The painful knots the Tories tie themselves in over supply management

The Wheat Board monopoly is bad because it denies farmers’ property rights, but eastern supply management is good because .... farmers like it. Such are the twists and turns of Conservative agricultural policy these days

by BARRY WILSON

The Conservative Party rural caucus on Parliament Hill must have a staff chiropractor to deal with their aches and pains these days.

They come from the knots Conservatives tie themselves into as they try to explain the visceral hatred of Prairie-based, grain single-desk monopoly selling that co-exists with a love of Central Canada-based, supply management single-desk monopoly selling. Oh, Lord knows they try to explain the difference.

The Canadian Wheat Board export monopoly is bad because it denies farmers property rights and marketing decisions for their property, goes the argument.

The Conservative minority government is moving inexorably to end the monopoly. Their most fervent supporters on the issue, including some prominent prairie MPs, insist that this is not an issue to be decided by a farmer vote because it is an issue of inalienable human rights, property rights.

By contrast, supply management, as practiced mainly in Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada is a good marketing monopoly.
Did we mention that Conservatives hold most of the rural western seats and expect to continue that dominance but really need central and eastern rural seats, where supply management is popular, to retain government?
Did we mention that these Conservatives love supply management despite the fact that the predecessor Reform party and the now-prime minister Stephen Harper once considered supply management an unconscionable price-fixing cartel?

But now, when opponents of the Conservative campaign against the Canadian Wheat Board suggest it is a precursor to an attack on supply management compulsory marketing, it turns out critics are misinformed about the true nature of supply management.

Broken down into its regional component parts, the Conservatives have two arguments to justify their support of the supply management single-desk monopoly.

Western Conservatives tell their voters that supply management is voluntary, unlike the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly. As House of Commons agriculture committee chair Gerry Ritz from Saskatchewan explained recently, easterners have a choice about whether they buy quota and enter the supply-managed system or not. Western farmers with wheat and barley farms have no such choice.

Of course, like eastern farmers, westerners could choose to use their land for something other than wheat and barley. But that merely complicates the anti-wheat board argument. Ontario and Quebec Conservatives have a different explanation for the difference.

The second Conservative argument is that farmers in the supply-managed sector love the system. While farmers in the wheat board area are divided, they are 100 percent united in the supply-managed sectors, Bruce County Conservative Larry Miller said at a November agriculture committee meeting.

Never mind that his western colleagues insist that it is not a matter of democracy (lest farmers say they disagree) but of property rights. Never mind that there are producers in supply-managed sectors, admittedly a small minority, who want out from the onerous quota expenses but are not allowed to market outside the system. It is not 100 percent acceptance and western free market promoters would insist that one producer forced to sell through a monopoly is one too many.

Such are the machinations of a political party trying to sell different messages in different regions about the virtues or vices of marketing monopolies.

Hopefully for the Conservatives, chiropractic charges are tax deductible. BF

Barry Wilson is a member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery specializing in agriculture.