It was the early 1960s and agriculture minister Alvin Hamilton was appearing in Regina to tell the board of Saskatchewan Wheat Pool the stunning news that Canada had signed a major deal to sell prairie wheat to China.
The Asian country had 800 million mouths to feed and a market the United States would not touch because China was communist.
“The farmers around the table were enthusiastic, wondering if they could grow it fast enough to satisfy the market,” former Canadian Federation of Agriculture executive director Bill Hamilton remembered last week.
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At the time, he was a young staff member of the Saskatchewan Federation of Agriculture and it was the first meeting he remembers with Alvin Hamilton (no relation), a legendary agriculture minister from 1960-63 who presided over an activist term.
“Alvin certainly exuded enthusiasm as well.”
Hamilton, a former Saskatchewan teacher who was elected to the House of Commons in the first Diefenbaker government of 1957, died last week at age 92. He was one of only two survivors of the Diefenbaker government and served in Parliament until 1988.
A room in Canada’s embassy in Beijing is named after Hamilton in honour of his role in the precedent-setting 1961 grain sale.
In his 1960s book on the Diefenbaker government, author Peter C. Newman called Hamilton “probably the best and certainly the most popular minister of agriculture in Canadian history” – at least to that point.
Newman recently called Hamilton “the intellectual core” of the Diefenbaker government.
Hamilton insisted in 1980s interviews that without his political intervention guaranteeing Canadian government support for the sale, it would not have happened. He called it “one of the great political stories in western Canadian history.”
Canadian Wheat Board records suggest the deal had been negotiated before Hamilton made his dramatic trip to Beijing.
Beyond the wheat sale, the Saskatchewan MP also embraced an activist agenda for agriculture that proposed stabilized prices and incomes, plus increased sales, to steady the farm sector.
In 2003, Tom Axworthy, former Liberal and now executive director of the non-profit Canadian history group Historica, named Hamilton as his agriculture minister in a dream cabinet chosen from governments since 1867.
