SASKATOON – Ted Turner was surprised the first time he encountered Emmett Hall.
It was 1975, and Hall, an eminent former Supreme Court justice, was leading an inquiry into Canada’s grain handling and transportation system.
At one of more than 120 public hearings held across Western Canada, Turner, then president of Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, showed up to make a presentation.
“I was absolutely amazed at the attitude that justice Hall took right from the outset of that meeting,” Turner recalled last week. “He was straightforward and it was obvious he was going to listen to what groups had to say to him, particularly groups that were representing farmers.”
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Listened to farmers
A government commission actually listening to what people had to say was dishearteningly rare. And even more gratifying, Hall’s recommendations two years later mirrored what those people said.
“His report reflected what he heard, not what somebody in Ottawa told him,” said Turner.
Hall, a man whose name was almost synonymous with public service and who was still revered by thousands by prairie farmers, died in Saskatoon last week at the age of 97.
A graduate of the University of Saskatchewan, his distinguished legal career culminated with an appointment to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1962. Outside the legal arena, he headed a royal commission that in 1964 recommended national universal medicare, conducted a comprehensive review of Ontario’s education system and served as chancellor of two universities.
But for prairie farmers, his name will be forever linked with the Commission on Grain Handling and Transportation, which after an exhaustive, two-year review made recommendations on everything from branch lines, elevator tariffs and Churchill to producer cars, value-added industry and the Crow Rate (retain it, he said).
People in the grain industry remembered Hall last week as a man of the people, someone who always favored the underdog and was sincerely interested in what the little guy had to say.
“It didn’t matter whether he was talking to the president of the railway or a quarter-section farmer, he had the same respect for their opinions,” said Reg Forbes, who worked with Hall on the commission.
Hall’s great intellect and analytical legal mind were balanced by a strong sense of right and wrong, said Forbes. He wasn’t interested in only the bottom line; his concern was how individuals would be affected.
“Sometimes I think his social conscience was more acute than his economic savvy,” Forbes said with a laugh. “But I’m not saying that’s bad, because economics you can do with computers. Social conscience you can’t.”
Even today, at meetings of groups like the National Farmers Union, Hall’s name will occasionally be invoked by farmers who feel threatened, ignored and powerless in the face of the radical changes sweeping through the grain industry.
“We always felt he was sympathetic to the needs of the people,” said Stuart Thiesson, former executive secretary of the farmers union.
More than 400 people filled a downtown Saskatoon church for his funeral Nov. 15.
Hall is survived by two children, 12 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by his wife Isabelle in 1981.
