<b>Monopoly marketer’s $1.4-million radio and TV ad campaign targets Eastern Canadians</b>
If you listen to the radio, you’ve probably heard a mysterious little commercial running on GTA stations lately.
A voice identifies itself as a Canadian farmer and just to hammer home that message, speaks with a distinctly hayseed accent.
He tells you the federal government is about to destroy the Canadian Wheat Board, leave him all alone to sell his grain to the big American customers and put him out of business. It’ll be the end of the family farm, he says.
Then there’s the TV steamroller ad in which a guy in jeans and sheepskin jacket stands in the middle of a field and demands you “don’t let Harper steamroll western Canadian wheat farmers.”
It’s costing $1.4 million, straight out of western grain farmers’ pockets and if you’ve listened carefully, you’re probably wondering why something that has absolutely nothing to do with you is getting in your face in southern Ontario.
Good question.
It would be easier to explain if the ads weren’t so full of half truths and misstatements.
The CWB, which markets all western Canadian wheat, is not farmer-owned, as the ads suggest, nor is it being shut down.
No one will go out of business. The family farm, that icon of mom-and-apple-pie Canadian identity, is in no more danger now than it was before.
All that is happening is the federal government is making a change to one of its own agencies.
It has introduced legislation to allow farmers to sell their grain themselves and end the Wheat Board’s “single desk” monopoly.
If you’re a wheat farmer, you’ll still be able to sell your product through the Wheat Board if you want. But if you don’t want to, you won’t have to.
Many don’t. Unlike other marketing boards in Canada, which are farmer-owned — for poultry and dairy products — the wheat board has a history of what seems tyrannical behaviour.
If, you’re a Canadian dairy farmer, the cheque is in the mail every month. But many western grain producers have complained they’re often left without being paid promptly or even knowing how much they’re getting.
Western farmers manage to sell other big crops, like canola, without help so why can’t they sell their wheat?
But the 76-year-old Wheat Board, now believing itself to be in its death throes — it claims similar moves in other countries have ended similar agencies — isn’t going quietly and is putting up a mighty struggle to save itself.
Hence the ads, the interviews on eastern Canadian radio and TV, the small Parliament Hill demonstrations, the accusations flung back and forth and the online petitions. It’s also suing Ottawa even though its own lawyers have said it won’t work.
Agricultural marketing agencies are a remote part of the landscape to most Canadians and their mere mention almost guarantees eyes to glaze over by the thousands.
Few of us know much about any of them except we often blame the Dairy Farmers of Ontario — rightly or wrongly — for our high milk prices.
What supply management really does for poultry, eggs and dairy products, is ensure cheap and heavily subsidized foreign products are kept out while controlling supply through quota. Without it, we wouldn’t have a dairy industry.
But that’s not what the Wheat Board does. It simply markets all prairie wheat.
So why should we care?
For one thing, this isn’t 1935, the year the board was founded.
In 2011 farmers have lots of options available to sell their grain — if they’re allowed to. And you have to wonder what kind of country forces its citizens to sell only to one buyer.
As one Alberta farmer wrote in the National Post: “Any Canadian business expects to be able to choose where it does business and to whom it can sell its product.”
http://www.torontosun.com/2011/11/18/wheat-board-whining
If you listen to the radio, you’ve probably heard a mysterious little commercial running on GTA stations lately.
A voice identifies itself as a Canadian farmer and just to hammer home that message, speaks with a distinctly hayseed accent.
He tells you the federal government is about to destroy the Canadian Wheat Board, leave him all alone to sell his grain to the big American customers and put him out of business. It’ll be the end of the family farm, he says.
Then there’s the TV steamroller ad in which a guy in jeans and sheepskin jacket stands in the middle of a field and demands you “don’t let Harper steamroll western Canadian wheat farmers.”
It’s costing $1.4 million, straight out of western grain farmers’ pockets and if you’ve listened carefully, you’re probably wondering why something that has absolutely nothing to do with you is getting in your face in southern Ontario.
Good question.
It would be easier to explain if the ads weren’t so full of half truths and misstatements.
The CWB, which markets all western Canadian wheat, is not farmer-owned, as the ads suggest, nor is it being shut down.
No one will go out of business. The family farm, that icon of mom-and-apple-pie Canadian identity, is in no more danger now than it was before.
All that is happening is the federal government is making a change to one of its own agencies.
It has introduced legislation to allow farmers to sell their grain themselves and end the Wheat Board’s “single desk” monopoly.
If you’re a wheat farmer, you’ll still be able to sell your product through the Wheat Board if you want. But if you don’t want to, you won’t have to.
Many don’t. Unlike other marketing boards in Canada, which are farmer-owned — for poultry and dairy products — the wheat board has a history of what seems tyrannical behaviour.
If, you’re a Canadian dairy farmer, the cheque is in the mail every month. But many western grain producers have complained they’re often left without being paid promptly or even knowing how much they’re getting.
Western farmers manage to sell other big crops, like canola, without help so why can’t they sell their wheat?
But the 76-year-old Wheat Board, now believing itself to be in its death throes — it claims similar moves in other countries have ended similar agencies — isn’t going quietly and is putting up a mighty struggle to save itself.
Hence the ads, the interviews on eastern Canadian radio and TV, the small Parliament Hill demonstrations, the accusations flung back and forth and the online petitions. It’s also suing Ottawa even though its own lawyers have said it won’t work.
Agricultural marketing agencies are a remote part of the landscape to most Canadians and their mere mention almost guarantees eyes to glaze over by the thousands.
Few of us know much about any of them except we often blame the Dairy Farmers of Ontario — rightly or wrongly — for our high milk prices.
What supply management really does for poultry, eggs and dairy products, is ensure cheap and heavily subsidized foreign products are kept out while controlling supply through quota. Without it, we wouldn’t have a dairy industry.
But that’s not what the Wheat Board does. It simply markets all prairie wheat.
So why should we care?
For one thing, this isn’t 1935, the year the board was founded.
In 2011 farmers have lots of options available to sell their grain — if they’re allowed to. And you have to wonder what kind of country forces its citizens to sell only to one buyer.
As one Alberta farmer wrote in the National Post: “Any Canadian business expects to be able to choose where it does business and to whom it can sell its product.”
http://www.torontosun.com/2011/11/18/wheat-board-whining
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