The Prairie farmers’ group that sought to challenge changes to the voters’ list for Canadian Wheat Board director elections is considering its next move after its application was shot down Friday in Federal Court.
The challenge brought by Friends of the Canadian Wheat Board was dismissed with costs in a ruling Friday by Federal Court Justice James Russell.
The FCWB sought a review of orders made by federal Ag Minister Gerry Ritz in 2008 before CWB director elections that year.
Ritz limited the number of CWB permit book holders who would automatically get a ballot only to those who delivered wheat or barley to the CWB in the 2007-08 or 2008-09 crop years.
Read Also
Field-by-field mapping could improve yield, productivity predictions
University of Saskatchewan researchers are using field border mapping to collect data on field variability, including problematic weeds, and to predict things like yields.
Other growers, or those who grow other grains, thus need to apply for ballots, whereas previously all valid permit book holders received CWB election ballots.
FCWB member Stewart Wells, an organic farmer from Swift Current, Sask., and past-president of the National Farmers Union, said Monday that he would characterize Russell’s ruling as “a major setback for basic farmer democracy.”
The FCWB’s members, a dozen of whom were listed on the court application challenging Ritz’s order, “are currently discussing the possibility of an appeal,” Wells said.
Russell, who heard the case Jan. 20 in Winnipeg, wrote Friday that in his eyes, the FCWB members’ concern was not how Ritz’s order affects their voting rights, but to ensure the order doesn’t lead to changes in how the CWB does business.
“Highly tenuous”
Specifically, Russell wrote, there are “suggestions” from the FCWB members that behind Ritz’s decision is “some devious ploy to load the board of (the) CWB with directors who will be sympathetic to new ways of grain marketing.
However, Russell wrote, “there is no evidence before me to connect these speculative fears with (Ritz’s order) and, even if there were, any personal impact upon the applicants would remain highly tenuous.”
Russell said he views Ritz’s order as “an attempt to ensure that only (grain) producers get onto the voters’ list and vote for directors. This is precisely what the (CWB Act) says must occur.”
And, he wrote, “measures aimed at ensuring the integrity of the voters’ list do not curtail the rights of producers. If producers who do not deliver (grain to the CWB) choose not to have themselves placed on the (voters’) list, then that is their choice.”
Wells, however, argued that Russell’s ruling, if “taken to its logical conclusion… means that a (federal) cabinet minister could, with impunity, override the voting regulations with a simple letter to the CWB directing them to remove ‘all farmers whose last name begins with W’ from the initial voters’ list.”
Where Russell ruled that the direct effect of Ritz’s ruling on the 12 FCWB members was minimal at most, Wells argued that “farmers who hold permit books and sell grain through the CWB, and whose livelihoods, in large measure, depend on the outcome of (CWB) elections,” should have the right to challenge such moves by the federal government.
