Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz, when asked Monday to comment on Tuesday’s court date for Ottawa’s bid to deregulate Prairie barley marketing, had said “it’s just one sleep away — it’s sort of like Christmas.”
A three-member panel of judges from the Federal Court of Appeal handed Ritz a proverbial lump of coal Tuesday in Winnipeg, ruling against the government’s appeal of an earlier Federal Court decision which blocked Ottawa’s bid to change barley marketing regulations by order-in-council.
The ruling sends the Conservative government back to the drafting board to come up instead with legislation, which Ritz pledged in the near future, to remove the Canadian Wheat Board’s single marketing desk for Prairie barley.
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“I am disappointed with the decision of the Federal Court of Appeal,” Ritz said in a statement Tuesday evening. “We will carefully review the decision and decide on our next steps accordingly.”
The pro-single-desk National Farmers Union was earliest to react on Tuesday afternoon, after the court’s ruling was handed down much more quickly than some observers had anticipated.
Ottawa’s appeal Tuesday was “another costly court fight, the result of which we see today,” said NFU president Stewart Wells, who farms at Swift Current, Sask.
The hearing was “a colossal waste of taxpayers’ money,” Wells said, made moreso by Ritz’s plans to bring forward open-market legislation “that will again attempt to dismantle the CWB.”
Barring another federal election before then, such legislation must get past a minority Parliament, with the Liberals, NDP and Bloc Quebecois all having expressed varying levels of opposition to the Tories’ plans on the CWB file.
Wells also saved criticism for one other farmer group with intervener status at Tuesday’s hearing, saying the Western Barley Growers Association had argued “that farmers should not have the right to vote on issues critical to CWB marketing.”
Wells said in the NFU’s release Tuesday that the barley group’s lawyers had essentially argued that Section 47.1 of the Canadian Wheat Board Act, which requires a farmer vote before crops can be removed from CWB jurisdiction, is “unconstitutional.”
The barley growers’ group had not yet released an official response Tuesday evening.
(More details to follow Wednesday.)
