Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Western Canadian farmers are just asking for the same opportunity that farmers across the rest of this country have. The committee has worked hard on some of those issues to grant that. I think of the recommendation that we made on KVD a few months ago in our report. It was interesting because it was relevant. Again the other day we had a report out of Saskatoon where plant breeders are saying, “That needs to go ahead or we might as well be setting our breeding programs aside”. So the committee has done some good work in those areas. We've all worked hard to make things work for farmers.
One area that we believe is important for farmers is the right to market their own products. And we've worked long and hard for western Canadian farmers to try to bring market freedom to them.
I want to give a bit of my history on this. I am a farmer in western Canada. We were farming in the early 1990s. We had a frost one fall, so the grain went from good quality to feed quality. The Wheat Board informed us that they really couldn't move that quantity of grain that we had on hand. So we started looking around, trying to find a place where we could market the grain. We were able to go to Great Falls and to find one of the big elevator companies there that would buy the grain. We began to make plans to move it across the border. We had to do the Wheat Board buy-back in order to do that. So you have to give the Wheat Board your sales information when you make those agreements. We did that. Then we got a call from the buyer in the United States saying “Sorry, we don't need your grain. We found a cheaper way to get it.” We actually watched trucks drive out of our own elevators locally and followed them across the border and watched them unload across the border in the United States. Now the price that we received was about 80¢ a bushel less than what we had arranged for ourselves.
So that really began, in lots of ways, to focus farmers on the fact that they could actually do their marketing as well as anybody else could do it for them. And in our area, it actually encouraged people to move into a lot of other crops as well. We used to just grow all wheat and durum. I would say in our area now, it's probably about 50% wheat and durum, and the rest are specialty crops. We grow just about everything.
I don't know the numbers. Mr. Arason today says we should trust him. I've heard for a long time from the Canadian Wheat Board that we should just trust them on their numbers and that everything is okay. I know the figures on only some of the sales, and I know there is a discount on them for farmers.
Our policy has been clear over the last few years: we want to bring choice to western Canadian farmers. We don't have any intention of eliminating the Canadian Wheat Board, in spite of the rhetoric that you might hear from other sides. There are people who argue that the board can't work in a voluntary system; it's just not possible. I just want to read a little something that someone wrote up for me. It's somebody who knows a lot about this.
It's hard to know what to make of the CWB's claim that they cannot survive as a voluntary marketing agency. It would appear that they are either insincere, incompetent, or ignorant: Insincere because they know better but aren't saying; incompetent because they truly can't figure it out; or ignorant because they are unaware that prairie farmers already accomplished this feat in the 1920s.
Consider this: In the 1920s, farmers had no fax machines, no cell phones, no computers, and no Internet. They had no paved roads, no large grain trucks, and...no super-B's. They owned no terminals, no rail lines and, as of yet, no elevators. Yet under these conditions, they decided to form a voluntary wheat cooperative known as the prairie wheat pools.
The very challenges that the CWB says it cannot overcome were confronted and solved by farmers in the 1920s.
No elevators? No terminals? No problem. Existing elevator owners recognized they would be passing up business if they sniffed at the pools. Deals were struck to move pool grain.
Open market price higher than the pooled price? No big deal. Multi-year contracts were the solution. And when challenged in court, the contracts stood up. Problem after problem--confronted and solved by prairie farmers. In the 1920s.
It wasn't until the combination of the 1929 stock market crash, falling commodity prices and bad business decisions by management that the pools went broke and had to be bailed out.... Until that time, they had been growing and handling over 50 per cent of the prairie wheat crop. It was a voluntary pooling system that worked.
The quote from Vernon Fowke in his book The National Policy and the Wheat Economy says,
The pools represented a producer-owned and producer-controlled alternative to the open market system for the disposal of Canadian wheat. They were the first cooperatives to aspire to this position in the Canadian grain trade.... From 1923 to 1931 the open market survived as an alternative channel for the disposal of Canadian wheat in competition with the pools.
I would say that it's dishonest to say that the Wheat Board cannot survive as a voluntary wheat-marketing agency. It's already been done successfully. If the Wheat Board can't keep up to farmers in the 1920s, then I would suggest that they really probably do have a problem.
We've moved to bring farmers choice. To do that, the minister has moved ahead with a plebiscite that has three clear questions on it. I think every farmer understands those questions. They're very similar to the questions that are used on the Canadian Wheat Board surveys. So when they do their surveying, they--