Economic Slavery on the Prairies
Dr. Barry Cooper teaches political science at the University of Calgary
and Dr. David Bercuson is director of the Centre for Military and
Strategic Studies at the same institution. They could hardly be
accused of being unable to formulate an intelligent decision based on the
Prairie experience and the facts.
It is certainly comforting to know that these two great scholars have
come to the same enlightened conclusion that many prairie residents have,
that the Canadian Wheat Board is a tyranny. The say the Canadian
Wheat Board is "...a tyranny of rules and faceless bureaucrats for
which even parliamentary oversight is absent. Alone among Canadian
farmers, prairie wheat and barley producers must, by law, market their
product through the Canadian Wheat Board." These leaned
scholars continue by pointing out that "They [meaning wheat and
barley growers] have no choice. The Wheat Board is a compulsory
monopoly run by and for people who staff it. Like CSIS, the spy
agency, the CWB is exempt from access to information requests."
At one time, had anyone made such a damning indictment of the CWB, the
defenders would have held rallies, marched in the streets, and would have
accused the detractors of heresy and lies. They would have insisted
on a retraction and even an apology. How times have changed.
Today, the shrill voices in defense of the CWB are all but silenced.
Even the most ardent defender is ready to admit that the CWB is a secretive,
self-serving, untouchable bureaucracy, unfamiliar and insensitive to the
realities of a changing world.
The CWB and its dwindling support base continues to assert that the
Board extracts premium prices for farmers and will still not provide any empirical
research that supports with that assertion. Since Saskatchewan, with
48% of the arable land in Canada, is the biggest contributor of wheat and
barley to the CWB, it should be the most prosperous province in Canada,
right? Not so.
Real income in Saskatchewan has fallen 7% in the past ten years.
In 2001, it had only 136,295 net taxpayers supporting just over one
million people. It has a 1 in 7 dependency ratio (for every
taxpayer, Saskatchewan has 7 people who take more out of the system than
they put in). Saskatchewan has lost 20,000 people to out-migration
in the past three years. In spite of these negative statistics, the CWB
spin doctors continue to maintain that they are doing a good job.
Cooper and Bercuson, the their credit, see it differently. They
say, "In practice, the CWB is simply oppressive. The 13 farmers
who where found guilty of a crime are eloquent witnesses to its despotic
power."
It is high time for the Liberal-dominated Standing Committee on
Agriculture and Agri-Food to present a Bill in the House of Commons to
amend the Canadian Wheat Board Act in accordance with the Standing
Committee's own recommendation #14 to "authorize on a trial basis, a
free market for the sale of wheat and barley."
In the past few years, we have witnessed the collapse of communism in
the Soviet Union, the destruction of the Berlin Wall, and the
re-unification of East and West Germany. Just like the Berlin wall
was used to oppress East Germans and keep them from the free market
economy, the Canadian Wheat Board uses its power to oppress those who want
the freedom to market their grain as they choose. Is it possible
that the end of another bastion of socialist oppression is finally very
near?
Ken Dillen
November 18, 2002 |
