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by Ken Motiuk (Author)
In 1935 the Canadian Wheat Board was established to oversee the marketing, handling, and transportation of Western Canadian grain. Under the CWB's increasingly rigid regulations, farmers in the West were prohibited from responding to free market conditions by setting their own prices and selling their grain when and where they chose. By the 1970s, the "single-desk" system was completely controlled by federal government agencies and had become dysfunctional.
In Culture of Control: Farming with the Shackles of the Canadian Wheat Board, author and grain farmer Ken Motiuk meticulously documents how this system began to take shape in the late 1800s and continued until the Canadian Wheat Board was officially abolished by an Act of Parliament on August 1, 2012. From 1977 until 2015, when the last remnants of the CWB were finally dismantled, Motiuk wore many hats in both the farming and political arenas and contributed to the efforts that led to the successful deregulation of the grain industry.
Let me begin by thanking Ken for this insightful accounting of the many trials incurred by Western Canadian farmers foisted on them by the Canadian Wheat Board. These pages are an accurate, decades-long analysis of a government policy that had outlived its usefulness.
Excerpted from the Foreword by the Hon. Gerry Ritz Minister of Agriculture 2007-2015
