The Canadian Wheat Board has added print, radio, TV and web advertising campaigns to the ammunition pile in its fight against the federal government's plans to end the board's single marketing desk.
The new campaign, titled "Stop the steamroller," also includes a web page within the CWB's own site, and urges Canadians to voice their opposition via texts to federal members of Parliament.
The multimedia blitz follows the CWB's application Oct. 26 for a judicial review in Federal Court of the government's Bill C-18.
The bill's legislative package, which lays out a five-year process to wind down the CWB's single desk for Prairie wheat and barley by August 2012 and either privatize or fold the CWB by mid-2017, is expected to pass next month on the weight of the Conservatives' majority in the House of Commons.
"We're asking Canadians to help us send a clear message to the Harper Government that we will not be steamrolled by their anti-democratic processes," board chairman Allen Oberg, a farmer from Forestburg, Alta., said in a board release Wednesday.
"The Harper government is acting ruthlessly, unethically and illegally and the outcome is that Canadian farmers are at risk of losing their livelihood."
The campaign, Oberg said, "is about standing up to a bully government that is acting recklessly," said Oberg. "To date, we still have not seen any business case on why the CWB should be eliminated and no plan for its future. No farmers have been consulted and this legislation is against their wishes."
"Conglomerates"
Among the CWB's talking points in this campaign are warnings that without the CWB, small farmers "will be left to negotiate their own prices with giant American food conglomerates" and "farms that have been in families for generations may be bought out by American and multinational companies."
Farmers, the CWB said, "will have to compete not only against each other but also against much larger companies that can afford to set their prices lower because they have such great volume of grain" and the "hundreds of millions of dollars that the CWB makes for Prairie farmers will instead go to private grain company profits."
The CWB's move to take Ottawa to court -- similar to a previous application by a pro-CWB group, Friends of the Canadian Wheat Board -- was among the reasons given by two pro-deregulation members of the CWB's board of directors for handing in their resignations in the past two weeks.
The new campaign, titled "Stop the steamroller," also includes a web page within the CWB's own site, and urges Canadians to voice their opposition via texts to federal members of Parliament.
The multimedia blitz follows the CWB's application Oct. 26 for a judicial review in Federal Court of the government's Bill C-18.
The bill's legislative package, which lays out a five-year process to wind down the CWB's single desk for Prairie wheat and barley by August 2012 and either privatize or fold the CWB by mid-2017, is expected to pass next month on the weight of the Conservatives' majority in the House of Commons.
"We're asking Canadians to help us send a clear message to the Harper Government that we will not be steamrolled by their anti-democratic processes," board chairman Allen Oberg, a farmer from Forestburg, Alta., said in a board release Wednesday.
"The Harper government is acting ruthlessly, unethically and illegally and the outcome is that Canadian farmers are at risk of losing their livelihood."
The campaign, Oberg said, "is about standing up to a bully government that is acting recklessly," said Oberg. "To date, we still have not seen any business case on why the CWB should be eliminated and no plan for its future. No farmers have been consulted and this legislation is against their wishes."
"Conglomerates"
Among the CWB's talking points in this campaign are warnings that without the CWB, small farmers "will be left to negotiate their own prices with giant American food conglomerates" and "farms that have been in families for generations may be bought out by American and multinational companies."
Farmers, the CWB said, "will have to compete not only against each other but also against much larger companies that can afford to set their prices lower because they have such great volume of grain" and the "hundreds of millions of dollars that the CWB makes for Prairie farmers will instead go to private grain company profits."
The CWB's move to take Ottawa to court -- similar to a previous application by a pro-CWB group, Friends of the Canadian Wheat Board -- was among the reasons given by two pro-deregulation members of the CWB's board of directors for handing in their resignations in the past two weeks.
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