Demarchy

I agree with the Conservatives. And I’m not being faceitious.

Cut to a shot of me and Gerry Ritz doing a flying high-five.

First off, the bill is not exactly as firebrand Dipper Pat Martin described it in the house.

Mr. Speaker, coming from a failed ostrich jockey, I do not know what the member knows about beaver fever.

One thing is clear, the government actually has no idea what will happen when it does away with the Wheat Board. It is legislating away a $6 billion a year successful company without a business plan, without a cost-benefit analysis, without any evidence whatsoever that prairie farmers will actually be better off. If the government has such documentation, why does it not table it in the House?

If the government will allow government MPs who are in a conflict of interest to vote, why will it not let prairie farmers vote on how they want to market their grain themselves?

While I have no idea what an ostrich jockey is, I’m sure that Gerry Ritz (who he was referring to) was very good at it.

As a sidebar, Andrew Scheer had to intervene on that one,

Order. I think some of these metaphors involving animals may be causing a little disorder in the House. I would urge all hon. members to try to avoid using them so that we can get through question period.

Scheer also had to intervene today due to some unfortunate metaphors involving fruit. 

But that’s neither here nor there. The point is that the New Democrats are really blowing this one out of the water. The Conservatives, however, aren’t much better. Agriculture minister Gerry Ritz promulgated in the House,

The opposition will stop at nothing to try to intimidate farmers, whether they are sitting in the House or out in western Canada, not to move ahead with marketing freedom, but of course they do not represent them.

He then fist bumped Kelly Block and shotgunned a beer while the Tory caucus started cheering “STRONG MAN-DATE. STRONG MAN-DATE” until Vic Toews got uncomfortable hearing about man dates and shut the whole thing down.

What is the Canadian Wheat Board? 

The Board is exactly that: a group of folks, most of whom are elected by the farmers, who sells Western Canadian wheat. Essentially, it’s monopoly capitalism. The idea goes that the board can sell the wheat for a better price if each farmer doesn’t have to worry about the business aspect of farming. So the Board buys the grain from the farmers, and undertakes selling it. If the profit is big enough, the dividends return to the farmers. If the revenue is too little, the government will make up the difference.

The farmers are probably getting a better price than if they were all to be independent or if they had to try and sell their goods to massive Agrobusiness. 

But is that good enough?

What are the Tories planning?

There tends to be a conception that the Conservatives are just going to blow away the Wheat Board and let farmers scrape together a living from the cold, calculating free market. That’s not entirely true.

Here’s what the act (Bill C-18) says,

42. (1) The Corporation must submit an application for continuance under one of the following Acts for the Minister’s approval:
(a) the Canada Business Corporations Act;
(b) the Canada Cooperatives Act;
(c) the Canada Not-for-profit Corporations Act.

There’s the core of the bill. The Canadian Wheat Board won’t be taken out behind the grain elevator and shot; it’ll be given a chance to reinvent itself.

While the opposition’s heart is in the right place - a monopoly is no way to protect the working people. Monopolies create inefficiencies in the system and often work counter-intuitively, hurting those they’re intended to help. I admit that the Wheat Board has been a success so far, but it can do better - and it won’t stay golden forever.

A better way

There’s certainly something to be said for making the Wheat Board ubiquitous. Any successor absolutely won’t have the same sort of membership numbers as the current composition. 

But that’s not necessary a bad thing. Let’s lay out a scenario;

Say that several small towns in central Alberta figure that their interests are best served by having their own corporation. They decided to incorporate as a stakeholder cooperative. As such, they decide to sell their wheat as a collective, and pool their resources to transport the grain and whatnot. While perhaps they can’t fetch the sort of rates that the Canadian Wheat Board could, their operating costs are lower, and they can use their profits to put back into the cooperative.

Because while the Wheat Board is a great idea, it’s primarily just the exchange of money. Farmers give the Board grain, the Board gives the farmers money. In a cooperative, the farmers are the board, and the board can invest to make itself more productive. It make sure that the nature of the corporation is on the ground-level, instead of being a top-down system.

What’s more - it’s democratic!

How often are working people given the choice to decide how their business will work? When Halifax was given massive shipbuilding contracts, were the dock workers asked how they would like Irving’s corporation to be structure? No. But they should have been.

This is actually all a tad repetitive, as was pointed out to me on Twitter, because the very impetusto start the Wheat Board came out of a failure of grain cooperatives.

From the University of Regina,

…the Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba Co-operative Wheat Producers organizations which became known as the “Wheat Pools.” They operated a system of pooling and payment similar to that established by the 1919-20 CWB, but lacked government guarantees for the pool accounts. In 1924 they formed the Central Selling Agency for the purpose of joint marketing. The organization enjoyed some success during its first six years of operations, but when world wheat prices collapsed in 1929 and the Great Depression began in the 1930s, it experienced serious financial difficulties. Operating on bank loans, the prairie Wheat Pools were threatened with foreclosure by the banks when the open market wheat price fell below the initial payment. The federal government was once again called upon, and this time it responded. It provided a guarantee of borrowings by the Central Selling Agency and later, through Act of Parliament, re-established the CWB as a voluntary marketing agency for wheat. The Canadian Wheat Board Act received royal assent on July 5, 1935.

So we can see that the failure was never in the farmer’s corporate structure, it was all in the economic system and poor regulation.

So I think it’s time to take another go. 

This country seems content on resting on its haunches on a lot of decisions made decades ago. It’s time to evolve away from archaic ideas that have worked, but need changing. The Wheat Board is one of them. There is a way to help farmers without having such a ham-fisted tool for the economy.

Better yet, there’s a way to help workers organize themselves, make more in profit and make the grain industry here in Canada sustainable.

Photo source: Britannica.