Terry Fries is copy editor of the Western Producer.
As a kinder, gentler-to-those-who-think-like-us New World Order cocoons the planet in a fuzzy warm glow of harmonic trading blocks, we must bow humbly and thank our Wal-Mart credit cards that Cold War traditionalists are standing guard at the gates.
Forget love, sweet love. What the world needs now is guys like Reform MP Jake Hoeppner making sure our spongy butts are forever covered by the skins of free-market thinking.
No matter that the dogs of doom are a howlin’, there is still Hoeppner. And Wife of Hoeppner.
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Together they are the reason we sleep soundly at night, safe from the long arm of the Canadian Wheat Board.
And it’s about time. There has been one too many babies spirited away in the gloom of night and too many mysterious crop circles forming without the appropriate permits.
Where there’s inflation, deflation, costly subsidies or high-rolling fat bureaucrats, the wheat board must be lurking behind the curtain. Whether it be Thalidomide babies, Vietnam, Lee Harvey himself, acid rain, ozone depletion, Ebola, chicken pox, or the new Coke, the plagues of the 20th century could only be sprung from the roots of an evil, state-run monopoly. It’s what they do.
If it’s bad for us, there must be some behemoth institutional throwback to the Red days responsible.
A place where the de-commissioned KGB elite farmer corps sits idling away the time just waiting for the chance to whack unsuspecting wheat board commissioners who know too much about how vermicelli is really made.
The western world has Hoeppner and his wife Fran to thank for saving life as we know it for their dogged pursuit of the Canadian Wheat Board.
They’re vowing to consider the possibility of running a rogue load of grain across the Canada-U.S. border without a wheat board permit (after giving appropriate advance notice, of course.)
Hoeppner has sworn to take the wheat board to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, which has been on the trail of an international farming spy ring for years, but to date, has been unable to uncover enough encrypted messages in the world’s Corn Flakes boxes to make any charges stick.
Hoeppner has championed the legitimate complaints of a few farmers and turned the complaints into laughing stocks.
Complaints about how the Canadian Wheat Board handled frozen and fusarium-infected wheat last year and how the wheat board charges farmers to buy grain back to export on their own to the U.S. deserved better than Hoeppner’s snakeoil sideshow.
When the RCMP said there was nothing criminal in the information it was given on the case, Hoeppner’s panoramic paranoia turned to the Canadian justice system, denouncing it as having no accountability.
But since the United Nations has nothing more pressing on its table than to whip the stellar dust into a Reform alignment, I expect it will soon enter the fray and save the world from the imminent collapse at the hands of the notorious cattle feed cartels.
From here on out, we’d better watch our backs. And keep our Captain Crunch secret decoder rings close by.
