Last month, prime minister Stephen Harper made a rare trip to Sas­kat­chewan to help announce a $50-million pasta and pulse-milling plant in Regina. He was accompanied by Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz and most of the Tories’ 13-member Saskatchewan caucus.

Why all the excitement over a $50-million pasta plant? Because Harper saw the announcement as an important symbol of the “marketing freedom” his government is giving Western Canadian farmers with the elimination of the Canadian Wheat Board’s monopoly over wheat and barley exports, effective Aug. 1, 2012.

“An open grain market will attract new investment, encourage innovation and create new jobs for Canadians,” Harper told a news conference at a warehouse owned by Alliance Grain Traders, the Regina-based company that’s building the pasta plant.

Harper says the elimination of the CWB’s monopoly — its “single desk” authority — will unleash the entrepreneurial might of Western Canadians, who have been constrained by the “costly red tape, administration fees and logistical inefficiencies” of the CWB.

For Harper, an old foe of the CWB dating back to his days with the National Citizens Coalition, state trading enterprises such as the CWB represent the “dead hand” of government interference in the marketplace. He has pledged to give Western Canadian farmers “marketing freedom” — the choice of selling their grain to whomever they want.

Many farmers are eager to see the end of the single desk, which they believe has robbed them of their ability to market their grain at higher prices than what the CWB has been able to provide. And many business groups support the government’s plans to dismantle the single desk, which they believe will herald a new era of value-added processing on the Prairies.

At stake is the CWB, a 75-year-old institution with a staff of 400 based in Winnipeg. With annual sales in excess of $5 billion, the CWB is the largest wheat and barley marketer in the world. Allen Oberg, a farmer in Alberta and chairman of the CWB’s 15-member board of directors, says the majority of Western Canadian producers support the single desk. A plebiscite vote by some 40,000 producers conducted this summer by the CWB found that 62% of wheat farmers and 51% of barley producers want the single desk retained.

Eliminating the single desk won’t result in hundreds of pasta plants and flour mills springing up in the Prairies, either, Oberg says, adding that distance from domestic and export markets — not the single desk — is the real impediment to value-added processing on the Prairies.

And without the monopoly — which gives the CWB the marketing clout to guarantee the quantity and quality of grains it ships to customers all over the world — the CWB will be just another grain company, albeit one without a network of grain-handling facilities and infrastructure necessary to survive.

The stakes are high. If Canada chooses to remove the single desk, under our international trade agreements, we would not be able to re-establish the state trading enterprise — ever.

So, what will it be: marketing freedom or marketing clout? The CWB says it has the support of the majority of farmers, while the Harper government has a majority in the Parliament. The battle is joined, and the outcome will have major repercussions for Western Canada for decades to come. IE