The Mysterious and the Funny: New Twists in the CWB Debate

Paul Beingessner
September 24, 2006

“If Canada’s new government is funnelling money to this effort, is the government registered as a lobbyist to itself? And should farm newspapers ever trust another letter to the editor from a farmer who hates the CWB?”

The discussion over the future of the Canadian Wheat Board takes new twists weekly. Some are mysterious. Some are just way too funny. At least it won’t be dull in the farm community for the next couple months.

In the mysterious category is the stand the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities has taken on the fight over the CWB. The position of the members isn’t mysterious. It is very clear. At the last convention, some 90 percent of SARM delegates passed a resolution supporting both the CWB’s role as the sole marketer of wheat and barley and the government’s role in supporting this through price and borrowing guarantees.

The mystery comes in why the Board of SARM seems so unable to stick to the resolution. The most obvious was when the Board decided it would attend both Chuck Strahl’s private gathering to kill the single desk and the opposition rally to support it. SARM took the position of attending both as an observer. I spoke with SARM’s president after he came out of Strahl’s meeting, and he told me they didn’t have a clear mandate from their members in any direction.

Some RM’s are upset enough at the Board’s lack of concrete action that they’ve written it, demanding the Board follow the direction it has been given. Speculation has it there will be an attempt to weaken SARM’s strong position at the next convention. Should be interesting to watch that one.

The way-too-funny category catches a real prize this week. It comes in the form of an email written by a Regina communications company to officials with the Western Canadian Wheat Growers, the Western Barley Growers Association, and the Alberta Barley Commission. The email is from Mary-Lynn Charlton, President of Charlton Communications. In it, Charlton offers to write letters to newspapers and politicians, promoting, it would seem, the anti-CWB cause. Charlton asks the three organizations to contact their members to get them to be signers of the letters. What is really funny is that according to Charlton, it was “suggested to us by government, MPs and others that we must get into the game with letters to the editor in weeklies, dailies and agriculture trade publications as the other side is embarrassing us with their propaganda.”

These unnamed MPs must have a sense they are losing the battle for the minds and hearts of farmers. Charlton’s helpful encouragement is that “this would get us into the propaganda game and save you people time.”

Mary-Lynn Charlton’s offer to the anti-CWB groups raises a number of new mysteries. First, one might wonder who would pay for these bogus letters? Would it be the organizations that got the email, or perhaps the government folk or MPs Charlton says suggested the deception? It is doubtful that Charlton Communications would be doing this out of the goodness of its corporate heart.

Second, if Canada’s new government is funnelling money to this effort, is the government registered as a lobbyist to itself? Third, should farm newspapers ever trust another letter to the editor from a farmer who hates the CWB? Fourth, why can’t these folks write their own letters? And finally, why was Paul Orsak included as a c.c. to the email? Orsak, readers may remember, was appointed by Chuck Strahl last week to the Task Force on Implementing Marketing Choice for Wheat and Barley.

It is clear that both the government and the anti-CWB side know they have little support in the farm community for destroying the CWB. This lack of support for the government’s intentions will be further demonstrated if open-market supporters are indeed going to boycott the CWB director elections, as is rumoured. There is talk that the government has decided it would be bad for its cause if anti-CWB candidates were defeated. The only way to prevent this, it seems, is not to run.

All the attempts to manipulate farmers’ opinions on the CWB issue will not succeed. Clearly, farmers don’t think this is a matter of propaganda. The issue is rather simple, really. Farmers have the power to change the CWB, if they want to. They can do this the democratic way by electing directors that support their views. Only a government inherently anti-democratic would deny farmers that right.

(c) Paul Beingessner