The former Canadian Wheat Board Act, under section 47.1, provided that farmers were to have a vote on whether any grain was to be added to or removed from the marketing mandate of the Canadian Wheat Board. I had another client who challenged the government on this. We were unsuccessful for technical legal reasons, but we pushed that process up to the Supreme Court of Canada. Farmers were indeed denied any vote, which, under the previous legislation, they had been promised. Further, my client groups were never invited to any meetings on the legislation. I think the government of the day did listen very selectively to certain small farm groups that were strongly linked with big ag and big chem and big fertilizer and so forth, and it took its advice from that faction rather than listening to our group.
The Wheat Board at that time ran its own vote parallel to the sort of vote that would have been held under the Canadian Wheat Board Act, and about 62% of farmers said they would prefer to retain a Wheat Board, a single-desk marketing power, over having to sell to many buyers, all of whom compete against each other to offer the lowest price to the Japanese or the English or the Chinese or whoever.
One of my clients reported that he lost—