Wheat Board Supporters are "Communists"

Alberta decries Web message insulting wheat board

I swear it wasn't me who wrote it. ROTFL

Anyway, Only another ten days or so and we will know the results and hopefully it means Liberals will no longer be able to jail prairie farmers in the future for selling grain to anybody but a Liberal government.

The Conservative government will have been worth it just for that.

Bye bye CWB.

I'm not a fan of the CWB and will be glad to see it go. I would recomend putting money into agricultural development. In the States we have Universities that specialize in agriculture. What are the Canadian counterparts?

It is a lose consortum of private developers, farmers, government and universities. The problem with the CWB is not in research but poor marketing ability. When the Liberals had to start jailing farmers for even donating a sack of grain to an American 4H club we knew the writing was on the wall. Dion says that no matter what prairie farmers decide he doesn'tcare, he promises he will reconstitute the CWB so that the west can't compete with eastern farmers.

I don't think the idea of the CWB is a bad one. The execution, well... The concept that Canada can stand toe to toe with foreign agricultural producers is crap. The subsidies the US/Euro farmers recieve in the form of "insurance" and anything else they can come up with would result in de facto foreign control of our commodities and their prices if we tried to. THIS IS IN NO WAY A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD. Canada has neither the population/output nor the cash commitment to compete with global conglomerates in terms of trading, so even if policy protected the commodity traders from foreign ownership brokerages in Canada would merge to compete with them, get bought out by Saskpool or Cargill and farmers would end up having to go through them instead. Monopolies or Monopolist economics would result with no benefit to the primary producer - the very people it's supposed to benefit. It's happened in sawmilling (forestry), retail (clothing/dry goods), and it would happen in this industry as well. When was the last time the majority of us went to the mom& pop clothing store?

If the Feds want Canadians to come out on top (which I wonder about sometimes) the need to take the CWB and revamp it. Keep the collective clout that they have for dealing with foreign markets so they can help dictate a best price scenario, but offer more options to the farmer. How about enabling the farmer to add some secondary manufacturing to their facilities? That's where the money is anyways! Subsidize small industry startups with contracts that could only be doled out by a government body trying to spur growth in small town Canada. It would take a co operative style organization (much like that exists for other producers already) of local manufacuters to deal with the CWB and develop contracts that they have the capacity to fill. CWB goes and acts as the market maker (like a commodity exchange). Foreign buyers have a one stop shop to place bids/contracts. The billion dollar question is: can the CWB act in an efficient enough manner?

I would suggest supporting the local guy long before anyone cares about the global trade of these commodities. This is a faster, safer, and easier way to make Canadians richer (which is what this is about) - giving monopolistic control of commodities to a profit seeking privately owned body is a recipie for poverty. If you're interested in that, I'm pretty sure you could get in as a "Mart" store employee or something similar;). Create independantly owned medium sized business that has an umbrella of publicly owned clout to knock back the foreign controlled interests. It's our economy and we should own as much of it as possible!

Regardless the spin, the bottom line is that Crown Corporations are always inefficient and only serve a bloated bureaucracy. These stalinist tactics of jailing farmers for selling wheat privately smack of stalins forced collectivization of the 30's. We all know that the USSR's central planning was a monumental failure. Yeah supporters of the wheat board are defacto communists....by definition if nothing else.

"Communists?"

Sounds like the Naomi Klein school of political labeling.

You think you have it bad now.

It's almost like sasquatch2's trolling a bit;)....

As for the inefficiency of crown corporations... If anybody has ever worked in the public and private sector the margin isn't as wide as one might think. There is plenty of corruption, mismanagement, inefficiency, poor planning, nepotism, underbudgeting, etc within the private sector. Don't give the government a monopoly on that! One difference is that a lot of private company mishaps don't get the exposure that the gov't ones do. But alright, give the government 20% less effiency than the private sector. Hell, make it 30% (whatever). After accounting for writeoffs and other basic measures to hide profits from the tax man that private companies use it still comes out even - ish or even cheaper in some cases (ie healthcare). I guess the point is that the accounting measures are different so the picture painted is different. Hence all the propaganda about massive gov't inefficiency.

As an individual I run screaming from government intervention because it's like doing business with an extraordinarly large company. If you've had dealings with extra large oil companies, you know what I mean! Gov't can always stand a good dose of private sector "can do" work ethic and could sure do with an easier firing policy as well as some meaningful performance review processes. But as for total damnation, I stop short.

If the wheat board is such a great thing, then why don't the eastern farmers join it?