What’s the Wheat Board and why do farmers need it back?
(February 23, 2016) First, let’s be clear. The Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) was not a monopoly, or supply management, nor was it a socialist institution imposed on the powerless west to help a bunch of illiterate immigrant farmers as some would have you believe.
The CWB was more than just its office building, rail cars and grain ships. The CWB was the most successful of capitalist institutions designed to work for prairie grain farmers in a globalized economy and compete with the other four grain companies that trade essentially all the other grain in the world. The only reason it could do so was because it was the exclusive dealer of prairie wheat and barley.
The CWB had the legal authority to be the only seller of western Canadian wheat and barley for export and domestic human consumption. While some call it a franchise and others call it an exclusive dealership, most called it the “single-desk.” That meant all the grain processing industries in Canada and around the world who wanted quality assured wheat and barley for export or domestic human consumption had to purchase from the CWB. Because the CWB presented a united front to the buyers on behalf of western grain growers we had market power to get the maximum value of our crops.
Compare that to now where farmers must go cap in hand to the big international grain companies hoping they are getting a better price than their neighbours or hire grain brokers to do it for them. The CWB gave farmers 90% of world price or more while now we are lucky to get 60%, a loss to western Canada of at least $3.25 billion each year.
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Our single-desk CWB was something uniquely Canadian which has been copied and renewed by others all over the world including in the US. It provided quality assurance to customers giving western farmers an unrivaled international reputation for honesty and delivering premium quality grain. For many years it was among Canada’s top ten net-foreign exchange earners. Yet it never made a dime in profit and most years cost its farmer-owners nothing to operate. It was the only grain marketer in the world that published an annual independently audited statement that laid out exactly what it got for selling grain and what it spent for doing that.
Many competitors hated the CWB and used the US government to launch 14 unsuccessful international court challenges against the Board, usually claiming it was undercutting prices, claims which turned out to be completely false. This is also exactly what the Auditor General of Canada found when she was invited, by the farmers elected to run the CWB, to do a full audit.
There are two kinds of grain farmers on the prairies. The majority are the successful ones who were supportive of the CWB. The benefit farmers gained from the CWB was proportional so the larger the farmer the more they gained. Successful smaller farmers also supported the CWB on principle, although many of them were too busy to actually worry about the details.
The other kinds of farmers are the minority. Often embittered, this group is usually heavily in debt, often insolvent, attempting to grow their way out of debt by borrowing more money to rent more land, equipment, and inputs to grow their operations. They can be described as the “know how, but don’t know why” group.
The farmer-owned single-desk Wheat Board took an undifferentiated product grown by thousands of farmers that is almost worthless unless it is amalgamated into the 30 and 60 thousand metric tonne lot sizes customers want; branded it, promoted it, and then sold it for premium prices around the world. To put that in context, a typical rail car holds a mere 90 tonnes of wheat and the CWB arranged to send some 350,000 of them containing identity-preserved wheat and barley to port each year. The CWB returned the money to the people who produced the grain through a price pooling system that made sure all farmers received the full value of the crop over the year regardless of when they delivered their grain for sale.
Prairie farmers delivered their grain to 326 inland terminals across the prairies. Then the CWB contracted with the railways to move the grain to deep water ports. Just a handful of those inland terminals would store the whole of Ontario and Quebec’s annual wheat production.
The CWB chartered the ships to carry the grain, and made sure the ships got filled on time and on budget. In the 14 years the farmers ran the CWB it never paid net costs for late shipments and never bungled a sale. Last year, without the CWB, late fees (demurrage) topped $75 million. 
In CWB directors elections typically 80% of the Director positions went to farmers in favour of the single-desk. Now that the results of the experiment comparing the CWB to the speculative market are in, even the debt-blinkered crowd is starting to see that 90% of any number is better than 60%. No doubt their bankers are starting to understand that too.
We need the single desk back.
Parliamentary Dance
(February 18, 2016) On Tuesday we were treated to the usual Parliamentary Question Period dance. Unlike those classic dance scenes in costume drama movies like Pride and Prejudice where the whole community works in synchronization, Question Period is more like crazed zombies interrupting a square dance while the Speaker of the House tries to keep order.
It was like that when the Leader of the NDP rose to ask the Agriculture Minister Lawrence MacAulay when he would re-establish the Canadian Wheat Board.
Mr. Mulcair was doing his job by raising a very serious issue for western grain farmers. The evidence is now in that the private grain companies have taken $6.5 billion from grain farmers in the last two years. As usual in Question Period the Conservatives were heckling. It was not much of a surprise to see the former Harper Ag Minister sneering via Twitter about the effrontery of western grain farmers wanting natural justice to be done by restoring what was seized from them without due compensation or the vote he promised.
It would not have been unreasonable to expect Minister MacAulay, whose Prime Minister is already noted for un-muzzling scientists and promising evidence based policies, to respond positively to making it so farmers get back the roughly 60% of their grain cheque now being taken by the private oligarchs.
One sure sign the grown-ups are back in power is the ease with which the Agriculture Minister confounded the questioners on both sides of the issue. Yes, he said, the Wheat Board had been sold – apparently reminding the Conservatives that for this Minister a contract is a contract and he would not be seizing assets, no matter how they were disposed of, from G3 which is the combo of Saudi Arabia and Bunge one of the world’s giant private grain companies. But that is really all he said.
In the past, when confronted with the same economic structure as we see today both the Liberals and the Conservatives tried every conceivable combination of regulations and reforms to make the defective international grain market work without bankrupting western farmers. After many things were tried and failed the single desk was the only thing that remained viable. The Wheat Board’s marketing responsibility was renewed every five years by Parliament. Finally in 1967 all parties unanimously endorsed and supported a permanent single-desk, orderly marketing organization known as the Canadian Wheat Board. It was the only way for farmers to have a level playing field in the international market.
Since then nothing has changed and the evidence is the same today as back then. The only question is how long will it take for Minister MacAulay and the Liberals to look at the evidence? How many farmers must get hurt? How many domestic processors will be driven out of business by subsidized off-shore production and how long will Canadians tolerate eating bread and pasta from grain grown in parts of the world that are amongst the most heavily polluted on earth?
If we are talking about evidence based policy, a new single-desk marketing agency can be created. We can name it whatever we want. What we care about is that it gets premium prices for Canadian grain and supports local food.
Family Day hits keep coming for prairie farmers
(February 16, 2016) Another family day domino fell this week with the report that a major Canadian food retailer was replacing pasta manufactured with prairie durum with pasta imported from Turkey of all places.
It should be remembered that with the single-desk Wheat Board pretty much all the pasta consumed in Canada was made with prairie durum. The Wheat Board had a policy of keeping competition among durum purchasers alive by equalizing freight costs for processors.
This meant more wheat and durum was milled and made into flour and pasta on the prairies than in the same grain growing areas of the United States. It also meant that the big eastern flour and pasta plants in Ontario used prairie wheat. It was a very profitable premium market for prairie farmers and took somewhere around 20% of our annual production of wheat and durum wheat.
This Wheat Board policy meant that essentially all the bread, pasta, and most of the beer in Canada was made with prairie wheat and barley. As this organization warned in 2011 “the end of the Wheat Board means the end of local food.”
Now the Wheat Board is gone along with its policies encouraging local processing. Combine this with very cheap ocean freight and it is apparently more economic for eastern retailers to buy Turkish pasta than it is to purchase locally produced pasta made with prairie durum. Ocean freight on 4,800 nautical miles from Turkey is apparently cheaper than dealing with the uncertain and unreliable private trade to acquire grain 3,300 miles away on the southern Canadian prairies.
Some Canadian pasta processors have complained this Turkish pasta is subsidized, and that may well be the case. However that ultra cheap ocean freight may also mean that sourcing wheat from the Ukraine, which is a mere 600 nautical miles away is now more economic than importing even heavily discounted prairie durum.
Speaking of Canada’s southern prairies, it was three years ago, on Family Day, that the giant American firm, Archer Daniels Midland announced it was closing its flour mill at Medicine Hat, in the center of prairie wheat country, and consolidating operations in Calgary.
The family day hits from the abusive and short-sighted Harper regime just keep on coming for Canadian families and the prairie farmers who work to feed them.
Some farmer funded Commissions living large
(January 25, 2016) After Harper and Ritz killed the Wheat Board their ideological cousins in Alberta and Saskatchewan set up new farmer-funded Commissions to look after farmers’ interests. Three years ago Alberta created the Alberta Wheat Commission (AWC) while Saskatchewan’s Wheat Development Commission (SWDC) has been up and running for a bit more than two years as has the Saskatchewan Barley Development Commission (SBDC). All of them were modelled on the venerable Alberta Barley Commission (ABC).
Another farmer funded trip – May not be exactly as illustrated
Manitoba took a more economical route by establishing a combined wheat and barley commission in mid-2014. It has not been running long enough to establish a pattern of expenditures. So for now, we can focus on comparing the corporate cultures of the four check-off organizations in Saskatchewan and Alberta. Since the Alberta Wheat Commission’s (AWC) 2015 audited statement is not available as of January 21, this article is based on the 2014 Audited Statements.
Readers may recall that in both Alberta and Saskatchewan every farmer who grows wheat and barley pays a production tax (innocuously called a “levy”) which is given to the relevant Commission. Alberta farmers paid the AWC $6 million, and the ABC $2.7 million for a total of just over $8.7 million in 2014. Saskatchewan farmers paid the SWDC $6.3 million and the SBDC $820 thousand for a total of $7.2 million dollars that year.
In Saskatchewan each levy paying farmer receives a ballot in the mail to elect the Commission’s Board of Directors. On the other hand, in Alberta all it takes to get elected is a car load of friends showing up at a remote meeting – elections are not conducted with mail-in ballots so that they are accessible to every farmer who pays the levy. It comes as no surprise there are stark contrasts between the democratically elected Commissions in Saskatchewan and Alberta’s crony models.
Living Large: Staff
According to its audited statement Alberta’s Wheat Commission supports a staff complement of 12 people, five of whom are shared with the Alberta Barley Commission which has an additional 4 staff of its own. The Wheat Commission spent $539 thousand on salaries while the Barley Commission spent $764 thousand.
In contrast the 2014 Saskatchewan Wheat Commission had just four staff and spent a mere $156 thousand on wages and benefits while SBDC spent $89 thousand on service contracts for the equivalent of just one and a quarter full time staff.
Living Large: Publications
Much of the Alberta Wheat Commission staff seems to be devoted to telling growers just how great the AWC is with a ‘grower relations’ person in addition to two communications people, one of whom is also given the title of ‘events coordinator.’
In the AWC’s audit if you add up the lines for Communications $296,278.00, Meeting $169,588.00, and Administrative $161,712.00, these amount to $627,578.00 or about 20% of their Budget Expenditures. If you add in the very broad Market Development category of $813,373.00 a whopping 40% of the AWC’s expenditures go to these items before a single seed is planted or scientist funded.
Presumably a good time is had by all, but just in case farmers footing the bills missed going on that last Asian junket the AWC/ABC produces a glossy magazine published four times a year. It costs a tidy $60,000.00 per issue plus the staff time of both a managing editor and a sales and production coordinator. Advertising off-sets only about 8% of the magazine’s cost. At this point farmers paying the AWC/ABC check offs might be wondering if paying for this magazine and effectively subsidizing companies advertising to them is really the best use of their money.
This reflects the Alberta Conservative tradition of lavish spending on propaganda. Under Premier Ralph Klein and his successor administrations the government’s “Public Affairs Bureau” censored all Government-issue communications from Cabinet Ministers down to the lowliest dog catcher. Dubbed variously “the Ministry of Truth” or “Edmonton’s Pravda,” it was said to cost more and have more staff than the same department in the White House for the President of the United States.
So it is no surprise the corporate culture of the Klein era carries over into the Alberta Wheat and Barley Commissions. In fact the top check-off commissions in Alberta took a total of $31 million dollars from Alberta farmers in 2014.
Contrast this with the lean but not mean staff at the Saskatchewan Wheat Development Commission. In 2014 the SWDC Board of Directors increased their staff from three to four with the hiring of a Research Program Manager. A good hire since the whole point of these commissions was to fund agronomic research.
SWDC publishes three simple newsletters a year heavy on text and agronomic information about things like the development of wheat cultivars resistant to fusarium and evidence-based responses to economic and customer quality concerns.
Alison Redford
Living Large: Travel
Speaking of Alberta corporate culture, the dizzying international travel of the Alberta Wheat Commission people reminds this writer of the Alison Redford era in Alberta – except she mostly flew around Alberta. In 2014 AWC staff and directors traveled to Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, England, Spain, Italy, Germany, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates. Perhaps this travel schedule explains why the Alberta Wheat Commission spent less than one third of its expenditures on research.
In contrast the wild bunch at the Saskatchewan Wheat Development Commission toured research facilities like the Crop Development Centre at the University of Saskatchewan, and the Kernan Crop Research Farm in Saskatoon. They also took a southern trip but it was to the Semiarid Prairie Agricultural Research Centre near Swift Current, Saskatchewan. This shows the SWDC is laying the ground work for supporting real world research into wheat at recognized scientific institutions on the prairies.
Without a complete house cleaning and forensic audit of the activities of the various Alberta check-off commissions, it would at least be refreshing to see the new Alberta Government revamp the Alberta commissions and enforce democratic elections which are open to all farmers not just the ones who have the free time to travel to distant meetings to get elected by their friends.
A parting gift
(January 23, 2016) I got the news this week that one of my favorite publications is no more. G3, the joint venture between Saudi Arabia and Bunge, which acquired the hard assets of the farmer-controlled Wheat Board, has announced they are sending out their last Market Outlook Newsletter.
Written by the remainder of the Wheat Board’s marketing staff, this is the wonderful newsletter that in February of 2014 blew the whistle on the private grain companies ripping farmers off for billions of dollars between the Vancouver port price and the prices they were paying farmers on the prairies. CWBA published an analysis of this, issued a news release and has updated the material from time to time and will be again.
A few weeks after we issued our news release, Dr. Richard Gray, an eminent agricultural economist from the University of Saskatchewan came to the same conclusions and issued a damning report which he updated in August of 2015 showing the grain trade took an extra $5 to $6.7 billion over the past two crop years from western farmers as excess profits.
The last issue of the Market Outlook Newsletter again showed the integrity and dedication to prairie farmers typical of the CWB’s employees as they put a small gem into their farewell Newsletter confirming once again just how critical the single-desk and orderly marketing really is for western Canada’s farmers.
Look at the gem I bolded and underlined in the quote below. CWB staff has again let the truth of the matter slip out:
“The weak Canadian dollar has sheltered some of the sluggishness in the grains and oilseeds futures markets. A similar trajectory has been experienced by many of our competitors for grains and oilseeds export market share. In fact, farmers in the Black Sea region and South America have seen locally denominated prices reach near or absolute record levels.”
Seeing this we must ask: are western Canadian elevator prices at the same record highs we see in other countries with declining currency values? They certainly should be with the Canadian dollar now down by 30%.
However, the answer is a resounding “no.” Translating our prices into US dollars shows we are now getting depression era prices for our grains. Somebody isn’t getting paid all that they’re owed and you can bet it is not the grain companies.
So thank you to the anonymous CWB employee for having the integrity to once again tell the truth.
Their final news letter quote said: “There is no real ending” and western farmers will not let the story stop here.
2015 – The year we cut off ideology
(January 13, 2016) Over the past year Canadians cut off a number of things, most notable of which were neo-conservative governments in Ottawa and Alberta. For some the shell shock has hardly worn off.
2015 also marks four years since the Harper administration created mighty and lasting grudges on the prairies by killing the Canadian Wheat Board in an undemocratic and legally dubious process. At this distance a number of things have become painfully clear:
– The farmers’ share of the international grain price is down by at least half and likely more. Agricultural economist Dr. Richard Gray of the University of Saskatchewan has published several papers demonstrating that farmers ought to have at least 50% more dollars from their grain sales than the middlemen of the private trade are giving them.
– The annual audits of rail performance carried out by the Canadian Transportation Agency in the 2013/14 and 2014/15 crop years show the claim of the grain trade that poor railway performance is causing high basis levels is false. In fact the low prices farmers see are really the result of excess profits taken by the grain trade.
– Prairie farmers have gone from being major exporters of grain with direct relations to end-use customers through the Wheat Board to being held captive in a domestic market by just a few giant grain handling companies and their agents.
– Canadian farm debt has now topped $90 billion dollars. Many economists thought when we broke the $50 billion mark that level was unsustainable. Anyone looking at the amount of unsold machinery sitting on dealer’s lots across western Canada or reading of the further consolidation of farm equipment dealers and manufacturers knows something is broken.
– It is not possible to remove more than half of the wheat and barley revenue from western Canadian farmers, double the farm debt level, and have the west remain as prosperous as it has been.
– The real grain price situation for farmers got substantially worse in 2015. Grain is priced in US dollars and because the Canadian dollar has lost 30% of its value the domestic grain price for western farmers should have increased accordingly – if there was really such a thing as a market – but it did not.
Instead the price for number one wheat in Manitoba is effectively $4 US a bushel, a price not seen for decades, and if you adjust for inflation, it is a price closer to great depression levels than ever before.
Free market farmers touted modest Canadian price increases as proof things got better without the CWB. The numbers show they are living in a fool’s paradise. As Dr. Gray observed of 2014/15:
“Yes, (western) farmers had a good year, but that doesn’t take away from the fact they could’ve been several billion dollars better off.”
Certainly the results of planting rather than cutting off ideology are still plain to see in the Alberta Check-off commissions. At last report the Alberta Wheat Commission was planning to investigate what grain was actually selling for at port. Something they announced with much fanfare last year as well.
As said here before, the actual sales price the private trade gets from end-use customers are amongst the most closely guarded secrets of the grain trade. These sales prices have only a casual relationship to port prices, and reports of port prices are unreliable at best. I can only assume the worthies on the Alberta Wheat Commission have been watching too many James Bond movies and plan to skulk around grain company headquarters listening at keyholes.
So in many ways 2015 was a recap of 2014 with the usual suspects’ ignoring the loss of money to prairie farmers and the ominous growth of farm debt. We can only hope 2016 sees the continued cutting off of the ideology planted by the Harper regime over the past nine years.
Optimism for 2016
(January 1, 2016) This Canadian New Year brings much hope for western grain farmers. The Prime Minister has promised to demolish the Harper legacy “brick by brick” and has already started to do so by un-muzzling Federal scientists. His administration is even looking at re-opening the prison farms which the Harper Conservatives closed with their typical contempt for cooperative rural values and skills.
A joyful graphic celebrating this reminded me of the courageous Manitoba university student, Bridgett DePape who used her position as a Senate page to hold up a “Stop Harper” sign in 2011.
Alberta farmers say “Stop Harper” – respect our vote
One of my favorite pictures on our Facebook page is of farmers in east central Alberta taking time out from loading wheat into their producer rail cars to do the same thing a few weeks later. Courage and integrity can wear many clothes, from the finery of a Senate page to work clothes on a dusty rail siding.
In the 1950s when there were a lot more people in rural Canada a favorite scam of American hucksters was to travel to the small towns and farms on the southern Canadian prairies offering to put a petrochemical sealer on home roofs. The sealer was usually a mixture of used motor oil, grease and a bit of saw dust which disappeared not long after the money and the Yankee hucksters were gone. People soon figured out the scam and the Canadian border was closed to the scammers from the south.
Canadians, like Albertans have finally expressed their judgement on the equally mendacious scammers of the American tea-party variety who managed to highjack the Progressive Conservative Party and even our country for a time. We now expect both our Prime Minister and the new Alberta Premier to dismantle this legacy brick by brick. As Premier Notley remarked in her New Year’s Address, “elections have to mean something.”
Last year the farmers of the CWB Alliance voted to reaffirm the mandate of this organization to work towards the restoration of a single-desk grain marketing agency for western Canada. With the results of the Federal election and the election of a strong and stable NDP government in Alberta that goal now appears much closer than it did this time last year. Progressive Liberals and the NDP have always supported the single-desk Wheat Board and even Saskatchewan’s Conservative premier supports single-desk marketing when it comes to potash.
Restoring orderly marketing and Canada’ place as an honest food supplier will not be easy, and the Liberals will be bombarded with many bogus arguments. However we know that sooner or later the facts are always friendly to orderly marketing though a single-desk whether it is for commodities like wheat, almonds, or potash. Our biggest issue will be effectively engaging with the new administrations in Ottawa and elsewhere. I know there is no shortage of courage or will in the farm community for the job ahead.
Producing poverty
(December 30, 2015) Earlier this year a think tank held out the carrot of population growth to encourage prairie farmers to go further into debt to purchase crop inputs and technology to increase production. I was reminded of this again a few weeks ago when a couple of colleagues sent me a note from a private grain trader claiming “Canadian families save 58% on their weekly grocery bills thanks to modern crop protection and plant biotechnology tools.”
As my colleagues pointed out, this is nonsense. There is less than six cents worth of wheat in a loaf of bread, so even if the price of wheat doubled bread prices should not really increase. Four bucks worth of barley makes 400 bottles of beer and so on.
Note: since the 2011 killing of the Wheat Board, the farmers’ share of the wheat price has been cut in half
The price of organic produce in the store is only marginally higher than conventionally produced food yet the organic farmer is paid a premium of two to three times more compared to what a conventional producer gets for the same crop. So the claim all those expensive crop input products and genetically modified grains like canola, soy beans, and corn are saving consumers money is dubious at best.
Market power plays an important role here. Organic producers are still few in number and their overall production is strongly exceeded by consumer demand for organically produced food. As a result, food processors and retailers are prepared to take very slightly lower profits and pay organic producers substantially more.
For conventional farmers the market power they once enjoyed through cooperatives and marketing boards has been stripped away over the years by the relentless demands of the oligarchs of the private grain, chemical, and seed trade to generate ever higher profits for their shareholders. Now the same oligarchs are pushing to extend their power over both consumers and farmers by controlling the genetics of all food crops.
With the signing of the UPOV91 treaty by the Harper government and the continual pressure on farmer-elected commodity commissions to privatize public plant breeding, not to mention the wholesale destruction of Agriculture Canada’s research farms, it would appear the oligarchs are getting closer than ever to eliminating all farmer market power and along with it any choice consumers and farmers have over how food is developed, grown, and marketed.
It is now virtually impossible for western farmers to grow canola which has not been genetically modified, and the trend seems to be to extend this situation to all other grains as well. Ultimately, this is yet another cost imposed on both farmers and consumers and another profit center for the giant agro-chemical-seed companies.
In spite of the self serving nonsense about feeding the world that comes from the private trade, neither farmers nor consumers benefit from either extra production or the astronomical profits now taken by the oligarchs who own and control the food system thanks to the neglect, ignorance, or sheer venality of successive governments.
The National Farmers Union published a report documenting all this in very substantial detail. You can view the summary here.
Or you can download the complete report.
Mega train down under
(December 23, 2015) Among many important things, the holiday season is a time for good cheer and general amusement. So with that in mind, readers, especially prairie grain farmers, may find this breathless BBC report of a “mega” Australian grain train pulling a whole 73 cars of wheat grown near Narrabri, New South Wales to the coastal port of Newcastle amusing – not the least for its “gee whiz – ain’t those Aussies amazing” tone.
A friend of mine who raises wheat near Regina laughed and said “I see five or six trains a day past my place that are easily twice that long.” A reminder that western Canada lives or dies by its grains and trains.
Blake, Sk
But the BBC report is sobering as well. That Aussie train was carrying wheat competing with our prairie wheat for the lucrative Asian market. However it was heading downhill over flattish terrain for a mere 400 km to deep water. Compare that with our own grain moving almost 1,800 km from Regina to deep water at Vancouver. In contrast to permanently temperate New South Wales in Australia, western Canadian sourced grain has to cross the prairies, where occasionally temperatures can be bracing, then climb over and through seven mountain ranges to Vancouver.
There are less than 300 nautical miles difference between Vancouver and Newcastle, Australia to Kobe, Japan, so the critical difference in transportation costs comes down to the huge difference in shipping by rail to deep water between the prairies and Australia’s wheat growing area.
This extra distance is a cost disadvantage, and now provides the private trade with an excuse to pay lower prices to prairie farmers. When prairie farmers owned and marketed wheat through the single-desk Canadian Wheat Board, this disadvantage of distance was more than compensated for because the Wheat Board carved out an international niche market based on the reliable supply of high-quality grain direct to end-use customers who paid premium prices which the Wheat Board passed back to prairie farmers.
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Prairie grain is no longer owned by prairie farmers thanks to the end of the single-desk Wheat Board. That grain is now owned by the same giant companies that own Australian wheat and premium prices for western Canadian farmers are long gone. So when it comes to making money “who ya gonna call” if you are one of the ABCD group of companies and you own and effectively control all the tradable grain on the planet?
The answer to that is pretty clear. The ABCD group of companies are perfectly happy to take western Canadian grain off the hands of farmers, but at a much greater discount than ever before simply because they now can. As predicted by both the former Wheat Board and its many supporters, western Canada is becoming a residual supplier of wheat to the world market and that is reflected in our smaller share of the world price.
So in the spirit of Charismas we can only recommend reading The Ritz who killed the Wheat Board to your farmer colleagues, especially those in dairy, since grain farmers already know how it comes out.
Alberta experience demonstrates need for De-Harperfication
Broken bond of trust between rural Alberta and government not healed by NDP election
(December 1, 2015) Readers from outside Alberta may be amazed at the tempest being generated over the Alberta NDP government’s move to protect Alberta’s farmers and ranchers from ambulance-chasing lawyers and private disability insurance providers. What could there possibly be to dislike about Workers’ Compensation (WCB) legislation (Bill 6 – “Enhanced Protection for Farm and Ranch Workers Act”) which not only provides people employed by farmers with disability insurance but makes their farmer and rancher bosses immune from lawsuits?
Nothing at all really, aside from a few technical details easily ironed out in the regulations as they have been in other provinces. But that has not stopped a swell of outrage and a well orchestrated protest fanned by fears being spread by extreme right-wing groups associated with the almost as extreme Wildrose opposition.
However, the reason this nonsense has so much traction is an entirely justified distrust created by the decades of abuse of process by the Government of Alberta aimed at rural landowners.
The well-documented instance where supposedly impartial government energy regulators hired spies to snoop on landowners, violate their lawyer-client confidentiality, and pass the information on to private energy companies is only one example among many.
In this context wild and inaccurate fears of heavy-handed government inspectors counting the hours children spend gathering eggs for grandma or farm and ranch husbands and wives having to register for WCB coverage and being forced to knock off work after eight hours during calving or harvest season have credibility with rural Albertans and have been widely circulated.
However the real villains in this whole debacle are the neo-conservatives that have long found a home in Alberta’s bureaucracy and later infested Ottawa under the Harper regime. The drafting of this legislation and communication about it was left in the hands of Alberta government bureaucrats. Now there can be little doubt they certainly bungled, and perhaps sabotaged the NDP’s efforts and created much fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the rural community as a result. Why else would they have provided such scatter-gun legislation with information about it spread across 10 wordy and almost incomprehensible fact-sheets spread across the province’s web site?
They left the new Occupational Health and Safety Minister Lori Sigurdson and Agriculture Minister Oneil Carlier spinning in the wind on this one. So there is a lesson here for the new Liberal administration in Ottawa which is as valid today as it was in the 16th century when Niccolò Machiavelli advised a new administration to swing the ax widely when it first took power.
This type of bungling by the Notley NDP should be a sobering lesson to the new Trudeau administration that they immediately need to swing a wide ax across the top level of the civil service and the appointed Boards and Commissions if they expect the machinery of government to run smoothly for Canadians.
The likeable but badly stumbling Notley government has provided an object lesson to Ottawa Liberals on the importance of the de-Harperfication of the mechanisms of the state. Until this happens, Canadians, like Albertans, will not be able to have confidence that their governments are operating impartially and their democratically expressed preferences are not being sandbagged at every step by an illegitimate cadre of ideological zealots ensconced in the public sector pretending to be civil servants.
Video link
