Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, gentlemen, for coming here this evening. I appreciate your time, and I thank you for being here.
I look at this, and I'm just amazed. This debate has been going on in the Prairies for 20, 30, 40 years. There's nothing new you've brought forward today, Mr. Rosaasen, which hasn't already been discussed and debated. We could debate it for 30 hours and it wouldn't change anybody's opinion, whether a person agrees with you or not. Nor will anyone discuss whether or not you're paid by the board for past research or your colleagues' past research.
When you go onto the Prairies, it doesn't matter if you do a plebiscite; it's the question that becomes the factor. Who asks the question? What's the question that you ask? That's the issue.
It doesn't matter what is being said, because people have already said that they've heard all sides of the story. It's the opposition members who are disappointing. I don't blame them. They're not in the designated area, so they don't necessarily have the background that some of us farmers here on the Conservative side have. This debate has been going on forever.
When I farmed, I actually attended a combine-to-customer course and another. I actually went through the Wheat Board training and went through and saw the type of work you did, the value-added work you were doing. I was actually very impressed with that work. In fact, I was very impressed with the staff and the people you had working with me.
That's what kind of threw me off on this. You knew this was coming. In fact, in 2005-06, you issued a report called Harvesting opportunity. Mr. McCreary, I think you even presented it in Ottawa, if I remember correctly. You talked about looking forward and how to position the board for the future. You looked at different types of pricing programs and how to try to compromise with farmers. But you would never go far enough to solve this for the group of farmers that wanted freedom.
When you talked to the farmers who wanted to build a durum plant in Weyburn, the final answer was no, yet there are seven durum plants across the line in North Dakota. There has been bullying. There has been intimidation practised on the Prairies by your organization, and it's been going on for way too long. And that has to change.
What really disappoints me right now is that you've known that the change was coming. It was signalled far enough ahead that it was coming, maybe not this year, maybe not two years ago, but maybe five years from now with the WTO. Who knows? But you had to make a plan for change. I asked you over and over again if you had a plan B for change, if you had a plan B to protect these employees and to make sure that the farmers that wanted to use the CWB would have an option and have the ability to do that. Have you thought through that process?
We went to your guys to ask you to be part of the working group and to be involved in the change and transition. I understand that Mr. White did participate, but I understand, Mr. Oberg, that you did not participate. You chose not to participate.
Instead of actually going through and signing up farmers and acres and going to your customers and accredited exporters and saying, “You know what, guys? The change is happening, but we have x number of farmers, 22,000 supposedly, who support us and have committed their acreage, and we've gone ahead and signed them, and we have all these bushels of grain that we're going to have for the next two or three years,” you didn't. You could have done that. You could have gone to the market and the durum plants and said, “Hey, we have all this volume, so relax, it's okay”.
Then they wouldn't have come to Ottawa to say to me that they couldn't source milling durum or wheat in March and April of next year. But you didn't. You proceeded with an ideological battle, and that's what disappoints me the most.
Instead of looking at what's in the best interests of farmers, which is what I'm doing, and what the minister has done in changing the board of directors, you proceeded to go down a road of Thelma & Louise, saying that if you can't have it your way, you're going to run this thing off a cliff and make sure that it doesn't work for anybody.
Mr. Rosaasen, you talked about instability in the marketplace. Well, that's exactly what you did in the way you handled things here this summer. And that's disappointing, because you were not elected to destabilize the marketplace. You were not elected to create insecurity in the marketplace. You were elected to market grain. That's what you were elected to do, and you chose not to. You chose to go the other route and actually do more harm than good based on ideology. And that's very disappointing.
Mr. Oberg, how can you justify this? How can you justify it to farmers when you go back into your riding and say, “I told the NDP to destabilize things, to stall and stall and destabilize it”? How do you justify that? How do you justify spending money to defend a single desk, when a majority of farmers do not want you doing that? When you have a court order saying that you should not be doing that, how do you justify that?