By Glenn Tait,
The StarPhoenix
September 10, 2012
Re: Stuck in past (SP, Sept. 4). In this response to a letter from Kyle Korneychuk, Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz – to use parliamentary lingo – was being a “stranger to the truth” when he said that Prime Minister Stephen Harper set a precedent by always standing up for farmers.
Harper didn’t stand up for us when he unilaterally fired the duly elected Canadian Wheat Board directors and destroyed our organization without a vote. He walked all over us, just as he said he would.
To say the CWB does what it used to do is also a reconstruction of the facts. The current “CWB” didn’t do anything previously – it’s a new entity. It may work out of the same office and have some of the same people (for now), but what used to be is gone.
Ritz’s most common piece of misdirection is more of a sin of omission. To claim that farmers “embraced” the end of the single desk implies that all or most of us wanted this. To be wholly truthful, Ritz should say that some farmers, the big grain companies and Conservative ideologues wanted it.
At least 80 per cent of farmers wanted the wheat board to remain in existence, and a minimum of 62 per cent wanted it to remain as a single desk.
I suppose that 18 per cent gap is made up of blind believers and lazy thinkers who refuse to understand how a single desk system works.
We farmers owned the wheat board. We controlled it, profited by it and it was worth more than $15 billion. Harper smashed it. It’s despicable
Video link
