First, a gripping set of images from an imagined history of the Royal Canadian Wheat Fleet:
Ahhh, yes, there has been much reaction to the Canadian Wheat Board’s decision to buy part of a new fleet of ships for use in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway. There has been outrage, praise, surprise, shock, joy and even mirth. I’m one of the mirthful, because I enjoy thinking up unrealistic visions of what a brand new wheat fleet would look like, and then getting graphic artists – like Emineightsh for the image at the top – to make me fantasy renditions.
I’m sure when I see the real boats I’ll be mightily let down by their serious, commercial nature.
But for others I’m sure this will become a cause celebre, one about which they will spill much ink, exercise much jawbone and waste untold amounts of newsprint. I expect I’ll be hearing much about this issue at farm meetings for the next decade at least, because it’s not just controversial, but will likely starkly illustrate the fundamental differences of weltanschauung amongst farmers.
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For most farmers – probably 70 percent – the issues will be practical and concrete: 1) Why was it seen as necessary by wheat board to buy the ships; 2) Will farmers actually make more money over the long run by owning ships, or are there unrecognized liabilities; 3) Did the board go beyond its mandate in buying these vessels; 4) What does this mean for the CWB in the long term; 5) Is this a one-off, or the beginning of a move to buy-into more parts of the marketing chain; 6) What are they going to be named, and can I suggest my children’s/wife’s/girlfriend’s names?
Those are the middle of the road issues most of us will spend our times thinking about. I’m most interested in the question of why it was necessary for the board to buy the ships. Is that a sign of market failure? If it makes sense and will be profitable to buy and run new ships down the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence, why haven’t other companies and investors done so? Are there controlling forces within the Canadian grain handling and transportation system that are preventing others from investing confidently in the business (Hello rail duopoly and grain elevator triumvirate!), or is the board simply building itself an empire (First some boats, then the world!!)?
No doubt as an agricultural journalist, I’ll hear 10,000 different takes on those questions.
But there are two groups for whom the concrete questions and answers aren’t central, and they’ll never come to a consensus or resolution on this question. They share incompatible weltanschauungs, those that underly the extremities of all politics in our society.
On the way-left are those who love anything that smacks of collective action and market rejection, and they’ll want to see the board’s purchase of the wheat fleet as evidence of its value as a way of pulling farmers out of the grasp of the cold hands of the capitalists. The marketing monopoly prevents farmer-against-farmer competition on wheat prices and defends against the insidious actions of the silk-suiters at all those corporate grain and rail offices, and in the gambling den of the commodity exchanges, they tend to feel. They’ll hope to see this as evidence of the potential of collective structures such as the board against the brutality of private interests.
On the far right, this will likely be endlessly denounced as another example of the wheat board’s War on Farmer Freedom, as the board being unable to keep its hands out of pies that it has no business being in. Anything that confuses the signals and muddies the situation in an efficient, competitive business like grain handling and transportation is just going to cost farmers money, they will feel. The last thing the grain industry needs is another complication to jam up the gears, another amateur player to bog down the system’s functioning. This once again, I’m sure I’ll hear, demonstrates the danger of erecting government-backed entities that limit individuals’ freedom: they inevitably try to keep expanding.
This move by the board is certainly interesting – whether good or bad – and I’m keenly interested in hearing more of the reasoning behind why it was felt necessary for the board to step in directly rather than allowing the market to allocate the capital by itself, if the need was truly there. I’m interested in the views of other grain industry players about that question. It’s a pretty big market competitiveness issue. I just hope that it isn’t drowned out by the ideologues of left and right, as they fire the broadsides of their weltanschauungs.
