They were people driven by a cause, an idea, an ideal, a grievance. They saw the world around them and figured the flaws needed fixing and the good things needed preserving. It would be up to them to help make it happen.
Griping to their neighbours wouldn’t be enough.
In their hundreds and thousands, there are people whose ideals, grievances or causes have made a difference, sometimes by changing the rules but more often by alerting the public to an issue and at least inspiring a public debate.
Read Also
Stock dogs show off herding skills at Ag in Motion
Stock dogs draw a crowd at Ag in Motion. Border collies and other herding breeds are well known for the work they do on the farm.
Frank Boss did that in 1924. The Sintaluta, Sask., farmer was a supporter of the nascent Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, which was still more idea than reality. Supporters were contracting to sell through the pool but it had no elevators.
Boss took a load of wheat to the Sintaluta elevator, had it graded No. 1 and then found the grade reduced to No. 2 when the agent found out it was for the pool account. Boss refused to sell. He took the grain home and with some neighbours, hand loaded producer cars through the winter to sell it themselves.
Like thousands of other prairie farmers at the time, Boss and his neighbours helped change history, working to create the pool that would grow to dominate the province’s grain industry.
As part of our 80th anniversary reflections, we thought it might be interesting and enlightening to profile 10 people who have made a difference, people who created something, fought the system or simply alerted a broader public about a brewing issue. The list could stretch into the hundreds of equally worthy subjects.
- In 1969, Wally Nelson was a 42-year-old Avonlea, Sask., farm machinery dealer and farmer convinced that the low grain prices and surplus stocks that marked the era were as much because of a dysfunctional Canadian Wheat Board and government regulations as they were about world surpluses.
It started with a Pense, Sask., farmer showing up at Nelson’s door to apologize for not being able to pay his bills. It ended with Nelson and a handful of others organizing the Palliser Wheat Growers Association the next year, quickly attracting 5,000 members and becoming an influential lobby group against the CWB monopoly, government “socialistic policies”, as Nelson saw them, and the political power of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool.
Thirty-four years later, Nelson concedes many of the same problems exist and the successor Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association has collapsed.
“But we have made a big difference and the wheat growers will be revived,” he says. “We still need that voice of sanity.”
- One of the more formidable policy and political opponents the new conservative farm group faced in 1970 was E.K. Turner, recently elected president of Saskatchewan Wheat Pool and very much determined to keep the status quo or to improve upon it, but not to dismantle it.
Turner, a farmer from Maymont, Sask., was elected pool president in 1969 at age 42 and remained in office through 18 years when the company was the dominant player in the prairie grain industry. He once told an interviewer that joining the pool was “the natural thing to do” since he was raised by pool-supporting parents and farmed next door to the local pool delegate.
During his presidency, the company expanded and Turner played a key political role in defending the wheat board, pressing for transportation and political policies that favoured the pool and its members and fighting federal attempts to dismantle the Crowsnest Pass freight subsidy.
In retirement, Turner spent six years as chancellor of the University of Saskatchewan until 1995.
- For Ken Goudy, life for the past two decades has been about focus and convincing farmers to buy into his dreams.
First there was his 1980s Focus on Inputs campaign dedicated to convincing farmers to spend $250 each in support of building a plant to produce a generic form of glyphosate to compete with Monsanto’s Roundup. He said more than 10,000 farmers bought in but in the end, the idea failed as Roundup prices fell after the patent expired.
By the late 1990s, he had a new focus – Focus on Sabbatical – that promotes idling farmland in Canada, the United States, Australia, Argentina and Brazil to cut production of grains, feed grains and oilseeds by eight billion bushels. He sees it as a way to boost prices.
After more than three years of promoting the scheme, Goudy had sold just 3,500 $250 memberships by spring, 2003 and he says the idea will collapse if more memberships are not sold by year’s end.
More than a decade ago, Goudy spoke about his campaigns almost as crusades. “I am convinced that I am here because God indicated this is where I should be.”
- Fame came late to Bruno, Sask., farmer and anti-genetic modification crusader Percy Schmeiser. The 72-year-old has been tried and convicted for illegally growing Roundup Ready canola in 1998 without paying Monsanto Inc. its licensing fee The conviction was upheld in appeals court.
His case is heading to the Supreme Court of Canada next year, where Schmeiser’s lawyers will argue that the conviction was in error and the GM canola found in the fields was inadvertent.
Meanwhile, Schmeiser has become an international celebrity, speaking at rallies around the world, the subject of “David vs. Goliath” websites and the darling of anti-genetic modification campaigners. He had toured Europe, spoken at a fundraiser in a Vancouver gay bar and seen tens of thousands of dollars being raised in his defence.
Schmeiser says he also has spent tens of thousands of dollars of his own money on the case.
- In 1978, the Western Producer profiled Landis, Sask., farmer Roy Atkinson under a provocative headline: “Legacy of a radical.”
It was not an over-statement. As leader of the Saskatchewan Farmers Union in the 1960s and for nine years until 1978 the first leader of the National Farmers Union, Atkinson championed radical causes and tactics – tougher regulations over agribusiness, stronger and more pervasive marketing boards and direct farmer action to make their voices heard.
He was as comfortable leading farmer demonstrations and street action as he was lobbying cabinet ministers.
Later, he became a Saskatchewan Wheat Pool delegate and a fierce critic of the pool’s move away from its farmer roots and onto the Toronto Stock Exchange. He was chair of the Canadian Wheat Board advisory committee in the early 1980s and a ferocious defender of the board.
Still, as Atkinson approaches his 80th birthday next year, he has become a bit of an establishment figure. The radical has come full circle, being honoured for his radicalism.
In 1990, he was inducted into the Saskatchewan Agricultural Hall of Fame. Last year, he was honoured by the nation when he was made a member of the Order of Canada
- It was threatening to become a habit.
Beginning in 1998 and stretching for three years out of four, Farmington, B.C., farmer Nick Parsons was a familiar fixture on Canada’s roads and television screens driving his combine Prairie Belle hundreds or thousands of kilometres to raise the profile of farm sector woes. By the time of his last trek, which landed him on Parliament Hill in late January 2001, he was calling himself the “ambassador for farming.”
Twelve years before at age 41, Parsons had emigrated from Great Britain to a 1,250-acre farm in B.C.’s Peace River region. By 1998, he was troubled by the lack of government support and drove his combine from Dawson Creek to Victoria, B.C., in protest.
In 2000, it was on to Ottawa with media attention, donations and plenty of political support. He was able to meet prime minister Jean Chrétien and to drink expensive 24 Sussex Drive scotch, which he mixed with Coca Cola.
The next winter marked his last combine trip to Ottawa, with most of the mileage covered by truck and the political impact diminished when he reached Parliament Hill.
- In 1985, Davidson, Sask., organic farmer Elmer Laird complained in an interview that while he supported the National Farmers Union, it was hostile to his farming practices. He figured that too many NFU members used chemicals. “They won’t let me do anything.”
How times change. Many NFU leaders these days are organic farmers and it is a key part of the union’s message.
By his own admission, Laird was considered an eccentric by many of his neighbours when he went chemical-free in 1969. At first, it was to cut costs during the years of wheat glut and low prices. By 1973 when he rejected chemicals, it was for economic, health and ideological reasons.
Thirty years later and more than half a century after he started farming, Laird continues to promote organic farming with farm tours and speeches. In a 1985 interview, he said he had no choice but to oppose chemical use.
“They’re headed for disaster if they keep going the way they are,” he said. “I couldn’t stand sitting and doing nothing.”
- In 2001, anti-Canadian Wheat Board author Don Baron described Lyleton, Man., grain farmer Andy McMechan as a Canadian icon, a hero in the fight against arbitrary government rules and regulations. His target was the wheat board export monopoly. His tactic was to haul some barley across the 49th Parallel in 1995 as one of a handful of farmers who defied the law to make a point.
Customs Canada ordered his tractor seized. McMechan refused and he was charged with theft.
McMechan spent more than 150 days in jail when he refused to pay his fine and in Baron’s description “was paraded in chains and leg irons and strip searched more than 50 times.” In 1998, the Supreme Court of Canada refused to consider his request to appeal the conviction and tens of thousands of dollars in fines and costs.
McMechan’s experience became inspiration for other members of Farmers for Justice who took grain across the border to make a point about their opposition to the CWB monopoly.
“McMechan’s arrest signaled a new phase in the struggle,” wrote Baron.
Since then, wheat board election rules have been changed and border running has ceased, at least for now.
- In 1985 when Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney reversed himself and began talking about a free trade deal with the United States, Borden, Sask., organic farmer and nationalist David Orchard decided he had to do something.
He formed a national Citizens Coalition Against Free Trade organization, won national support and later took credit for the Liberal-dominated Senate’s decision in 1988 to block the free trade deal.
During the subsequent election on the issue, Orchard often focused on perceived dangers to agriculture in his arguments.
The Mulroney Conservatives won the election and the free trade deal was approved.
Still, Orchard says his campaigns and books against free trade have had an influence. “I would say our activities were pivotal in bringing the issue to public attention and galvanizing opinion,” he says.
Since then, Orchard has joined the Conservative Party and twice ran for leadership. In 2003, he forced eventual winner Peter MacKay to authorize a party review of the free trade policy, a review launched in early August.
- Through his career as a high school teacher in Brandon, Arnold Grambo taught his students about the geography of the Prairies and its economic patterns. Year after year, he arrived at the same conclusion.
“It always made sense to me that much more product should be shipped through Churchill,” he says. A dozen years ago, he learned about the Hudson Bay Route Association, used his position as a member of Brandon City Council to become involved in the association and soon became president.
Grambo, like the HBRA activists before him, has dedicated himself to promoting the northern Manitoba port as a logical exit point for prairie crops, despite what he says is the sustained opposition of the railways that want longer haulages, grain companies that want to use their own terminal facilities and federal politicians who represent Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway constituencies.
“It is a constant struggle,” says the now-retired Brandon teacher and HBRA president.
“I think the future is bright. And I know if it had not been for the work of my predecessors and the association, Churchill would not have been kept open.”
