To the Editor:
Maybe embarrassed by their haste to demolish the Canadian Wheat Board without ever conducting a cost-benefit analysis or producing a business plan, the Harper government just published a rather vacuous paper entitled "Report of the Working Group on Marketing Freedom".
It's a predictable document, loaded with clichés and ideology, but nothing new.
Half bureaucrats and half hand-picked CWB opponents, the "Working Group" made no attempt to assess what's good or bad about a single-desk selling system.
They calculated no costs. They measured no benefits. They produced no business plan.
The Working Group implicitly acknowledged that quite apart from grain marketing, the CWB provides a range of useful logistical services to prairie grain producers, such as:
fair treatment to producer-car shippers and short-line rail operators;
market development and research work;
the delivery of Advance Payments; and
market information and options.
They proposed that vital services like these simply be hived-off from the CWB and delivered in a hodge-podge of different ways.
The Working Group failed to mention the Board's unique single-desk ability to "price discriminate" - which means getting the top price in each individual market, not the lowest common denominator in every market.
They also failed to mention the Board's unique ability to challenge the railways when farmers are getting hosed on freight rates. Instead, they expressed their great faith in supposed competition among railways and grain companies.
But perhaps the Group's most glaring omission was their failure to describe how the CWB is supposed to function with no single-desk, no capital base and no access to grain handling facilities.
The Harper government is trying to snooker the CWB into drafting such a phony plan - to hasten its own demise. The Board should refuse. It's Mr. Harper who wants to kill the Board. Let him carry the full responsibility.
Ralph Goodale, MO, Wascana, SK.
