Free the
Farmers:
The wheat board no longer has a place in our liberal democracy
Reprinted with Permission
The Ottawa Citizen
(October 4, 2002 - Ottawa
Citizen) 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 $7,5000 before Nov. 1 or face jail time. So far,
they're opting for ail. "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 d3efiant. 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.
© 2002 The Ottawa Citizen
Reprinted with Permission |
