In Tacoma, it is a common sight to see rail cars with the Canadian Wheat Board insignia on them. I dug around the internet and found out it’s a government run wheat marketing monopoly. That still left me with a lot of questions:
–Why was it founded? What does it have monoply over?
–Why does it only have control of prarire province wheat? And why only certain kinds of grain?
–What is its rep among farmers, other businesses, and the public?
–I often see Alberta goverment rail cars. Are they seperate from the wheat board and why?
Here’s what it has to say about itself.
And here is what Wikipedia: Canadian Wheat Board has to say.
The Australian version has been privatised or corporatised or some sort of ised which I forget, and if you google “AWB” or “AWB scandal”, you will find some juicy stuff about their dealings with Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Don’t know about Canada, but here the monopoly issue has split the farming community down the middle.
When I was growing up in Manitoba, it always seemed to be something of a divisive issue — some farmers were for retaining it, and some wanted to abolish it. In the late 90s, a lawsuit brought by a group of farmers argued it was an illegal monopoly and infringed upon the farmers’ freedoms; but the farmers lost that lawsuit. As the Wikipedia article notes, the current (conservative) government is fixing to try to abolish the CWB again.
There’s a fairly good summary of the history and controversy over the Wheat Board on the CBC’s website.