Four western Canadian farmers have served their amended statement of claim in the Federal Court of Canada alleging Ottawa shortchanged farmers by approximately $720 million dollars of farmers’ money from the operations of the Canadian Wheat Board in 2011/12 when the government was dismantling the marketing organization. The statement was served Friday, July 10 in Ottawa.
Speaking from his farm near Swift Current, Saskatchewan, Stewart Wells, a former farmer-elected Director of the CWB, and now chair of the Friends of the Canadian Wheat Board, said that the percentage of CWB revenue allocated by the Ottawa appointed Board of Directors during the 2011/12 crop year to farmers was “substantially out of line” with previous years of CWB operations.
“The audited financial statements of the Canadian Wheat Board show that when the elected farmers were running the CWB almost 93% of sales revenue was returned to farmers between 1998 and the 2010/11,” Wells said. “There is no justification for the government-run CWB to return just 83% of sales revenue to farmers in 2011/12. The difference between 93% and 83% is in the order of $720 million. It should be noted that 2011/12 sales recorded the third highest revenue since farmers were put in charge of the Board in 1998” said Wells.
Also, for the first time in 79 years the Minister of Agriculture decided to withhold the financial results of the CWB for the 2012/13 crop year making it impossible to follow the money as the CWB was transformed from a farmer-run and accountable organization to another foreign-owned and secretive margin trader.
“The costs of restructuring the CWB” Wells noted, “were new liabilities created by the government, and the government announced that $349 million of taxpayer monies were to be set aside to be used to cover these costs. However, it appears that while the majority of restructuring costs were already met by 2012, the government-run CWB decided not to use all of the taxpayer money in 2011/12 in favour of accessing those funds in subsequent years. In fact it appears that the government-run CWB even used money from pooling accounts to cover some of the restructuring costs.”
Anders Bruun, counsel for the Friends noted “The CWB Act makes it clear that only the actual costs of the CWB’s operations to sell a crop can be deducted from the money to be paid to farmers for that crop. We are concerned that the CWBs expenses more than doubled for the 2011/12 crop year after the farmer directors were removed on Dec. 15, 2011.”
“The lack of farmer oversight at the Board table, together with the Minister’s cover-up of CWB finances makes it imperative that the class action move ahead in order to determine what really happened to the money farmers should have earned from their grain sales in 2011/12. Given the substantial amount of taxpayer money involved we will also be asking the Auditor General of Canada to conduct an investigation” concluded Wells.
