But the board’s moral authority has nothing to do with lawyers – it rests on the generations of farmers who have supported the board.
Most recently, farmers voted two to one to maintain the board’s power over barley. Japanese Canadians had no vote in what happened to them.
If the majority of farmers ever were to cease supporting the board, the laws giving it its powers would quickly change and the board would be gone.
It is up to today’s farmers to decide if the board is valuable to them.
If it wants to win converts to its cause, CFEN should get its mindset out of the 1940s and focus on the issue of the board’s role today.
Cheap publicity tricks based on pages from 47-year-old law books aren’t much help to people trying to decide what type of grain marketing system they need for the 21st century.
