To the Editor:
The Government's move towards unilaterally dismantling the single desk of the Canadian Wheat Board is gaining momentum, and the outcry from farmers is growing louder and more desperate.
In 1998, amendments to the CWB Act were passed to ensure that such drastic reforms could only be enacted with a plebiscite of the grain producers themselves, that the Agriculture Minister responsible would not endorse any such change without this free vote, and that the Agriculture Minister would not present any bill to Parliament to change the Wheat Board without the approval of the majority of producers. But to please a fraction of their electorate and to fulfill a long-held desire of the Prime Minister's, the government has chosen a unique approach to dealing with the intricacies of the law - abolish it altogether. Their plan is to pass legislation in parliament to repeal the CWB Act, with complete disregard for the democratic rights of western Canadian producers.
They mask this deceptive move with the words "marketing freedom", all the while ignoring or refusing to acknowledge the supreme irony that they are denying farmers the freedom to decide how to sell their produce. Opting to remove the single desk without the consent of the farmers who have voted to keep it for so many years can hardly be called an act of liberation, as it not only limits their control over grain prices but may very well condemn struggling farms to bankruptcy. Furthermore, Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz has displayed either an astonishing ignorance or a calculated disregard for the realities of both the grain and transportation industries in Canada, when he said this past June 29th: "I don't think the viability of the Port of Churchill is just based on grain, anyway", when in fact the CWB accounts for 95 per cent of that port's exports. Transportation costs to farmers and job security for hundreds of CWB employees and port workers are clearly not high on the Minister's list of priorities.
How can Stephen Harper's ministers and senators even imagine themselves to be justified in the disenfranchisement of Canadian farmers? How can our government justify this dictatorial subjugation of the Canadian Wheat Board?
The answer is, simply, they cannot. There is no justification for such an action, no democratic license has given them this power, and the citizens of Canada and the wheat and barley producers themselves have surely not given them so wide a mandate as this. But when I have questioned them on this very point, when I pressed for a response just this past spring, the Conservative Senate Leader, Marjory LeBreton, gave an answer as unsatisfying as it was unsettling: that the past election, in which the Conservative party won a majority, indicates a strong mandate from the Canadian people, and that this alone justifies them in scrapping the single desk of the CWB without allowing for the producers' plebiscite, a free and open vote which was guaranteed to the farmers by law.
The implication of such a statement is startling - the Conservatives are now claiming that any initiative they choose is warranted because they have a majority government. Consultation with the people concerned is no longer necessary in such a state; the wishes of the Conservative party are all that counts. The will of the people is no longer the driving force, but rather, the will of the few is forced upon the whole. This is democracy turned upside down.
To their credit, respecting the rights of their shareholders - the farmers - the Board of Directors of the CWB will be conducting a plebiscite this summer, in defiance of their disenfranchisement and in spite of Minister Ritz' callous remarks of June 29th, when he explicitly said that the value he would place on farmers' votes was "little to none". To show the Minister that farmers' votes do indeed have value, and to make their voices heard in this decisive debate, I would urge all western Canadian producers to exercise their democratic rights and cast their vote on this critical issue.
Have our farmers not earned the right, the simple right, to decide the future of their own industry?
R.W. (Bob) Peterson
Senator (Saskatchewan).
