Wheat Board: One Canadian's Open Letter to PM Stephen Harper



For the record, this my second letter to you is an open letter, given my first, appended below, was never even provided the courtesy of an acknowledgment of receipt.  That letter to you marked the 10 year anniversary of my earlier letter to an earlier PM on the day after September 11, 2001, when civilian aeroplanes were used as weapons of mass destruction.

The purpose of this letter is to make publicly certain you will know that the contents of one of Rod Flaman's farm building's was razed on December 12, 2011 as reported in the following Regina Leaderpost article: http://www.leaderpost.com/director+suspects+arson+farm+near+Regina/5883989/story.html

Why would his loss have any meaning to you, personally and as PM?

Here is part of the larger context.  Rod Flaman is of course not unknown to you.  He was one of the farmers elected by farmers.  Not as your, nor the government's representative, but as our farmer director representative on the Canadian Wheat Board, one among seven whom you had fired from his office as CWB director but a few days removed from the fire.

As to razing the prairie farmers' single-desk Canadian Wheat Board on behalf of the astroturf group which you and it pretentiously called itself as the National Citizens Coalition, has been a multi-year target of yours.  For details please see http://www.eduardhiebert.com/mbprov-site/cutting.htm

Turning to the powers you now have as PM, you have provided earlier critique: "In today's democratic societies, organizations share power... through consultation, committees and consensus-building techniques. Only in politics do we still entrust power to a single faction expected to prevail... by sheer force of numbers. Even more anachronistically, we persist in structuring the governing team like a military regiment under a single commander with almost total power to appoint, discipline and expel subordinates."

Now more recently, through C-18 you have expressed intentions to raze the CWB and provided warning you were prepared to steamroller anyone in your way.  Even when a federal court* found your minister broke the law in how you and he advanced Bill C-18, you have continued on your path in the exercise of power as defined by you.

Your words and actions could be mistaken by some crazed supporters as a word of encouragement and licence to put some CWB supporters in harms way and in my opinion heightens the need for you to immediately, in clear and in no uncertain terms, to condemn publicly that the acts of violence and vandalism against Rod Flaman are cowardly, will not be tolerated and furthermore, you will do everything within your power to see that justice will be done by bringing all who have had a hand in this alleged case of arson, including threats made to other CWB supporters will be brought to justice as true examples of your "tough on crime" agenda.

*    The text of the decision is available at:
http://cas-ncr-nter03.cas-satj.gc.ca/rss/Wheat%20Board%20T-1735-11%20and%20T-1057-11%20reasons.pdf
For a quick review of the Federal Court Decision simply search out six key words without the quotes as follows: "Declaration", "meaningless", "Fraser", "absurd", "NAFTA" and "manner and form":

As a note of correction, you call C-18 a freedom bill.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The fact of the matter that you have not refuted, is that under the CWB single-desk system every farmer through the "buy-back" program already had the right to sell their grain to anyone they wished, even at any price they wished.  However the CWB buy-back ensured no farmer could profit by selling their grain below the price available to the CWB.  With C-18, you are advancing the illusion that farmers can now profit by pitting farmer against farmer, when in reality by razing the CWB single-desk, instead of offering change on the dollar you are giving very large international companies the power to short-change farmers on every dollar.


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