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The federal government eliminated the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly five years ago this week, but grain farmer Stewart Wells isn’t celebrating the anniversary.

The board, set up in 1935, was the sole organization allowed to buy and export western Canadian wheat and barley until former prime minister Stephen Harper’s government eliminated the “single desk” and opened the system to competition on Aug. 1, 2012, a time Harper called “grain marketing freedom day.”

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The government sold the Crown corporation in 2015 to G3 Global Grain Group, owned by Saudi Arabia and a U.S. grain trader.

For some in the industry, the end of the wheat board was a victory in an emotional fight to increase profitability and efficiency — some farmers went to jail in the 1990s for taking their grain across the border to sell illegally in the U.S.

But Wells, a former wheat board director who chairs the Friends of the Canadian Wheat Board, sees the government action as a hammer blow that continues to hurt the average producer.