It's another step in a long legal battle for friends of the Canadian Wheat Board.

A Manitoba Court of Queen's Bench has ruled Ottawa must answer for the Harper administration's actions regarding the wind down of the Canadian Wheat Board.

Friends of the Canadian Wheat Board initially launched legal action against the Federal Government back in 2012.

The groups Chair Stewart Wells is pleased to see the government's request to have the case dismissed was struck down.

"This has to go in front of a judge at a certification hearing in order for the case to be certified and a representative plaintiff to be named to represent the cost," he said. "Now the action is asking a farmer from Manitoba by the name of Andrew Denis to be named as the representative plaintiff, and then he and his legal team will be carrying this forward."

Once certification is granted then the detailed arguments will be made in court.

The case is based around $145 million, which FCWB says should have been paid to farmers as part of their final payment, but was withheld and transferred to the CWB’s Contingency Fund and later to G3.

"It's clear from the annual reports that were issued in those two years 2010-11, 2011-12, that they were diverting money away from farmers that should have been paid out to farmers in the pool accounts of this year," Wells said. "Then in the 2011-12 the government actually used some of the pooling account money, 5.9 million at a minimum to pay some of the restructuring expenses."

Wells says likely sometime this fall there will be a certification hearing allowing them to launch the case as a class action suit, after that it will go to court for the detailed arguments.