Directors of the Canadian Wheat Board are not interested in having Agriculture Minister Chuck Strahl tell them how to pay the board president.

"[Strahl] doesn't seem to understand that this is a shared governance corporation with a board of directors, 10 of whom are elected by farmers," Bill Toews, a farmer-elected director from Kane, Man., said Sunday. 

"He seems to want to take full authority over the operations of the board."

Strahl issued a directive on Friday evening ordering the board of directors to pay interim president and CEO Greg Arason, who hasn't been paid since being appointed on Dec. 19.

Strahl's directive stated that the agriculture minister has the right to appoint the president and set that person's compensation.

Toews said that while the Wheat Board Act is not crystal clear in this respect, it does separate the powers of the board and the minister. The board believes it has the right to set the president's salary.

Arason, who previously headed the wheat board from 1998 until his retirement in 2002, was appointed interim president after Strahl fired Adrian Measner on Dec. 19 as part of an ongoing battle between the Conservative government and Canadian Wheat Board proponents.

Measner had been a vocal proponent of keeping the wheat board's existing monopoly powers over the marketing of wheat and barley in Canada — a monopoly Strahl wants to eliminate in favour of a dual marketing system, which he says would give farmers a choice in how they market their grain.

"This is just another example in a whole litany of actions and statements that this minister and this government has made and undertaken in order to try and destabilize and undermine and dismantle the Canadian Wheat Board, contrary to the clearly expressed wishes of the majority of farmers," Shoal Lake, Man., farmer and wheat board director Bill Nicholson said.

Nicholson said Arason has refused to negotiate with the board and has already worked out a sum with Strahl.

The directors say they will likely meet in the coming days to determine how to respond to Strahl's directive.

Starting Jan. 31, about 75,000 barley farmers in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba will get to vote in a non-binding federal plebiscite on the wheat board's future in marketing barley.