WINNIPEG – An expert on the history of farm movements in Canada says he can’t understand why producers are struggling to destroy the same institution their forerunners fought for two decades to create.
“The forum of this agrarian protest is in some ways similar to protests of the past, but the content is so different,” said John Thompson, a Canadian historian working at Duke University in North Carolina.
Called as a crown witness to testify in a constitutional challenge of the Canadian Wheat Board Act, launched by Saskatchewan farmer Dave Bryan, Thompson said this recent anti-wheat board push will stand out in the history books as extreme.
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“We’re seeing the language of individualism when the language of the producers before was the language of community, the language of co-operation, of neighborliness,” Thompson said outside the courtroom.
“They don’t even believe farmers back then lobbied for a board, let alone understand why.”
The question Thompson said he wants to examine in a class he’s teaching on farm movements is whether groups, like the Canadian Farm Enterprise Network and Canadian Farmers for Justice, fighting to dismantle the board’s monopoly over prairie wheat and malting barley sales “is the tip of the iceberg or are they all the ice that is out there?”
Either way, he said their tactics might be questioned.
“I think this attempt by these people to pretend that the history of the wheat board is a history of crimes, something like the hanging of Louis Riel or the shooting of Winnipeg general strikers, is just silly,” Thompson said.
“People who don’t want the wheat board should be working the way that Canadians have always worked. They should be organizing, but this civil disobedience is a mistake.”
In his testimony, Thompson told the court how farmers created the prairie wheat pools as a sort of wheat board they ran themselves because the government continued to waffle on the question of setting up a compulsory board.
The Saskatchewan government tried to create its own wheat board in the 1920s, but the courts ruled against it because trade and commerce fall under federal powers, he said.
But throughout the 1930s, there was unanimous support by farmers for a compulsory board. There’s no dispute among historians about that, he said, adding votes in Parliament to extend the board’s monopoly were passed with overwhelming support from all parties.
“Historically this is unprecedented,” Thompson told the court. “It is an extremely rare occasion where all opposition and the government are in accordance on a piece of legislation.”
Thompson said if farmers decide to organize over the issue, they should do it within the law.
“I think the courts are the wrong place to decide these things. I think the history books are the place to determine the past, politics is the place to decide the present.”
