There is a glorious story, truth or fiction, that has been handed down through generations of farmers’ union members about a former federal agriculture minister. | by Barry Wilson, Ottawa bureau
NOW:
He is the reigning king of tenure in the agriculture ministry: 22 years from 1935 to 1957.
Jimmy Gardiner, a member of the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame, is credited by historians as an important architect of modern federal agriculture policy and, in a 1997 Agriculture Canada booklet on agriculture ministers, for having expanded the department’s authority.
All of that aside, his legacy remains contentious as the enduring story illustrates:
In the 1950s, Manitoba Farmers’ Union president Jake Schultz was watching television on his Interlake farm, TV being a newfangled communications medium at the time, and Gardiner appeared on screen to extol the virtues of Liberal policy for farmers.
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Schultz, later briefly a CCF MP in 1957-58 and father-in-law of future premier and governor general Ed Schreyer, was so outraged he grabbed his rifle and blew out his television screen.
In Saskatchewan, farmers’ union president Joe Phelps heard about it and organized a fundraiser among members to buy Schultz a new TV.
Such was the power of Gardiner to inflame opinion.
Even in his day and within his own government, this Saskatchewan farmer-politician was divisive.
Prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, exasperated by Gardiner’s belligerence in cabinet in defence of his farm policy demands and his take-no-prisoners style, wrote in his diary that the agriculture minister’s defects included going in the “Hitler direction.”
Yet this hyper-partisan Liberal, former Saskatchewan premier and Lemberg, Sask., farmer, has also been lauded for turning the federal agriculture department into one of the key economic portfolios in Ottawa during the Second World War.
He fought to get wheat marketing policy out of trade and into agriculture, improve the clout of agriculture within the government and create income policies for farmers.
“His greatest achievements were in the federal field, when as the minister of agriculture for 22 years, he promoted and expanded the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration, introduced the Prairie Farm Assistance Act and granted aid toward the reclamation of low-lying lands in the Maritimes,” said the citation when Gardiner was inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame in 1962.
Norman Ward and David Smith from the University of Saskatchewan wrote in their 1990 biography of Gardiner, Relentless Liberal, that he was a successful agriculture minister.
“He had arrived in the capital determined to raise agriculture into the front rank of portfolios from what he judged to be its previous adjunct, support role for the provinces,” they wrote.
“And he succeeded.”
During the war, he used belligerence, cabinet bullying and hard work to make agriculture’s effort to feed Britain, allies and the troops one of Canada’s key Canadian contributions.
However, in 1941, it would have been difficult to convince The Western Producer and its Saskatchewan Wheat Pool owner that Gardiner was on the farmer’s side.
Prices were dropping that year, following a record wheat crop of 514 million bushels in 1940 and the sudden closing of the European market after Germany’s capture of most of the continent. The surplus piled up, farm incomes tanked and Gardiner worked feverishly behind the scenes in Ottawa to find a way to compensate farmers.
He was a free marketer who was quickly converting into an interventionist to save the prairie farm industry, say Ward and Smith.
Yet he had no instant answers, and in a radio address, according to an outraged Western Producer editorial, he said: “There is no use sugaring the pill by trying to convince you we are trying to do something for you.”
The newspaper demanded Gardiner be moved to another portfolio because he had been ignoring farmer interests since 1935.
A principle for the minister, said the front page editorial in the paper’s April 24, 1941, edition, was that farmers should be ignored.
“First amongst these (principles) was the determination that organized farmers as such must be excluded from the formation or direction of agricultural policy,” it said, citing dissolution of the advisory committee to the then-voluntary Canadian Wheat Board.
In fact, within government Gardiner was fighting for unprecedented help to deal with the 1941 wheat market meltdown.
The end result was an early version of the controversial Lower Inventories for Tomorrow (LIFT) program introduced by CWB minister Otto Lang almost 20 years later to deal with another glutted wheat market.
In the end, the result for Gardiner was unprecedented government intervention: farmers were limited in their deliveries through quotas, paid to store grain on the farm for the first time and subsidized to grow coarse grain rather than wheat.
As well, Ottawa implemented a government price support system and, for the first time, a two-price wheat system that forced millers in Canada to pay more.
And there were farm income supports.
Ward and Smith said the minister consulted widely with the pools and the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, and over much opposition within the government, ensured a stable wheat sector income for the year.
“My sense is he was a great believer in co-operation and the idea of consulting with the pools or farmers was a natural political disposition,” Smith said in a recent interview.
Gardiner also morphed from being an anti-CWB free trader in the 1930s to a supporter of the 1943 decision to make the wheat board’s marketing desk mandatory.
Through a political career that spanned more than 40 years, he gained enemies and critics but also admirers.
In 1959, the University of Sask-atchewan gave Gardiner an honorary degree with the citation: “While he will best be remembered in Canada as a champion of the farmer’s cause, throughout the western world he will be remembered as the man who made an outstanding contribution to the Allied victory in the Second World War through his efficient and energetic direction of the mobilization of the food resources of Canada.”
But these days, in Canada or the western world, the longest serving Canadian agriculture minister who fought to transform federal responsibility for agriculture policy is barely remembered.
THEN: No sugar on pill – editorial
In an address over the radio last week, Hon. James G. Gardiner, Federal Minister of Agriculture, said: “There is no use sugaring the pill by trying to convince you we are trying to do something for you.” That is a commendable attitude. Plain, honest, frank speaking is always best and never better than when times are blackest. We need, therefore, make no apology for following the minister’s example.
Since he took over the portfolio of Agriculture in 1935, Mr. Gardiner has adhered fairly consistently to one or two principles. First amongst these was the determination that organized farmers as such must be excluded from the formation or direction of agricultural policy. The advisory committee to the Wheat Board, which contained strong producer representation was, therefore, immediately dissolved. Next the Wheat Board itself, established by his predecessors and which was built substantially, though not wholly, to the specifications submitted by the western Wheat Pools, was scuttled.
