Farming in the Free Market: The Impact of the Dismantling of the Canadian Wheat Board on the Mental Health and Well-Being of Oil and Grain Seed Farmers in Saskatchewan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Harper Government's dismantling of the Canadian Wheat Board’s (CWB) marketing monopoly in 2012 can be understood as part of a broader political project to liberalize Canada’s agriculture sector. While this policy shift has transformed Canada’s position within the global economic system, the impact it has had on small and mid-sized farmers in the grain sector is largely unknown, particularly with regards to mental health and well-being. The purpose of this research was to examine the social, political and economic impacts that removing the CWB has had on the lives of grain and oilseed farmers in Western Canada. This research’s methodology relies on both the ontological and epistemological assumptions of critical realism and employs a critical materialist political economy framework. A total of 29 semi-structured, open-ended interviews were included for this research study, including 17 Saskatchewan grain farmers and 12 individuals classified as relevant informants. This research found that the dissolution of the CWB had a tremendous impact on both farmers and their communities. The loss of the CWB likely exacerbated inequalities between farms, hastening the consolidation of farmland and contributing to rural depopulation. The issue of the CWB was also found to be highly divisive. A majority of farmers expressed either strong support or opposition to CWB, reflecting ideologically informed beliefs with regards to the benefits of collective marketing versus the marketing freedom respectively. For the most part, perceptions of farming post-CWB differed between these groups. Opponents of the CWB reported less overall stress with regards to grain marketing compared with CWB supporters. Perceptions of market competition, control, and transparency also varied with ideological views; CWB opponents generally believed they had greater control over their operations, faced adequate competition, and saw the current system as more transparent compared with CWB supporters. Farmers in both groups, however, identified corporate concentration and lack of adequate competition in the grain sector a major concern and source of stress. Given that the CWB remains highly divisive, solutions to improving farmer market power and thus reducing farmer stressors with regards to marketing may rest on reducing corporate power and concentration through legislation rather than reinstating a single desk marketing board, although that is an option that should be seriously considered as well.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".