Thanks.
Mr. Hill is not telling quite the whole story there. The returns of profit to farmers were a record based on the history of Canadian Wheat Board returns. If we were to look at what the open market returns were, though, we could have achieved much higher returns. That year, the Canadian Wheat Board returned less than the average of what the open market price was.
As an example from just my farm, I had 20,000 bushels of durum. The best I could get on the PRO in January of 2008 was $12 through the Wheat Board. The open market that day was sitting at $21.80 or something like that. When I phoned the board, there was nothing more I could do.
Taking a loss of roughly $10 per bushel to my farm is $200,000, and I'm considered a small farmer. That's a huge hit for me because I was compelled to go through the monopoly system.
Mr. Hill is correct in that there were record profits to farmers based on CWB returns, but not based on what the real market was in the world and on what we could have achieved.