The thousands of votes cast in support of the Canadian Wheat Board’s single-desk policy this week will not stop the federal government from ending it this fall, according to a local member of Parliament.
The Canadian Wheat Board released the results of its plebiscite on wheat and barley marketing on Monday. With about 38,300 ballots counted, the mail-in vote showed that about 62 per cent of farmers wanted to keep the single-desk system for wheat. About 51 per cent wanted to keep it for barley.
The non-binding vote was organized by the board after the federal Conservatives said they would end the single-desk policy by Aug. 1, 2012, without holding a plebiscite on it, arguing that the recent federal election gave them the mandate they needed to make the change. They plan to table legislation to do so during the coming parliamentary session.
“This government is out of touch with farmers,” board chair Allen Oberg said at a news conference. “There is no mandate from farmers to strip away their marketing power and hand it over to private corporations.”
This vote, which had a participation rate on par with that of the last three federal elections, should leave no doubt as to what farmers want from their government, Oberg said.
“Farmers do not want to give up their power to the grain corporations. They don’t want to sacrifice profits for the sake of ideology.”
He called on Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz to respect the results of the vote and keep the single desk.
This vote will have no effect on the Conservatives’ plans for the board, said Westlock-St. Paul MP Brian Storseth.
“We made it clear from the beginning that we’ve got a strong mandate from Western Canadian farmers to go forward with our changes that we’ve been promising for at least three general elections now,” he said.
Grain groups should be working together to explore the positives that could come out of ending the single desk, he said, instead of standing in the way of progress.
Farmers who want to kick it old-school should head to Onoway later this month for an old-time threshing demonstration.
The Onoway and District Historical Guild will hold its fifth annual threshing bee Sept. 24 at the Turnbull Farm. The event is meant to show today’s kids how farmers harvested grain in the old days.
Threshing machines have been around since around the 1880s, said Brian Turnbull, one of the organizers of the event, and are the ancestors of today’s combine harvesters. Some local farmers used threshers as recently as the 1960s.
Both machines use the same principles, Turnbull said, except the modern ones are faster and self-propelled. “If you ever threshed 10 to 15 acres in one day [in the old days], that was a really big day.” Modern combines can easily do 100 acres a day.
Local students will head to the Turnbull Farm east of Onoway this week to help with the first part of the process, Turnbull said. Using a binder — a horse-drawn device with a series of rotating blades — they’ll mow down the crop, bundle it up and let it dry for about a week. On the 24th, volunteers will fire up a vintage 1940s-era thresher and start chucking the bundles into it. The thresher uses screens and blowers to separate the wheat from the chaff.
The event will also feature food, antique tractors, blacksmithing and a tug-of-war. For details, call Turnbull at 780-967-2336.
