Responsibility

Some editorialists have adopted the line of “adapt or die” when it comes to the Wheat Board.  It is not up to the farmer-elected Directors of the Wheat Board or the majority of farmers who support the CWB to make Minister Ritz’s fantasy of a dual market possible.  Former Minister Chuck Strahl’s own marketing panel was correct to say it is “not possible.”  So this is really a form of blaming the victims of Minister Ritz and his cronies.

The list of things the CWB’s single desk makes possible, from price premiums, to equitable treatment of smaller Canadian processors, to providing terminal space for producer cars, is long and extensive.  To provide those benefits without the single desk, to farmers and their customers, would involve so much government intervention in the economy it would make a Marxist faint.

Once the single desk is gone, farmers will have lost control of their grain to the private trade. And once again farmers will be dependent on more or less the same five giant corporations they were in the 1920s.  That is reality.

So those who want the single desk ended need to take responsibility for what may come to pass.  The assertion that pro-CWB farmers should be ‘realistic’ is at bottom either disingenuous or dishonest.