Rural Canada Relies on the Canadian Wheat Board

In the ongoing debate about the future of the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB), one of the arguments for dismantling it is to allow farmers to find their own markets and presumably a better price for their wheat and barley.
On the surface, independence seems a good thing. However, it brings to mind an analogy: many if not most Canadians own at least some mutual funds, usually in their RRSPs. One could study and become an expert on investing and do the buying and selling that mutual fund managers do on our behalf, but we do have other ways, some useful, to spend our time. So we pay a fee, hopefully a reasonable one, to a mutual fund to do that work for us.
Yes, wheat farmers could track the price of wheat daily and sell their crop to a grain company at just the right time for a really good price.
However, unless they run a really large operation, the larger number, prefer to stick to farming and leave the grain trading to the paid staff at the CWB. The CWB offers a number of advantages to wheat farmers. First is price pooling which protects from abrupt price shifts so that farmers don't have to deliver their wheat exactly when the price peaks.
If the single desk goes, so will the producer car loading sites. Producer cars mean farmers can bypass grain companies' elevators and save themselves $1,200 per hopper car. The producer cars use branchlines and shortline railroads - what will happen to them and the communities along them?
As economist Murray Fulton said, "The . . . loss of the CWB's single-desk . . . would make the Canadian system . . . more like that in the (U.S.) . . . Grain company and railroad competition would fall, . . . the current freight revenue cap would disappear, and less value would be returned to farmers . . . These changes . . . are irreversible."
We can imagine a modern feudal system with farmers at the mercy of multinational corporations who'll decide what to grow and how much to grow.
Farms will have to grow bigger; there'll be fewer small- and medium-farming operations and the loss of small, rural communities with their schools, hospitals, community centres and other services. One could drive through rural Canada and find virtually no inhabitants.
Do Harper and company and their corporate friends care about rural Canada? It seems not.
Mark Sandilands
Lethbridge
Published in the Lethbridge Herald, Sunday, July 17th.  http://www.lethbridgeherald.com/letters-to-the-editor/rural-canada-relieson-cwb-71711.html

Strong leadership in perilous times

The news today is laden with bad economic news. The Toronto Stock Exchange dropped almost 350 points and the Dow dropped 400+ into the 10,000s even though the US government bailed out AIG to the tune of $85billion.

As someone told me on the doorstep tonight, Stephen Harper still doesn’t get it. He seems to believe that Canada is safe from the economic woes of the Americans. As the former head of the National Citizen's coalition and a graduate of the Calgary school of economics (a clone of the Chicago School), he still firmly believes the market will solve all.

The world is moving rapidly back towards government regulation of the financial sector and the economy in general: Harper has not moved an inch from his laissez-faire ideology.

A recent article in the Globe and Mail addressed this:
"With the nationalization of American mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the February nationalization of Britain's Northern Rock, governments are stepping in again. The heady days of conservative economics are over for now." (Skidelsky is professor emeritus of political economy at Warwick University, England, and author of a prize-winning Keynes biography)
Read the rest of Skidelsky's article

Anyone wanting to read more about the Chicago School of Economics should read from a left perspective must read Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine, attend her upcoming lecture at the University of Lethbridge, or, at the very least, visit her website:
Naomi Klein Official Website