Here's another nationally read opinion writer who seems to be ok with what Strahl and Harper are doing, Isn't this interesting. These guys musn't be on the cwb payrole.
Voting out a monopolist
Colby Cosh, National Post
Published: Friday, March 30, 2007
It is fascinating to watch the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) and its supporters try to squirm around the results of the agriculture department's barley plebiscite, whose results were announced Wednesday. The Harper government now has a formal mandate to liberate Western barley growers from the CWB's antiquated export monopoly, if it even needed one; as CWB chairman Ken Ritter admitted glumly after the announcement, "The results of the barley plebiscite? are not overly surprising. The CWB has been surveying farmers every year for the past 10 years and these results appear to be consistent with our annual findings."
Thirty-eight percent of Western growers voted in favour of retaining the traditional single desk, 48% wanted the ability to choose between sticking with the CWB or marketing their crop themselves and 14% voted for the complete abolition of board marketing. Although the CWB opposed giving farmers three ballot choices, on the premise that dual marketing is impossible, the latter figure by itself is enough to establish the moral case for eliminating the board's control of every grain of Western barley. A civilized country does not give an institution total economic power over the one in seven who opposes that institution, even if there are benefits to the other six.
But on Wednesday the Liberals trotted out Ralph Goodale and a few other surviving prairie Grits to denounce the results of the balloting, calling them "concocted" -- a term whose overtones will probably not sit too well with the ballot administrators at KMPG. The NDP's Wheat Board critic, Alex Atamanenko, called the vote a "sham from the beginning and?an insult to democracy and farmers alike."
Given that the outcome is consistent with the CWB's own longtime soundings of farmer opinion, the vote must have been a very incompetent concoction indeed. Ritter's admission suggests that the last year or so of squabbling over the board's right to spend farmer income campaigning for its own death-grip on barley and over the various features of the ballot was one long waste of time. The plebiscite told us only what we already knew five years ago, which is that life will be a little harder for the board in a competitive environment but that farmers are in favour of creating one all the same.
Indeed, the best summary of the emerging situation may have come from a Drumheller, Alta.-area barley grower and supporter of the single desk who was interviewed Wednesday by the Bloomberg financial news service. "The vote weakens the role of the Wheat Board an awful lot," Ron Leonhardt told Bloomberg. "The board just becomes another company."
That, indeed, is pretty much the idea. But of course in some ways it won't become "just another company" right away. It will still enjoy the basic seller loyalty that was expressed just as strongly in the plebiscite as the desire for choice, and it will maintain the competitive advantage of government guarantees on pool payments to growers. It is likely to maintain a tight rein on powerful buyers abroad, especially state-owned ones that have ideological allergies to private agribusiness and agencies that use Canadian federal loans to buy Canadian barley.
But if you believe the officials of the board, leveraging those advantages is likely to be too much trouble. "A plan to transition the CWB completely out of barley may be the only realistic option if the single desk is dismantled," warned Ritter two days before the vote announcement. He promulgated an "analysis" by his fellow directors, claiming to show that "without a radical transformation of the CWB into a grain company with a complete range of physical assets and a large capital infusion, the CWB could not market barley." In case anyone had any trouble interpreting this "transformation," the chairman helpfully added that "ownership of both port and country grain facilities could help ensure the CWB's competitiveness with customers and farmers."
It may be that some method of cash capitalizing the CWB is desirable (guess who would pay for that, or for a mass takeover of terminal capacity), but on the whole it sounds as though Ritter is using the plebiscite as an excuse to draw up an ambitious Christmas list, implicitly conjuring the spectacle of oceans of golden grain mouldering in Canadian fields while the world's beer supply evaporates to a trickle. We don't yet know what fraction of the crop the CWB will lose when farmers are allowed to walk out, but apparently even the tiniest rebellion by a handful of pro-choice miscreants will be enough to induce a total loss of competitiveness.
More probably, though, the Board will eventually stop proclaiming the apocalypse and at last make an adult adjustment to the new reality.
ColbyCosh@gmail.com
Voting out a monopolist
Colby Cosh, National Post
Published: Friday, March 30, 2007
It is fascinating to watch the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) and its supporters try to squirm around the results of the agriculture department's barley plebiscite, whose results were announced Wednesday. The Harper government now has a formal mandate to liberate Western barley growers from the CWB's antiquated export monopoly, if it even needed one; as CWB chairman Ken Ritter admitted glumly after the announcement, "The results of the barley plebiscite? are not overly surprising. The CWB has been surveying farmers every year for the past 10 years and these results appear to be consistent with our annual findings."
Thirty-eight percent of Western growers voted in favour of retaining the traditional single desk, 48% wanted the ability to choose between sticking with the CWB or marketing their crop themselves and 14% voted for the complete abolition of board marketing. Although the CWB opposed giving farmers three ballot choices, on the premise that dual marketing is impossible, the latter figure by itself is enough to establish the moral case for eliminating the board's control of every grain of Western barley. A civilized country does not give an institution total economic power over the one in seven who opposes that institution, even if there are benefits to the other six.
But on Wednesday the Liberals trotted out Ralph Goodale and a few other surviving prairie Grits to denounce the results of the balloting, calling them "concocted" -- a term whose overtones will probably not sit too well with the ballot administrators at KMPG. The NDP's Wheat Board critic, Alex Atamanenko, called the vote a "sham from the beginning and?an insult to democracy and farmers alike."
Given that the outcome is consistent with the CWB's own longtime soundings of farmer opinion, the vote must have been a very incompetent concoction indeed. Ritter's admission suggests that the last year or so of squabbling over the board's right to spend farmer income campaigning for its own death-grip on barley and over the various features of the ballot was one long waste of time. The plebiscite told us only what we already knew five years ago, which is that life will be a little harder for the board in a competitive environment but that farmers are in favour of creating one all the same.
Indeed, the best summary of the emerging situation may have come from a Drumheller, Alta.-area barley grower and supporter of the single desk who was interviewed Wednesday by the Bloomberg financial news service. "The vote weakens the role of the Wheat Board an awful lot," Ron Leonhardt told Bloomberg. "The board just becomes another company."
That, indeed, is pretty much the idea. But of course in some ways it won't become "just another company" right away. It will still enjoy the basic seller loyalty that was expressed just as strongly in the plebiscite as the desire for choice, and it will maintain the competitive advantage of government guarantees on pool payments to growers. It is likely to maintain a tight rein on powerful buyers abroad, especially state-owned ones that have ideological allergies to private agribusiness and agencies that use Canadian federal loans to buy Canadian barley.
But if you believe the officials of the board, leveraging those advantages is likely to be too much trouble. "A plan to transition the CWB completely out of barley may be the only realistic option if the single desk is dismantled," warned Ritter two days before the vote announcement. He promulgated an "analysis" by his fellow directors, claiming to show that "without a radical transformation of the CWB into a grain company with a complete range of physical assets and a large capital infusion, the CWB could not market barley." In case anyone had any trouble interpreting this "transformation," the chairman helpfully added that "ownership of both port and country grain facilities could help ensure the CWB's competitiveness with customers and farmers."
It may be that some method of cash capitalizing the CWB is desirable (guess who would pay for that, or for a mass takeover of terminal capacity), but on the whole it sounds as though Ritter is using the plebiscite as an excuse to draw up an ambitious Christmas list, implicitly conjuring the spectacle of oceans of golden grain mouldering in Canadian fields while the world's beer supply evaporates to a trickle. We don't yet know what fraction of the crop the CWB will lose when farmers are allowed to walk out, but apparently even the tiniest rebellion by a handful of pro-choice miscreants will be enough to induce a total loss of competitiveness.
More probably, though, the Board will eventually stop proclaiming the apocalypse and at last make an adult adjustment to the new reality.
ColbyCosh@gmail.com
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