Such is the case with an obscure little bill that landed before the House of Commons recently. Bill C-57 is a small bill that amends the board selection process for the Canadian Wheat Board.
The modification is innocuous enough:
3.02 (1) Four directors are appointed by the Governor in Council on the recommendation of the Minister. Ten directors are elected, in accordance with sections 3.06 to 3.08 and the regulations, by actual producers who produced at least 120 tonnes of grain in either of the two previous completed crop years. The president is appointed by the Governor in Council in accordance with section 3.09.
In fact you have to and look at the existing act and read section 3.02 before this amendment makes any sense whatsoever:
3.02 (1) Four directors are appointed by the Governor in Council on the recommendation of the Minister. Ten directors are elected by producers in accordance with sections 3.06 to 3.08 and the regulations. The president is appointed by the Governor in Council in accordance with section 3.09.
In other words the real change is that now only producers who produce a minimum amount of grain are permitted to participate in the board elections process.
Not being a farmer, I'm not sure if a 120 tonnes of grain is a huge amount - but I went off and did some investigating to try and determine just how much this is.
First, I located Alberta's Bushel-Tonne calculator - which told me that it takes some 4,400 bushels of grain to achieve 120 metric tonnes. But that doesn't answer the "how many bushels does an acre of land produce?" question - which turns out to be somewhere around 40 bushels to the acre for Alberta (yes, there's year over year variance, but I just wanted a working number to get some idea of how much land would be involved for a producer to qualify under these rules. A quick crunch turns up a number of 110 acres would have to be committed.
The amount of land doesn't sound all that big - 110 acres is about 1/6 of a section. When many farms are much larger than that, that doesn't seem to be a big deal. Until you sit back and consider the political games that have been going on around the Wheat Board. What this effectively does is cut off small producers (e.g. so-called "hobby farms" and producers who are trying to do multiple crops.
How does this fit into the HarperCon$ ambitions to dismantle the Wheat Board? Well, what it does is take out the small producers who benefit the most from the Wheat Board. In theory, larger producers have a sufficient amount of output that they would be "of interest" in their own right to buyers looking for grain from Canada.
In fact, it is the larger producers - those who have expanded by buying up adjacent farmland and consolidating it under the control of a small handful of people - who have the greatest objections to the Wheat Board. Strangely enough, they are the producers who believe that they will benefit the most from a dismantling the Wheat Board.
However, as repeated votes in the past have shown, they are not the majority of farmers. So, what is really happening here is the HarperCon$ are moving to disenfranchise the people that they find politically inconvenient for their agenda. What is particularly vile about this when you line it up against even the limited democracy that goes on with publicly traded companies, it's fundamentally dishonest. Even as a small shareholder (holding common stock), I have the right to vote for who should be on the board. That vote may not mean much alongside the massive weight that institutional investors can throw around, but it still exists. The HarperCon$ are kneecapping small farmers and telling them that their needs don't matter.
Who is next on their list? Disenfranchising women? Oh wait - they've already started on that.
[Update 19:30]
A reader pointed out that there are 640 Acres to a Section, not a quarter section as I had originally written. The error has been corrected.
[/Update]
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