News
22.01.2010
Canada Wheat Board Loses Bid for Spending Ban Hearing
The Canadian Wheat Board, which sells wheat and barley from western Canada, lost a bid for a hearing before the country’s highest court over a government ban on the promotion of its monopoly.
The Supreme Court of Canada today denied the board’s request for a hearing in a bid to overturn an appeals court ruling upholding the ban. The court gave no reason for its decision.
The farmer-controlled wheat board and the Conservative Party government have squabbled because Prime Minister Stephen Harper wants to end the board’s monopoly and let individual farmers sell the grain independently. The board says it’s able to win higher prices than farmers can get on their own.
Canada’s agriculture minister at the time, Chuck Strahl, on Oct. 5, 2006, ordered the board to stop spending money to promote its monopoly, saying it was inappropriate for the agency to spend producers’ dues on partisan activities. The minister said the board should reflect government policy.
“The directive is motivated principally to silencing the Wheat Board,” Federal Court Judge Roger Hughes said. As such, Hughes ruled, the directive “impinges on freedom of expression” in violation of Canada’s constitution and the minister didn’t have the authority to make such an order because government funds aren’t at risk.
A three-member panel of the Federal Court of Appeal overturned Hughes’s decision in June, with Judge Marc Noel writing that the board is “a creature of statute” and has no powers, rights or duties except those granted in the law.
Since the government banned the board from promoting its monopoly using money from producers, it has no constitutional protection, Noel said.
The case is Between the Canadian Wheat Board and Attorney General of Canada, 33334, Supreme Court of Canada (Ottawa).
Bloomberg
