The Rise and Fall of the Canadian Wheat Board: A Historical Institutional Analysis

In December 2011, the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper and the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, Gerry Ritz announced the dissolution of the Canadian Wheat Board. This essay analyses the rise and fall of the Canadian Wheat Board through the lens of historical institutionalism. We establish a comparison across time between the economical, social and political contexts that influenced the birth and the death of the institution. In the first section of this essay, we define the economical, social and political factors that we will use as a guideline to compare the contexts of the creation and dismantlement of the Canadian Wheat Board. This section is based on the work of Swinnen (2009) on the emergence of the protection of agriculture in the 20th century. The second section of this essay gives an overview of the Canadian Wheat Board with detailing on its history, its role and guiding principles, and the place it takes in the Canadian and international markets. This section aims to prove that the Canadian Wheat Board was, in fact, created in order to provide protection to the farmers and that Swinnen’s analysis is relevant to the Canadian experience. In the third section of this essay, we use the five factors identified by Swinnen (demonstrated in section one) to compare the Canadian contexts during the rise and the fall of the Canadian Wheat Board. We show that all the factors provided by Swinnen are relevant to the emergence of the Canadian Wheat Board, but none of them apply to the current situation. In the fourth section, we show that there are other factors that are not identified by Swinnen that have influenced the dismantlement of the Canadian Wheat Board, such as international regulation and regional agreements. Finally, this essay concludes that the Canadian Wheat Board has become outdated and that its demise was inevitable given the current context