IT WAS a week almost unprecedented in recent Parliament Hill history. Canadian Wheat Board week produced its share of spectacles and some incredible rhetoric.
There was the president and chief executive officer of a multibillion dollar quasi-government marketing agency (how close it is to government is very much at the core of the dispute) traipsing around Parliament Hill looking for opposition support to save his job from a threatened firing.
There was the chair of the CWB presenting a peace plan to a parliamentary committee that basically called for the government to surrender.
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There was a Liberal MP accusing the Conservatives of “Stalinist” tactics while Winnipeg New Democrat Pat Martin suggested agriculture minister Chuck Strahl’s decision to change the voters’ list in mid-election would not have been out of place in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile – a military dictator who orchestrated the killing of a democratically elected Marxist president and then the killing of thousands of his sympathizers.
On the other side were angry denunciations from anti-wheat board monopoly campaigners.
In the lobby of the House of Commons, former wheat farmer and now Conservative MP Ted Menzies told reporters that the wheat board monopoly had cost his Claresholm, Alta., farm $1.5 million in lost revenues over the years.
During an evening cell phone call, southern Manitoba Conservative MP Brian Pallister denounced the Manitoba government decision to hold a plebiscite on the issue: “It is not a provincial issue, it is a meaningless vote and it is money they could be spending to actually support producers.”
And unsuccessful Saskatchewan anti-monopoly director candidate Vicki Dutton sent a missive complaining that reporters should have a mission to expose “untruths” in the system even if they are biased against the cause. One significant untruth she sees is the claim that the board is accountable to farmers through their directors.
Her evidence is a March 17, 2005 submission by the CWB against a lawsuit launched by a group of prairie farmers against the board over its distribution of pool funds.
The CWB’s legal defence was that “the board is accountable only to Parliament and that neither the Board nor the Crown owe any duty to or are accountable to the (plaintiff farmers) as producers of wheat.”
Case closed in the critics’ eyes. Lawyer weasel words may thrive on subtlety but it was a week during which CWB executives were claiming Strahl was overstepping his bounds because the 1998 Canadian Wheat Board Act amendments made the board responsible to producers through their directors. This claim of fidelity to Parliament was the smoking gun in a Big Lie.
So the week went.
The CWB descent into partisan politics won it no favours with the Conservatives but nothing could have.
The pro-monopoly result of the directors’ elections made the Conservatives look out-of-touch with western farm opinion.
And all sides are stuck with a flawed Liberal CWB Act rewrite in 1998 that gives all sides comfort and no side satisfaction – a board with a majority farmer-elected board that still allows the government to appoint directors, including the CEO, and still has the board responsible to Parliament.
It is as though the Liberals believed the board could be half pregnant.
