A Picture Butte area farmer said the fight to save the Canadian Wheat Board is a fight in favour of democracy.
Everett Tanis has already traveled across the country in support of the CWB and is speaking out against the federal government’s move to dismantle the wheat board.
Tanis said too much is being left out of the debate and misleading information is creating confusion on the real issue, that of democracy,
He said farmers have already been given the freedom to market their grain, as they choose by supporting the CWB. When the farmers took over the running of the wheat board from the federal government, they made the choice then to market through the CWB.
Over the years, Tanis said those who supported open market or dual market have always lost out in the voting to those who supported a single desk through the CWB. He added Freedom Day for the grain growers was Jan. 1, 1999, when the farmers took over the operation of the wheat board.
“The difference of governance gave us the freedom to choose.”
Since that time the board has been run by farmers for the farmers. Tanis said those who are now trying to disband the CWB are trying to go around the democratic voting process. He added they have even gone so far as to ask the national convention of Canadian Chambers of Commerce to pass a resolution to end single desk marketing through the CWB.
“They’ve got support all over Canada.”
But, he said, they do not tell people they lost the election at the CWB level to do away with the single desk. In fact he said those who support open or dual marketing have lost seven plebiscites on the issue at the CWB level but now they have the government backing them.
Tanis said the group who support disbanding the CWB are living in the past, and they don’t recognize the future and they’re trying to predict the future.
“They are going to be at the mercy of grain merchants.”
Tanis has always supported the CWB and said a lot of the people he knows who deal with the CWB continue to support the CWB. Those who don’t deal with the wheat board are the ones who don’t support it.
He added a number of those who are in the debate and rallying against the CWB are not even current permit holders and not active in the CWB.
Tanis has taken his pro-democracy rallying cry, in favour of the CWB, across Canada and said most Canadians don’t understand what is really at stake if the federal government dismantles the single desk wheat board.