Western grain growers deserve apology — and perhaps a tear

Canadian Wheat Board cost producers millions of dollars, writes Noel Hyslip.

When I watch the evening news, I can’t help but notice that our prime minister sheds tears while making apologies for the poor leadership of previous politicians.

At the same time, he will sometimes offer large sums of cash as compensation for governments’ wrongdoing.

I too am a victim of wrongful actions by past governments, as is every western farmer who suffered financial loss at the hands of the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly.

The CWB monopoly was created in September 1943 to hold down wheat prices during the Second World War. The war ended in 1945. The wheat board monopoly ended 67 years later, in 2012.

In 1947, Senator Walter Aseltine calculated that in the first 3½ years of CWB operations, western wheat growers suffered $535 million in lost income. The monopoly was supposed to end after the war, but Ottawa instead entered into wheat agreements with foreign buyers — often at bargain prices.

Former prime minister John Diefenbaker argued at one point that Ottawa’s decision to make western farmers finance war reconstruction was ridiculous. He said that when aircraft and other war materials were sent to Britain, it was never the manufacturers that were expected to pay the cost.

“Why,” he wanted to know, “were farmers being treated so differently and unfairly.”

The CWB monopoly thus began to operate on five-year renewable parliamentary mandates. This was the practice right up until the 1960s, when the federal government quietly, and without any real debate, made the monopoly a permanent fixture. Western farmers thus laboured for many years under the auspices of this all-powerful entity.

After years of lobbying the government for reform, only to achieve complicated marketing options still through the single desk, in the spring of 1996, the decision was made by myself and several other Alberta farmers to export a 25-kilogram sack of barley and donate it to the Montana 4-H Club. It was intended as a demonstration to show the power the government held over farmers.

Upon our return to the Canadian border, we found a large increase in staff at the Canada Customs crossing, as well as several members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

After a few hours of peacefully processing our paperwork, we were charged with exporting grain without a Canadian Wheat Board permit, which carried a penalty of 45 days in jail, and we had our vehicles seized.

For six, long stress-filled years, we were hauled in and out of courtrooms only to find out that we were guilty. Even though we had all the time, effort and cost of producing that crop, it wasn’t ours to even give away.

On Oct. 31, 2002, with the harvest unfinished and the crop still laying in the field, and with family, friends and hundreds of farmers looking on in disbelief, I, along with 12 others, turned ourselves into the Lethbridge courthouse, where we were put in handcuffs and leg chains, placed in the back of a van and hauled to the provincial correctional centre in Lethbridge. It is a process that haunts me to this day.

As a result of these events, which caused international embarrassment for Canada, after a change in government, the Canadian Wheat Board’s single desk, wartime monopoly was brought to a close. It ended on Aug. 1, 2012.

I am writing because I’m wondering when and where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will draw the line on apologies, and on paying compensation for the hardship and oppression of Canadian citizens.

Perhaps, he will want to make his way to an Alberta farm meeting, apologize on behalf of the government, shed a tear, and settle up for the financial losses suffered by thousands of western grain growers.

We were put in handcuffs and leg chains.