FORMER Saskatchewan Wheat Pool director Lyle Knutson is haunted by a ‘what if’ question.
What if talks between the three prairie pools in the late 1990s had been successful in forming one large pool? Would that have made the company big enough to stave off the forces that quickly subsumed Alberta and Manitoba pools into a Canadian-American grain company and sent Saskatchewan Pool away from co-op principles and almost into bankruptcy?
“In retrospect, I really think that was our last best chance to save the pools,” Knutson says now, five years after his brief stint as a SWP director and decades of pool activism ended. “It might not have worked but it certainly would have bought some time and maybe given the company enough market strength to make the decisions that had to be made.”
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After the decade in which the three pools morphed from historical and commercial icons to bankruptcy candidates or used-to-be organizations, the analytical spotlight is turning on the issue of how and why.
Academic theses are being researched and written and in January, business experts pulled together by the Harvard University Business School in Boston will analyze the SWP as a case study of a secure co-operative going sour and then trying to rebuild.
There is a strong possibility that the Harvard focus will be on the difficulty co-ops have raising capital and the limits that co-operative democracy, the delegate body and the board of directors imposed upon the ability of the chief executive officer to manage.
Some key players in the history of the pool demise have a different analysis after years of agonizing over what was one of the most spectacular Prairie financial retreats of all time.
Former Saskatchewan Pool president E.K. Turner, the last of the titan pool presidents, was watching from the sidelines and judged that the core problem was a weakening of the democratic structure and the board while the power of the chief executive officer was centralized and strengthened.
“There just weren’t the checks and balances that were needed.”
Alex Graham, late 1990s president of Alberta Wheat Pool, also thinks back to failed pool merger talks.
The stumbling block was Saskatchewan Pool’s insistence that it be the dominant player in any new super-cooperative with its head offices in Regina and Sask Pool CEO Don Loewen in charge.
“I wasn’t prepared to try to sell that back home,” says Graham.
As he sees it, Sask Pool was rising above its level of competence but still insisted that it be the lead dog with the two junior pools sharing the view that followers of the lead dog always have. It was a case of Sask Pool CEO-driven hubris.
What followed was an attempt by Alberta and Manitoba pools to go it alone together with an explosion of concrete terminals across the Prairies that led to overbuilding, growing debt, losses and disaster.
Hopefully, the Harvard-assembled analysts will look beyond preconceived ideas of management-hobbled co-operative structures to consider the reality of weakened farmer control and strong-willed executives who made expansion and customer-member relations decisions that wiped out the goodwill built through more than 75 years of credible co-operative history.
