this should stir more fear mongering from our good CWB directors!! Vader/Rod your quoted below.
As to my questions in another thread Vader, do your duty and answer them, remember I pay your wages and expect you to honour the requests for answers.
Erik
EZRA LEVANT
Alberta lawyer and author
February 18, 2008
Globe and Mail
Oil and gold aren't the only Canadian commodities trading at record highs. Prairie grains are, too, driven both by a hungry world and by new demands for bio-fuels. A bushel of prairie wheat has broken double-digits on the world market. That's like oil breaking the $100-a-barrel barrier. Times are good again.
Except that farmers who happen to live in Canada's Prairie provinces aren't allowed to sell their wheat at market prices. They're compelled by an obsolete law to sell their wheat to the federal government's Canadian Wheat Board, at fixed government prices. Right now, the CWB pays farmers just over $8 a bushel for Hard Red Spring, which sells across the border in Montana for $13.51 a bushel, more than a 60 per cent premium. Canadian farmers get $12 a bushel for Canada Western Amber Durum. In Montana, the same grain sells for a whopping $20.34. That's almost 70 per cent more.
Farmers who dare to truck their own grain across the border - or even across the street - to sell it themselves are arrested. Manitoba farmer Andy McMechan spent five months in jail for exporting his wheat without a CWB permit.
The CWB's official mission statement includes the goal of "creating a sustainable competitive advantage for farmers." How does paying farmers barely half of world prices meet that standard?
The wheat board's origins trace back to government subsidy programs during the Depression, but the forcible requirement that all farmers sell to the state came about during the Second World War, in an effort to secure food as a strategic military resource. The war's been over for more than 60 years but, like the temporary income tax to beat the First World War, the law stuck.
There is no strategic purpose to having the government run the wheat business. The statute that governs the CWB says its object is to market wheat in an "orderly manner." Feeding an army that's liberating Europe may be a reason to effectively nationalize wheat farms. But the goal of making sure wheat sales are "orderly" isn't a compelling reason to restrict economic liberty.
So what happens to the gap between the world market price for wheat, and what the farmers get paid? A big chunk is vacuumed up by the wheat board itself, and its nearly 400 employees. Until the Conservatives came to power, the CWB was a government agency beyond the reach of the auditor-general and access to information requests - a good place for political patronage.
But even a thick layer of bureaucrats and politicians doesn't account for the full discount farmers must accept. The terms on which the CWB sells its wheat remain secret for "competitive reasons," but last year, the head of the Algerian Interprofessional Grain Board, a large CWB customer, let the cat out of the bag. In a newspaper interview, Mohamed Kacem boasted that "our country receives preferential prices, which save Algeria tens of dollars per tonne purchased." So it's really the Algerian Wheat Board, or the Chinese Wheat Board.
It's hard to imagine any other industry submitting to a secretive government agency that impoverished Canadians to the benefit of foreigners. As you'd expect, thousands of entrepreneurial farmers have stopped planting grains governed by the CWB, and switched to unregulated crops. As the gap between world prices and Canadian prices grows, the wheat board has become more politically aggressive, demonizing dissidents as "a few rich farmers" who just want to "buy out another suffering neighbour," in the words of Rod Flaman, a CWB director.
When he led the National Citizens Coalition, Stephen Harper described the CWB as a "draconian wheat monopoly that for years has relied on force and fear to exist." Now that he's Prime Minister, he has the chance to end that board's monopoly, and let farmers finally reap the financial harvest they deserve.
Ezra Levant was publisher
of the Western Standard.
As to my questions in another thread Vader, do your duty and answer them, remember I pay your wages and expect you to honour the requests for answers.
Erik
EZRA LEVANT
Alberta lawyer and author
February 18, 2008
Globe and Mail
Oil and gold aren't the only Canadian commodities trading at record highs. Prairie grains are, too, driven both by a hungry world and by new demands for bio-fuels. A bushel of prairie wheat has broken double-digits on the world market. That's like oil breaking the $100-a-barrel barrier. Times are good again.
Except that farmers who happen to live in Canada's Prairie provinces aren't allowed to sell their wheat at market prices. They're compelled by an obsolete law to sell their wheat to the federal government's Canadian Wheat Board, at fixed government prices. Right now, the CWB pays farmers just over $8 a bushel for Hard Red Spring, which sells across the border in Montana for $13.51 a bushel, more than a 60 per cent premium. Canadian farmers get $12 a bushel for Canada Western Amber Durum. In Montana, the same grain sells for a whopping $20.34. That's almost 70 per cent more.
Farmers who dare to truck their own grain across the border - or even across the street - to sell it themselves are arrested. Manitoba farmer Andy McMechan spent five months in jail for exporting his wheat without a CWB permit.
The CWB's official mission statement includes the goal of "creating a sustainable competitive advantage for farmers." How does paying farmers barely half of world prices meet that standard?
The wheat board's origins trace back to government subsidy programs during the Depression, but the forcible requirement that all farmers sell to the state came about during the Second World War, in an effort to secure food as a strategic military resource. The war's been over for more than 60 years but, like the temporary income tax to beat the First World War, the law stuck.
There is no strategic purpose to having the government run the wheat business. The statute that governs the CWB says its object is to market wheat in an "orderly manner." Feeding an army that's liberating Europe may be a reason to effectively nationalize wheat farms. But the goal of making sure wheat sales are "orderly" isn't a compelling reason to restrict economic liberty.
So what happens to the gap between the world market price for wheat, and what the farmers get paid? A big chunk is vacuumed up by the wheat board itself, and its nearly 400 employees. Until the Conservatives came to power, the CWB was a government agency beyond the reach of the auditor-general and access to information requests - a good place for political patronage.
But even a thick layer of bureaucrats and politicians doesn't account for the full discount farmers must accept. The terms on which the CWB sells its wheat remain secret for "competitive reasons," but last year, the head of the Algerian Interprofessional Grain Board, a large CWB customer, let the cat out of the bag. In a newspaper interview, Mohamed Kacem boasted that "our country receives preferential prices, which save Algeria tens of dollars per tonne purchased." So it's really the Algerian Wheat Board, or the Chinese Wheat Board.
It's hard to imagine any other industry submitting to a secretive government agency that impoverished Canadians to the benefit of foreigners. As you'd expect, thousands of entrepreneurial farmers have stopped planting grains governed by the CWB, and switched to unregulated crops. As the gap between world prices and Canadian prices grows, the wheat board has become more politically aggressive, demonizing dissidents as "a few rich farmers" who just want to "buy out another suffering neighbour," in the words of Rod Flaman, a CWB director.
When he led the National Citizens Coalition, Stephen Harper described the CWB as a "draconian wheat monopoly that for years has relied on force and fear to exist." Now that he's Prime Minister, he has the chance to end that board's monopoly, and let farmers finally reap the financial harvest they deserve.
Ezra Levant was publisher
of the Western Standard.
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