Canadian Chamber again backs voluntary CWB

The Canadian Chamber of Commerce has reiterated its support for a voluntary Canadian Wheat Board and now also urges no-cost licenses for shipping wheat and barley products out of province or for export.

The chamber’s membership approved a resolution to that effect during its four-day annual general meeting, which ended Tuesday in Gatineau, Que.

The Ottawa-based organization, whose membership includes over 300 Canadian chambers of commerce and boards of trade, bills itself as “the primary and vital connection between business and the federal government.”

Its resolution, introduced by the Red Deer, Alta. Chamber of Commerce and brought forward to the national body through its international affairs committee, is an update of the national group’s position from 2007, which expires this year.

The CWB’s current mandatory single-desk model for Prairie wheat and barley exports “restricts (value-added) investment in wheat and barley, significantly diminishing the ability of farmers and industry to respond to market demands and earn a premium return in recognition of the innovation provided, including innovation in value-added processing,” the resolution said.

Removal of the single desk in other countries, the national chamber said, “has led to new investment and growth in value-added activities, benefiting all members of wheat and barley value chains from consumers to processors to farmers.”

As examples, it cited Argentina, Australia, Ukraine and Russia.

As in 2007, the chamber’s new resolution calls for an amendment to the CWB Act to provide Prairie farmers and value-added processors with “the voluntary option to participate” in the CWB pooling system and give all farmers “the right to market their own production of wheat and barley to any buyer they choose.”

New for 2010, however, the chamber’s resolution also calls for Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz, “as a first step,” to immediately “instruct the CWB to issue no-cost licenses for all interprovincial and export shipments of value-added products of wheat and barley.”

Such a move, the chamber said, would “allow present and new processors to work directly with growers and thereby encourage an expansion of value-added processing of wheat and barley in the Prairie provinces.”

One pro-deregulation farmers’ group, the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association, hailed the chamber’s resolution in a release Wednesday.

“The chamber recognizes that greater prosperity will come about in an open and competitive market,” Kevin Bender, the farm group’s president and a farmer at Bentley, Alta., said in the release.

“One only has to look at the tremendous investment in (Canada’s) canola, pulse and oat industries to see the prosperity that can occur when farmers and processors are free to do business with one another.”

“Utmost pressure”

Other ag-related resolutions passed by the national chamber this week included a call for the federal government to help develop “a new pharmaceutical industry” in Canada by clearing paths to approve production of thebaine poppies, used to make drugs such as OxyContin and codeine without the narcotic properties of traditional poppies.

More generally, the chamber also called for Ottawa to “work with industry organizations to remove the encumbrances of  restrictive legislation that inhibit trade and growth of international and domestic markets” and to “work with countries that have restrictions in place on Canadian agricultural products to remove those restrictions and open closed international markets.”

As well, the chamber called for the federal government to regulate all biodiesel blends sold in the Canadian market for quality and blend levels.

The national group also passed a resolution calling on Ottawa to “apply the utmost pressure, on a continuous basis” through NAFTA and the World Trade Organization until the U.S. eliminates the “protectionist aspects” of its mandatory country-of-origin labelling (COOL) regulations.

Those four resolutions came to the national group from the Lethbridge, Alta., Lloydminster, Alta., Oshawa, Ont. and Medicine Hat, Alta. chambers respectively.