Years after the fact, Arthur Kroeger enjoyed reflecting on his key role in the early 1980s federal government campaign to end the Crowsnest Pass grain freight rate subsidy for prairie farmers.
As deputy transport minister in Ottawa, Kroeger was the man who convinced then-transport minister Jean-Luc Pepin to tackle the grain subsidy issue in 1980.
Pepin convinced prime minister Pierre Trudeau that it was the right thing to do and that only a Liberal government with almost no seats in the West to lose could do it. It became one of the three priorities of the last Trudeau government of 1980-84.
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“No one doubted you should do the Crow,” Kroeger reminisced several years later, after the Liberal government ended the 1897 fixed freight rate for a formula of higher freight rates and government subsidies to the railways for grain movement. “The question was, could you? Changing it wasn’t all that difficult but could you sell it?”
It wasn’t sold so much as imposed by a majority government in the end.
Until his death May 9 at age 75, Kroeger remained convinced that it was the correct decision even though the promised prairie diversification did not bring the agricultural prosperity that had been predicted. The Trudeau Liberals were only able to do half the job, continuing a $720 million annual subsidy to the railways aimed at suppressing grain freight rates.
Subsequent governments reduced that to $540 million until then-Liberal finance minister Paul Martin did in 1995 what Pepin could not do in the face of fierce Progressive Conservative and NDP opposition – kill the subsidy entirely.
Kroeger, an Alberta farm boy who went on to become a French teacher, a Rhodes scholar and one of the most respected bureaucrats in Ottawa, saw the Crow issue as a chance to end the prairie complaint that the region was condemned by national policy to be a producer and exporter of cheap raw materials.
He thought the end of the subsidy on raw grain exports would stimulate more value-adding agriculture on the Prairies. The effect was to lower grain prices and therefore encourage more livestock feeding and processing near production.
Kroeger died of cancer before his side of the Crow story was fully told. He has written a memoir about the Crow wars that will be published next year by University of Alberta Press.
It would have been published before his death but he became intrigued by boxes of papers he inherited from Mennonite ancestors who moved to Alberta from Russia in the last century. Last year, he published a history of his family’s journey from Russian oppression to the experience of homesteading in Alberta.
Although he was viewed as closely aligned with the Liberals in Ottawa, Kroeger’s brother, Henry, was Alberta’s transport minister at the time of the Crow debate and supported its end.
