News Articles

April 6, 2008
Winnipeg Free Press
By Bill Redekop

Giving farmers the short shrift: it's inevitable

Even Ottawa getting in on the act

It's inevitable.

I hear farmers say that a lot, like it's a syndrome. The Inevitable Syndrome.

"I think it's inevitable," farmers will say. Often the subject is the Canadian Wheat Board. They say it will disappear and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

Gone are all the grain co-ops. The grain elevators have toppled over. The rail branch lines have all been ripped up for scrap steel. The wheat board is next.

The Inevitable Syndrome doesn't just apply to the grain sector. The Rancher's Choice group tried for two years to raise money from colleagues to build a farmer-owned beef-packing plant. The biggest reason it failed is ranchers don't have the money -- they went straight from the BSE crisis into a market down-cycle.

But the second-biggest reason it failed is many ranchers don't think it could compete with the corporations. That was said often. Corporate capitalism will win out. It's inevitable.

It wasn't always that way.

I started my career working for one of those grain co-ops. I wrote for the Manitoba Co-operator weekly when it was owned by Manitoba Pool Elevators.
One of the things I remember at Manitoba Pool is the management style. Someone from the mailroom could be going down the elevator with CEO Greg Arason and they'd chat like old chums and continue chatting even after they stepped out.

That's part co-op culture but it's farm culture, too. After being "house proud" and owning bragging rights from the last curling bonspiel, farmers are a pretty egalitarian bunch.

Those attitudes filtered down from gentlemen farmers like Charlie Swanson, Bill Strath and Wallace Fraser, former presidents of Manitoba Pool Elevators.

And then there was legendary president Jim Deveson. He just loved to debate and the more you opposed him, the happier he got and the more his eyes sparkled until opponents couldn't stand it anymore and gave up. I always felt I could make a more favourable impression with him if I disagreed with him.

Pundits talk about a great disconnect between farming and city dwellers. Maybe more farmers in the boardrooms of the food industry would change that. But the grain co-ops have all been gobbled up by corporations in the last decade.

The Harper government seems to be playing corporate capitalism's cards these days. It is intent on removing the last farmers from the boardrooms of the grain industry by terminating the wheat board.

The government's game plan on the wheat board is to attack rather than explain itself. Farm minister Gerry Ritz touts "barley-marketing freedom" like he's going to liberate farmers from prison camps. He regularly insults the wheat board, most recently calling its supporters "the tinfoil hat and decoder-ring crowd."

I don't know what that means but I would suggest Ritz represents the "kiss the ring" crowd. No, that should be the "freedom" to kiss the ring.

The government touts its controversial barley-marketing plebiscite. A prominent pollster used words like "bizarre" and "diabolical" to describe the survey, meaning it lacked neutrality.

Even so, only 14 per cent of farmers voted to scrap the board, 38 per cent voted to keep it, and 48 per cent voted to have both the board and open-market sell barley.

In other words, a dog's breakfast. If there's a mandate in there, it's to find a compromise. But the government claims the vote means 62 per cent of farmers support its political agenda to end the wheat board barley monopoly.

The history of rural North America is of the big centres sucking out the wealth. You just have to look at the massive depopulation of the Great Plains in the United States. Farm movements of bygone eras like the co-ops fought to keep more capital on the land.

It isn't just rural people who lose. Capital gets centralized. Grain giant Viterra recently moved key senior management positions from Winnipeg to Calgary. Calgary? That's a first. Does anyone think it's the last?
There are an estimated 4,000 grain-related jobs in downtown Winnipeg. The wheat board is the anchor to those jobs.

In that way you start talking to a stranger when each of you has kids, I had a conversation with a woman on a beach last summer. It turned out the woman ran a dairy farm with her husband in eastern Manitoba.

We talked about farming in general and the subject got onto the wheat board. She wasn't sure about events being inevitable. What she didn't like was Harper trying to influence the outcome.

"Why is he telling farmers how to run their business? He doesn't tell anyone else how to run their business. He doesn't tell banks how to run their business. He doesn't tell the oil industry how to run its business. Why does he think he can tell farmers how to run theirs?"

© Winnipeg Free Press

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