PUBLICATION:
The Ottawa Citizen
DATE:
2002.10.04
EDITION:
Final
SECTION:
News
PAGE:
A18
SOURCE:
The Ottawa Citizen
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Free
the farmers: The wheat board no longer has a place in our liberal democracy
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Alberta
farmer Jim Ness and several of his peers are likely to go to jail next month.
Their crime: attempting to market a legal product they produced themselves. How
can a free society permit this?
In
1996, 14 farmers were convicted of illegally transporting grain to the United
States because they didn't have the proper paperwork from the Canadian Wheat
Board, the Second World War-era federal agency that claims all rights to a
farmer's grain in Western Canada. Mr. Ness and the others must pay fines ranging
from $1,000 to $7,500 before Nov. 1 or face jail time. So far, they're opting
for jail. "We'll stand shoulder to shoulder and get locked away like common
criminals," Mr. Ness vows.
He
and his fellow rebels are right to feel defiant. No country can call itself
truly free when a large sector of its economy is not. The Canadian Wheat Board
is imposed on farmers without their consent. It sets prices and quotas as it
wishes, and, as policy, does not reveal how it functions to the very people
forced to deal with it. Most of us take our ability to buy and sell for granted.
The wheat board denies this basic right to western farmers.
The
board's background is an interesting exercise in arbitrary power. Using the same
law it passed to expropriate property from interned Japanese-Canadians during
the Second World War, the federal government expanded the wartime powers granted
to its wheat board and the control the board had over other grains. Although
western farmers protested, the British Privy Council sided with the government.
For
the 21st century, it's time to reform this arrangement: Eliminate the board, or
turn it over to the farmers themselves, with membership entirely voluntary. It
is offensive that anyone is required to sell his production and skill to one
buyer, namely the federal government, at the price it determines in secret.
"Property
rights have value for more than economic reasons. The right to own and enjoy
property is the basis of moral independence," wrote Kevin Avram, a member
of the Prairie Centre Policy Institute, a group opposed to the board, in 1998.
"Societies which are the most immoral are those which have the least regard
for property."
When the federal government defends the existence of the wheat board, it is defending the expropriation of farmers' property in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Virtually no other profession in this nation -- and that includes grain farmers in Ontario and Quebec -- is forced to give up the efforts of its own production to a government monopoly just so its members can work in a particular trade (true, Quebec is trying the same game with its doctors just now, but so far hasn't succeeded). It's time we put to pasture the notion that farmers shouldn't be allowed to grow their business like any other.