As opposition parties talked about co-operating to defeat the Conservatives and to install a Liberal-NDP coalition government, many farm leaders started speculating about who might be the next agriculture minister.
Most of it started and ended with veteran Prince Edward Island farm leader and MP Wayne Easter, one of few members of the coalition with a connection to agriculture.
“Who else could it be?” asked one national farm leader. “I can’t think of anyone else in those parties who knows anything about agriculture. Of course, I can’t say that publicly in case I end up working with someone else that I’ve already labelled unfit.”
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If the coalition resolve maintains itself over the seven weeks until Parliament returns in late January and confidence votes are held, it would be a strange twist in the long public career of the 59-year-old P.E.I. farmer.
Easter’s 15-year career in the House of Commons has been spent doing battle with the NDP and Bloc Québécois, as well as various incarnations of the Conservatives.
It would be ironic if his political competitors allowed him to get the job he likely has coveted since election in 1993.
Then again, Easter’s career has been full of irony and contradiction.
He started farming in 1970, beginning with a small dairy and hog farrow-to-finish operation.
It was a time of low prices and agricultural turmoil and almost immediately, the 21-year-old fell under the spell of Roy Atkinson and the National Farmers Union that was organizing tractor rallies on the island.
Easter got involved in the rallies, then the NFU, and within a few years was youth president.
The enemy during those years was the federal Liberal party and what the NFU saw as its failed policies and support for a corporate model of agriculture that involved fewer farmers.
By 1990, he was national NFU president and within a year, the enemy again was the federal Liberal government, this time over its controversial proposal to end the Crowsnest Pass freight rate subsidy.
At one point, Easter led an Edmonton protest against transport minister Jean-Luc Pepin that led to an NFU-police fracas that almost ended with criminal charges.
A decade later, when he decided to enter federal politics, some eyebrows were raised when he chose the Liberal party as his vehicle, although it was the only viable alternative to the Progressive Conservatives in P.E.I.
But it meant that Easter sat in caucus and ended up supporting a 1995 Liberal budget that killed the Crow.
Easter sat in successive Liberal governments that produced farm support programs he considered flawed, inadequate and in some cases creating the kind of farmer-weeding-out process he joined the NFU to fight in 1971.
One of the great twists in his long career came during his one-year tenure as solicitor general during the last year of Jean Chrétien’s government 2002-03.
He was in Edmonton to present awards of excellence to veteran police officers and one of them looked familiar.
“I think I know you,” Easter recalls saying.
“Oh, I know you,” replied the officer who had led the police contingent protecting Pepin from the NFU demonstrators a decade earlier.
Recently, Easter was asked to reflect on almost 40 years as a central player in farm and electoral politics. Has there been any progress in his original goal to fight for more producer market power through collective action?
“Farmers have never been weaker,” he said. “And since we killed the Crow, the railways have never looked back.”
