One of the things that drove me nuts as a primary processor and a producer many years ago was the fact that I had to sell my barley to the Wheat Board and then buy it back to reprocess it. That in and of itself is a ridiculous system to have.
I have to respond to Minister Wartman's comments with regard to the democratic, or duly constituted, or voted-on Wheat Board. It was never voted on that Alberta be a part of the Canadian Wheat Board. This was shoved upon us in the early thirties to ensure cheap wheat for the war effort. So let's not paint a rosy picture about how the Canadian Wheat Board came about. The Canadian Wheat Board came about because of the war effort, and that is it in a nutshell, for cheap wheat. That's why it was established: to ship raw material, not to encourage value-adding in the province.
And the honourable Mr. Anderson is exactly right, the premiums can range, depending upon whose study you've looked at. The Saskatchewan government has done some numbers that now claim--and this is different from before, but $256 million to $375 million a year is quite a spread. I have no idea how those numbers were arrived at.
But things like the interest earned by the Canadian Wheat Board is accounted for inaccurately and goes against its administration charges, so when you talk about what it costs the producer, let's be honest about those costs. They haven't been, because they've been spending a lot of money selling themselves.
So when you talk about the $1 million that the Alberta government has spent over the last three years, I'm not even sure if that's an accurate number. I can tell you that the policy of the provincial government is to give our producers the fundamental right to choose and I don't apologize for that. I don't apologize for the third party studies we have initiated. We've not done a lot of the stuff in-house because, quite frankly, as you gentlemen and ladies have seen, it's a very complicated issue. If the monopoly is providing that much premium, why is it not self-evident? Why is there even a question about it?