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FEATURE
Churchill’s viability as a commercial port is doubtful.
In conjunction with the removal of the single desk
the government announced a per-tonne incentive
program for shipments through the Port. The owner
of the port facilities is not a grain company, so it is
not yet clear whether the subsidy will be sufficient
to attract grain away from the pipelines owned by
the grain handlers in the GHTS.
Maintaining the Port is a public policy decision.
The government’s express interest in Northern
sovereignty issues should be sufficient incentive to
find a resolution, but that can’t be taken for granted.
What of the long-term competitiveness
of western Canadian farmers?
With lower cost production (e.g., from the former
Soviet Union) steadily gaining market share in the
world grain trade and with continuing improvements
in milling and baking technology to allow qualityconscious
processors to successfully utilize lower
quality wheats, western Canadian farmers will face
continuing pressure on prices. In addition, the major
exporting countries in the developed world, namely
the U.S. and the EU, continue to support their farmers
with massive subsidy programs and show little sign
of dramatically changing that practice. The collapse
of the current Doha Round of WTO talks means that
no reform of agricultural subsidies is likely in the next
decade. The CWB was by no means the sole agent
of competitiveness for western Canadian farmers.
However, with its removal a significant public policy
instrument with the potential to assist in securing that
competitiveness is gone.
Prairie economies, farmers now have only a shadow of
the political clout that they once did.
In the absence of political power in their hands, relief,
should it be needed, would presumably have to come
as part of a much broader public policy discussion.
Where do the opportunities most likely lie?
Problems are often easier to spot than
opportunities (particularly for lawyers). However, a
few obvious areas are:
• Offering the marketing, brokerage, riskmanagement
and similar services that were
formerly provided by the CWB;
• Niche marketing in areas that the large grain
companies (focused on bulk handling) are not well
positioned to pursue;
• Assuming the major traders are fighting amongst
themselves to fill the largest parts of the vacuum
left by the CWB’s demise, that leaves room for
smaller entities to pick up the smaller but still
profitable pieces;
• The development of proprietary varieties of wheat
may hold promise (though that is not for the thinly
capitalized or the faint of heart);
• There isn’t likely room for the development
of significant value-added processing on
the Prairies as end-users (millers/bakers/
pasta-producers) locate their operations
near population centres in order to minimize
transportation and inventory costs.
Hopefully Canada would decline to enter the
subsidy game, but it is foreseeable that some sort of
intervention may have to be considered.
Will western Canadian farmers have a loud
enough voice in the political arena?
Whatever else it may have been, the CWB was a
source of significant farmer power in the western
Canadian grain supply chain. It came into being over
75 years ago because farmers had the political power
to make it happen. With the exodus of people from
the farm to the city and the diversification of the
James E. McLandress, B. A., LL.B, ICD.D
was called to the Manitoba bar in 1989,
Mr. McLandress was General Counsel
to the CWB for 11 years. He is currently
President of Blairgowrie Consulting, Ltd.,
a newly formed company providing legal,
governance and strategic advice.
UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA, FACULTY OF LAW robsonhall.ca 108