If you thought the federal legislation enacted in 2012 which brought an end to the single-desk grain selling system in Western Canada was the last word on the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) — wait, there’s more.
Over four years ago during the pause in life caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Alberta farmer and former CWB director Ken Motiuk thought it a good time to start researching a book recounting the decades-long fight by many farmers like himself and other grain industry players to win the freedom of choice in how to market their grain.
That effort resulted this spring in the publication of a treatise by Motiuk titled Culture of Control: Farming with the Shackles of the Canadian Wheat Board. If you like agriculture and history and ever wondered about the rise and fall of the CWB era, the 330-page book is a good read.
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This isn’t just the rainy-day musings of a 70-something, third-generation farmer from the northeastern Alberta farming community of Mundare. It is a well-researched, well-written, well-documented, easy-to-read recounting, albeit from a “reformer’s” viewpoint, of how the CWB came to be and served a useful role in grain marketing in 1936; how some 35 years later the power of the agency had weakened the western Canadian grain handling and marketing system; and how it took another 35 or more years of protesting, lobbying and political wheeling and dealing to finally free the industry from the marketing monopoly.
Motiuk opens the book with a look at growing up on a mixed farm in Alberta in the 1960s and ’70s, recognizing then that the control, policies and programs of the CWB had created a “mess.”
“The problem was too much regulation, too many regulatory bodies with overlapping jurisdiction controlling the system, lack of market signals to farms and a disinterest from railways in hauling grain because they were losing money on every bushel they shipped,” he writes.
“This monopolistic structure was supported by self-serving farm organizations led by the Prairie wheat pools, who continually planted fear and uncertainty in the minds of farmers that any change to a market-driven system would be to the demise of their finances and the Prairie farm economy.”
Motiuk walks the reader through the evolution of western Canadian farming from the beginning of the 20th century and introduction of the first short-lived wheat board during the First World War. As the Prairie pools were established, they banded to create the Central Selling Agency (CSA), a system which failed during the Great Depression. The federal government bought all the CSA grain inventory with the pools lobbying the federal government to create a compulsory wheat board. The new CWB was formed in 1936.
Motiuk got to experience that Prairie grain handling and marketing structure from several different angles. He was a quasi-political creature, working for many years as a special assistant to Vegreville MP Don Mazankowski. “Maz” served in a number of roles including federal transportation minister. In the early days Motiuk worked for Alberta Agriculture’s statistics branch. He also served on the federal Farm Debt Review Board and the Senior Grain Transportation Committee, was a public governor on the Winnipeg Commodity Exchange, and was involved with commodity organizations such as the Western Canadian Wheat Growers. Eventually he was elected a director of United Grain Growers (UGG). Somewhere in all that activity, he and wife Wendy also in the early 1990s were named Canada’s Outstanding Young Famers.
Motiuk describes the Prairie pools and UGG as grain handling entities with widely different philosophies. They both had all or partially farmer-elected boards, “but the pools attracted farmer-directors with a socialist mindset that called for government intervention and CWB control,” he writes. “UGG tended to elect farmer-directors who believed in market-based solutions with more freedom for farmers to make their own decisions.” While he liked the UGG philosophy, his time as a director to his dismay eventually fell victim to UGG internal politics.
The end of the Western Grain Transportation Agency and the payment of the Crow benefit to railways in 1996 sparked a movement toward consolidation within the Prairie grain handling companies. With federal Liberal governments in power, the CWB was well entrenched. The Mulroney government was cautious about rocking the CWB boat too much, but in 1989 Charlie Mayer, as minister responsible for the CWB, did manage to get oats removed from CWB jurisdiction. With Stephen Harper’s Conservative government elected in 2006, the tide began to turn.
On the 15-member CWB were both government-appointed and farmer-elected directors. Motiuk was appointed to the board by the Harper government in 2006, and during elections James Chatenay of Alberta and Dwayne Anderson of Saskatchewan were also elected. They were among the first “reformers” to sit on the CWB board. They didn’t have much influence against the majority of directors but served as a burr under the CWB status quo saddle … it was a start.
In these chapters Motiuk takes the reader behind the scenes of the CWB operations. At his first meeting for example, he was appointed to serve on the audit committee and governance and management resources committee. “I was walking into a situation where my beliefs were directly opposed to the majority in the room,” he writes. It wasn’t the most pleasant environment, as he notes there was even a very rigid seating hierarchy and “many of the board members lacked social decorum, business acumen and financial knowledge. This meeting was a real gong show. The CWB was run by a group of financial neanderthals. Their main interest was mindlessly supporting and promoting the CWB without question.”
That was 2006. It wasn’t until 2011 when the Harper government won a majority and then-agriculture minister Gerry Ritz introduced the Marketing Freedom for Grain Farmers Act — the act that spelled the end of the CWB monopoly. Through the chapters Motiuk “pulls back the curtain” to describe, from his front-row seat, the people, places, events and attitudes that prevailed through those changing times.
Motiuk notes despite decades of fearmongering claiming the loss of the CWB would be the end of Prairie agriculture, it soon became clear that “No, Chicken Little, the sky did not fall,” as the single-desk agency passed into history.
In the closing pages, Motiuk has a thoughtful look at the future of the family farm, noting the impact of climate change and politics surrounding the environment can’t be ignored.
The book is well done with lots of photos and illustrations. Although I wasn’t a farmer, I was an observer of the Prairie agriculture industry for more than 35 years, so the mentions of people and events from the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s make for a great walk down memory lane.
Culture of Control, published by Friesen Press out of Manitoba, will be available in June. You can buy from the publisher or directly from Motiuk via email ($30 plus $18 mailing), or from selected stores or online booksellers. The price will vary with who’s selling (and shipping), but it’s going to be in that $40-$60 range.
If you consider the cost of the book is about the same as six or seven bushels of wheat at 2025 prices, note that thanks to the events described in that book you do have the freedom today to handle your own marketing; in many respects, that is pretty good value.
