Canadian Wheat Board – a longtime Conservative target – halts Harper government in court

Ideologically-driven fight against Board led to charges government acted illegally in stripping its powers.

OTTAWA, August 1, 2007 [a Harper Index/HarperIndex.ca update of an article originally posted June 12]: The Harper government has hit a roadblock in its attempt to strip the single desk marketing of barley from the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) when Federal Court Judge Dolores Hansen said the government overstepped its authority in trying to end the monopoly through a simple cabinet order. The CWB went to federal court in Calgary arguing that Harper's government has acted illegally and exceeded its authority by introducing the changes through regulation rather than legislation. The judge agreed. The CWB also argued the ultimate decision to remove a grain from its marketing jurisdiction is reserved to farmers and that only Parliament - not the government by itself - can make the changes required to implement farmers' decision.

There is much more at stake here than a battle of lawyers. Studies indicate that the farmer-controlled Board provides Western barley growers with a marketing advantage worth $60 million a year – money that flows into their pockets rather than into shareholder returns for multinational grain companies who might otherwise market the crop.

The June 12 announcement by Agriculture Minister Chuck Strahl that the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) will be stripped of its exclusive marketing authority for barley on August 1 fulfills a long, vindictive and ideological campaign waged by Stephen Harper and the Conservatives.

The CWB had a government mandate for decades to market Canadian grains on behalf of Western farmers. The CWB took no profit from the sales. Instead, it pooled the returns and redistributed them to farmers. Independent studies undertaken by agricultural economists dating back to 1997 show that farmers were far better off marketing their grain through the CWB than they otherwise would have been. They earned higher returns every year, varying from an additional $530 to $655 million annually.

The CWB has been targeted by the giant multinational grain trading companies, the railroads, the Prairie grain handling companies and the right wing farm groups associated with them. That coalition convinced the Mulroney government to unilaterally remove oats from the CWB's jurisdiction in 1989.

When it arrived on the scene, the Reform Party engaged in a crusade to achieve an entirely free market system for agriculture. This policy included dismantling the CWB and the orderly marketing systems in place for dairy products, poultry and eggs. Stephen Harper was a key figure in the Reform Party's 1991 policy conference in Saskatoon, and he helped Preston Manning to turn back grassroots resolutions calling for a continuing government role in agriculture.

In 1997, Liberal Agriculture Minister Ralph Goodale was pressured into holding a farmer referendum regarding the CWB's authority to sell barley. The farmers voted 2-1 to retain the Board as the exclusive marketer of their barley.

The CWB also came under increasing attack by European and American corporate interests and governments at the World Trade Organization and elsewhere. The Board had been a Crown Corporation, so Ralph Goodale moved in 1997 to have it become arms-length from government, with 10 of 15 members of its board of directors to be elected by farmers.

This change did not allay the critics or halt the attacks. American companies launched 14 separate actions alleging that the CWB is an unfair trader, but tribunals ruled in the Board's favour every time. The Reform Party, and later the Canadian Alliance continued their domestic attacks while the Americans mounted challenges.

Soon after he chose to resign as an MP in January 1997, Stephen Harper became president of the secretive, right-wing National Citizens' Coalition. The NCC focused its most strident attacks on medicare, unions and the Wheat Board. In a letter to the Brandon Sun in 1999, Harper described the CWB as a "draconian wheat monopoly [that] for years has relied on force and fear to exist." The NCC poured money into third-party attack ads against the CWB during elections for its farmer-controlled board.

By 2004, Harper had graduated from the NCC, won the leadership of the Canadian Alliance and orchestrated its takeover of the foundering Progressive Conservatives. In the campaign that year, Harper promised that, if elected, he would change the Board. He lost that election but he made the same promise in his victorious 2006 campaign.

Harper planned to emasculate the CWB by regulation but could not ignore polls indicating that nine farmers out of 10 wanted a plebiscite. A majority of the CWB's directors also opposed the government's autocratic plans to dismantle the Board by fiat, a position echoed by Inky Mark, a rural Conservative MP from Manitoba.

Harper and Strahl responded by issuing a gag order on the board of directors and firing CEO Adrian Measner, who had worked at the CWB for 30 years. The government then orchestrated an intentionally divisive referendum farm activists called "bogus." The vote would be about the CWB's authority over barley (grown mainly in Alberta), but not about wheat (grown mainly in Manitoba and Saskatchewan). The renewed attack on wheat will be left for another day. The questions were loaded and manipulative, quite in contrast to Harper's insistence, when he was the Reform Party's constitutional critic in 1995, that the Parti Quebecois provide a clear and concise question for the Quebec referendum.

Conservative MPs campaigned aggressively during the CWB referendum, while the Board was bound by a government-imposed gag order and unable to defend itself. There were no third-party spending limits. Major farm organizations were not allowed to scrutinize the ballot-counting procedure. Despite appearance of blatant manipulation and loaded questions, 38 percent of farmers voted to retain the CWB' s existing marketing arrangements, but the Conservatives declared total victory.

The American grain industry is delighted. The former president of the National Association of Wheat Growers said that if the CWB loses its single desk selling authority, "US wheat would be more competitive in markets such as Asia, the Middle East and Central America, where the two countries go head to head."

For Canadian farmers, the outlook is less promising. The Friends of the Canadian Wheat Board told a Winnipeg news conference that it will go to federal court to have Strahl's order-in-council removing barley from CWB jurisdiction declared null and void. The challenge is being led by 12 barley-producing farmers from across the Prairies.

Related individuals, organizations and significant events
National Citizens Coalition (NCC)
Reform Party

Harper Conservative vs. Public Values Frame
  Free market / Undemocratic, corporate, US interests
  Government-controlled / Democracy, farmer-owned
  Support for farmers / Lost income
  Plebiscite / Bullying

Links and sources
  Empowering Canadian Farmers in the Marketplace, Hon Wayne Easter, MP, July 2005
  Farming the System, Barry K Wilson, Western Producer Prairie Books, 1990
  Preston Manning and the Reform Party, Murray Dobbin, Lorimer, 1991
  Stephen Harper letter, Brandon Sun, January 13, 1999
  Submission to Agriculture & Agri-food Canada, Hon Wayne Easter, MP, May 18, 2007
  Wheat Board can keep barley monopoly, court rules
  US Watches CWB Drama, Western Producer, March 8, 2007
  Canadian Wheat Board
  Farmers vote to end wheat board's barley monopoly, CBC News, May 28, 2007
  Save My CWB

Posted: June 12, 2007

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