Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The National Farmers Union thanks the committee for the opportunity to be here today to speak with the standing committee.
I have two recommendations that I'd like to put before the committee, and then another point I'd like to make if time allows.
The first recommendation we would put forward is that the standing committee use all means available to investigate the events that led to changes being announced by the Minister of Agriculture to the Canadian Wheat Board director elections halfway through the election process.
The second recommendation is that the standing committee find a way to force the federal government to reimburse the Canadian Wheat Board's direct costs, as well as the individual farmers' extra cost, resulting from the government changing the Canadian Wheat Board director election rules halfway through the election process.
As background to the first recommendation, last week the MInister of Agriculture stood in the House and announced changes to the way this year's Canadian Wheat Board director elections would be run. This process had started in the first week of September, and so the election process was roughly halfway finished, or halfway through, when the minister announced these changes.
In his announcement of the changes, he said that he had made a suggestion to the Wheat Board to make these changes and that the Wheat Board had agreed and said it was a pretty good idea. That was last Tuesday.
On Monday of this week, the Canadian Wheat Board published on its website a statement of its own, where it actually said it was not a suggestion by the minister, but rather it was a direction by the minister. They also said that they were not given the opportunity to say whether it was a good idea or not. So the Wheat Board has directly contradicted the statements by the minister. That bulletin is available on the Canadian Wheat Board website.
As well, I would bring to your attention, when we're talking about websites, that there is other information on that Canadian Wheat Board website that I'm hoping members have a chance to review. There's a piece that I would like to enter, if I'm able to, as evidence for the committee. The presentation that the Canadian Wheat Board has made to the Minister of Agriculture's ongoing task force work is also posted on the website, and I would like to bring that before the committee, as well, as evidence.
So on Monday the Canadian Wheat Board contradicted the statement by the minister, and that moves us up to yesterday. Yesterday, the Minister of Agriculture produced another statement regarding the changes to the election. In his statement he has again tried to implicate the Canadian Wheat Board as being part of this change, and he referenced the Canadian Wheat Board election review panel results. There was an election review panel, which reported almost a year ago--November 2005. The minister has referenced that report, but the changes the minister has introduced are not one of the recommendations in the report. The changes are completely different from the panel recommendations that came forward in November 2005.
Inside of eight days, we've had two different rationales put forward on behalf of the minister in regard to these changes, and both of the statements he has produced are wrong. We're asking that the committee take this into its own hands. Go back and start at the time that the election review panel was tabled, in November 2005, eleven months ago, and from then, come through to the present and try to find out why these changes were made during the election process.
People who I trust and who have no reason to lie to me on this issue say that the minister was informed about the review panel, about the recommendations that were in the review panel, and was actually told as early as February that if any changes were going to be made along the lines of the review panel, they had to be implemented before the election process started. Well, that hasn't happened. So what we've seen are changes in the middle of an election process. The National Farmers Union is very upset about changes during the election process. This is Canada, and we don't do those kinds of things in this country.
That leads to the second recommendation, which is about the increased costs. Farmers in this country, farmers in the Wheat Board region, pay all of the election expenses related to these director elections for the Canadian Wheat Board, but the changes that the minister has introduced in the middle of the election period are leading to extra costs. The original information, the original advertising that was done by the election coordinator, Meyers Norris Penney, now has to be contradicted. There have to be new direct mailings to the 36% of the farmers who have been arbitrarily kicked off of the list, and that's going to be an extra expense, which the Wheat Board, at present, and farmers through the Wheat Board, have to pick up. So there's a direct expense to the Canadian Wheat Board.
There's also an indirect expense to the farmers involved who go through the declaration process. Thousands of legitimate voters have been kicked off this list. There were the people in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and in Alberta in Peace River, who experienced the incredible frost in the summer of 2004 and who produced only feed grains. Many of those same people in the next crop year were flooded out and produced only feed grains. If they haven't hauled yet this year--and we're only three months into the delivery period--they are kicked off this list.
Now, at a minimum, those people, when they fill out their declarations, have to find a notary public or a commissioner of oaths to verify those declarations. There are farmers now who are going to be 25, 50, or 100 miles away potentially from a commissioner of oaths. Granted, it might be a small cost--$10, $15, $20, or $50--for a person to get in their car, drive to find a commissioner of oaths and make that change, but it's a direct cost imposed on the farmers of western Canada by the Minister of Agriculture.
We've all been talking for the last number of years about the poor financial condition of farmers in western Canada. So, again, with the second recommendation we're asking that the standing committee find a way to force the Minister of Agriculture to reimburse the Canadian Wheat Board for these costs and farmers for any of their incidental costs.
The last point that I'll make is just to demonstrate a different way of thinking about the Canadian Wheat Board. We've heard a lot of the arguments, and there's lots of discussion to be had, but one way of thinking about the Wheat Board is as a legislated marketing instrument that's there for the benefit of western Canadian farmers, which is very similar to a legislated marketing instrument called “patent protection”. Patent protection is legislated by governments of countries in order to allow companies that are developing products to have a monopoly, a single-desk selling, if you will, of that particular product, so that they can maximize their returns from the marketplace.
The Canadian Wheat Board works in a very similar fashion. It's designed to help farmers maximize their returns from the marketplace so that we don't have to come back to taxpayers each and every year to try to get tax dollars to put farmers on life support.
So I just make that analogy to the patent system, which is a legislated system. Monsanto, John Deere, and every other company involved in the business benefit greatly from a legislated marketing instrument like patent protection, and the farmers should not be held up to some sort of double standard and denied use of the same legislated tools.
Thank you.