Piecing Together the Social Fabric
Southwest Progress Report 2012 7
Photo by Matthew Liebenberg
These signs on farmland along the Trans-Canada Highway between Rush Lake and Waldeck, east of Swift Current, continue to proclaim support for a single-desk Ca- nadian Wheat Board.
CWB opinions all over the board
Continued from Page 6 “T e experience of the Wheat Board made
farmers realize that pooling their wheat was a good way to approach a complicated international market over which they had very little control,” T ompson said. As a result, prairie farmers participated
in three farmer-owned co-operative wheat pools that were created in 1923 and 1924. For the 1925/26 crop year, more than 140,000 of a possible 240,000 prairie farmers signed contracts and the pools received 52.2 per cent of the wheat crop. T e depression years resulted in the revival the CWB in 1935 by the Conservative
of
government of Prime Minister R.B. Bennett. T e Mackenzie King
majority Liberal
government that came to power in October 1935 wanted to dissolve this voluntary, non- monopoly CWB but protests from prairie farmers prevented them from doing it. “When grain was diffi cult to sell everybody
as part of
supported the Wheat Board because it meant you could at least make some kind of a delivery and get some money for your crop,” T ompson said. In 1943 the CWB monopoly was reinstated the war eff ort. Prairie farmer
support for the CWB continued in the two decades aſt er the Second World War and the monopoly was renewed aſt er parliamentary debates in 1950, 1953, 1957 and 1962. On all four occasions not a single MP voted against the extension of the monopoly. In 1967, the Liberal minority government
of Prime Minister Lester Pearson made the monopoly powers of the CWB permanent with support from opposition leader John Diefenbaker. During the debate Diefenbaker suggested that the legislation on a CWB monopoly will not change “so long as there are farmers and wheat producers who are aware of the benefi ts which fl ow from the Wheat Board Act.” During the 1970s farmers started to feel
less threatened by the private grain trade and groups such as the Palliser Wheat Growers Association (later renamed as the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association) were critical of the CWB.
“I don’t think people’s minds changed, but
the minds of very large farmers changed,” T ompson said. “Farmers who had very large operations tended to be the weakest supporters of the Wheat Board.” Swiſt Current area farmer Stewart Wells is
convinced history will be kind to the CWB. “T e farmers’ well-being in their
communities and just the increase in the stability of the family farm are going to be refl ected when people look back on the numbers,” he said. Wells is the chairperson of the Friends the Canadian Wheat Board, a coalition farmers and other groups involved in
of of
legal eff orts to restore a single-desk CWB. He believes the Canadian Grain Commission and CWB has created a system with substantial benefi t to farmers, but farmers have started to take it for granted. “It’s very sad, but what’s happened here in
the last several years is this notion that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,” he observed. Wells, who was born and raised on a third-
generation family farm, said his parents and grandparents were proud of the institutions they built, such as co-ops, credit unions and the CWB. “T e Wheat Board was a great leveller of the
playing fi eld,” he noted. “It gave farmers, large or small, more opportunity to be involved in the market place, more opportunity to get their grain to market.” Prairie farmers are still waiting to see what
the impact of the new open-market system will be, but to Wells some things will remain the same. “T e market power imbalances don’t
change,” he said. “T e struggle has been going on for more than a hundred years and it’s not going to stop. T at struggle about trying to maximize returns from the market place is not going to stop.” Acknowledgement: Historical information
about the CWB was sourced from the document “Farmers, governments and the Canadian Wheat Board – a historical perspective, 1918- 2009” by Prof. John Herd T ompson, Sept. 16, 2009.
My Membership Pays!
In 2012,
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