National Post
Published: Monday, February 08, 2010
When the Supreme Court declined recently to consider the case of Canadian Wheat Board v. Attorney General of Canada, it brought a welcome end to a long, rancorous debate over the question of who, ultimately, has authority over the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB). The answer, we can now be certain, is that the agency remains, as Ottawa has always considered it, a creature of government, answerable to our country's elected representatives. This is how it should be.
Ottawa may permit Crown Corporations to act with a degree of independence; it would be ridiculous for John Baird, the minister responsible for Canada Post, to involve himself in the day-to-day operations of that sprawling enterprise. But ultimately, the post office still belongs to the Canadian people. It is the minister's role to represent our interests, and he does, and must have the authority to bring our influence to bear on the corporation when necessary.
The Wheat Board's directors had, however, other ideas. Because of changes made to the Canadian Wheat Board Act under the previous Liberal government, allowing a majority of directors to be elected by farmers, reducing Ottawa's appointees to a minority, directors had come to believe that they were only answerable, as chairman Larry Hill recently said, "directly to the people who elect us." When Canadians elected a Conservative government, which began working to unwind the CWB's 75-year-old monopoly over Western barley and wheat sales, the board's directors declared war on the government. They unleashed an advertising and public relations campaign designed to frustrate the government's work, trying to turn farmers against the government's plan, and launched legal challenges aimed at thwarting the Conservatives' efforts.
All of this was paid for using funds collected by the Western farmers forced to fund the Wheat Board, a substantial number of whom, as it happens, support deregulating the CWB's monopoly: A 2007 plebiscite resulted in a majority of barley producers endorsing their right to choose to market their grain outside the board. In 2006, Chuck Strahl, then the agriculture minister in charge of the CWB, issued a directive to the board's directors: The revenues they collect, he said, were to be spent on the orderly marketing of grain -- the CWB's mandate -- not political crusades. The directors took him to court, insisting the minister was not the one who was "controlling and calling the shots for the organization," as the Wheat Board's CEO put it at the time. And while a federal judge initially agreed with the directors, an appeals court found that ruling was made in error. The language of the Canadian Wheat Board Act is specifically written to "provide the Governor in Council with the authority to direct the Wheat Board on any matter of governance in the event of a disagreement with the board of directors," the appellate judges ruled. With the Supreme Court's refusal on Jan. 21, to reconsider the decision, that ruling stands.
This is an important victory for Parliamentary primacy that extends beyond the farming community. It's true that member farmers have a personal stake in the CWB's fate, but ours is not a country that grants affected groups a trump card on policy. We don't give fishermen exclusive control over fisheries policy or grant lumberjacks the privilege of writing our forestry laws. (In any case, all Canadians who eat pasta or drink beer are touched indirectly by Wheat Board policy.) Whether Prime Minister Stephen Harper is making the right decisions or the wrong ones is something he'll answer for in the House and at the polls -- though, for the record, we believe every Prairie farmer should enjoy the same rights as his eastern cousins: the freedom to sell his own goods to whomever he wishes.
No Crown agency can be allowed to defy its owner, the Canadian public. This government came to Ottawa with an explicit mandate from the electorate to end the Wheat Board's monopoly; opponents of that approach can continue to publicly protest using their own funds. We're quite sure that's exactly how Canada's Parliamentary system was intended to work.
Published: Monday, February 08, 2010
When the Supreme Court declined recently to consider the case of Canadian Wheat Board v. Attorney General of Canada, it brought a welcome end to a long, rancorous debate over the question of who, ultimately, has authority over the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB). The answer, we can now be certain, is that the agency remains, as Ottawa has always considered it, a creature of government, answerable to our country's elected representatives. This is how it should be.
Ottawa may permit Crown Corporations to act with a degree of independence; it would be ridiculous for John Baird, the minister responsible for Canada Post, to involve himself in the day-to-day operations of that sprawling enterprise. But ultimately, the post office still belongs to the Canadian people. It is the minister's role to represent our interests, and he does, and must have the authority to bring our influence to bear on the corporation when necessary.
The Wheat Board's directors had, however, other ideas. Because of changes made to the Canadian Wheat Board Act under the previous Liberal government, allowing a majority of directors to be elected by farmers, reducing Ottawa's appointees to a minority, directors had come to believe that they were only answerable, as chairman Larry Hill recently said, "directly to the people who elect us." When Canadians elected a Conservative government, which began working to unwind the CWB's 75-year-old monopoly over Western barley and wheat sales, the board's directors declared war on the government. They unleashed an advertising and public relations campaign designed to frustrate the government's work, trying to turn farmers against the government's plan, and launched legal challenges aimed at thwarting the Conservatives' efforts.
All of this was paid for using funds collected by the Western farmers forced to fund the Wheat Board, a substantial number of whom, as it happens, support deregulating the CWB's monopoly: A 2007 plebiscite resulted in a majority of barley producers endorsing their right to choose to market their grain outside the board. In 2006, Chuck Strahl, then the agriculture minister in charge of the CWB, issued a directive to the board's directors: The revenues they collect, he said, were to be spent on the orderly marketing of grain -- the CWB's mandate -- not political crusades. The directors took him to court, insisting the minister was not the one who was "controlling and calling the shots for the organization," as the Wheat Board's CEO put it at the time. And while a federal judge initially agreed with the directors, an appeals court found that ruling was made in error. The language of the Canadian Wheat Board Act is specifically written to "provide the Governor in Council with the authority to direct the Wheat Board on any matter of governance in the event of a disagreement with the board of directors," the appellate judges ruled. With the Supreme Court's refusal on Jan. 21, to reconsider the decision, that ruling stands.
This is an important victory for Parliamentary primacy that extends beyond the farming community. It's true that member farmers have a personal stake in the CWB's fate, but ours is not a country that grants affected groups a trump card on policy. We don't give fishermen exclusive control over fisheries policy or grant lumberjacks the privilege of writing our forestry laws. (In any case, all Canadians who eat pasta or drink beer are touched indirectly by Wheat Board policy.) Whether Prime Minister Stephen Harper is making the right decisions or the wrong ones is something he'll answer for in the House and at the polls -- though, for the record, we believe every Prairie farmer should enjoy the same rights as his eastern cousins: the freedom to sell his own goods to whomever he wishes.
No Crown agency can be allowed to defy its owner, the Canadian public. This government came to Ottawa with an explicit mandate from the electorate to end the Wheat Board's monopoly; opponents of that approach can continue to publicly protest using their own funds. We're quite sure that's exactly how Canada's Parliamentary system was intended to work.
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