The southeastern Saskatchewan village of Macoun is about to lose its high parliamentary profile.
Native son and 29-year parliamentarian Len Gustafson never missed a chance to illustrate bigger agricultural issues by referring to conditions in Macoun, whether grain prices, fuel costs or the weather.
It became a bit of a running gag at the Senate agriculture committee. “What’s happening in Macoun, Len?”
He chuckles at the memory.
“I made up my mind that the town, what I know, would be the focus, would anchor my views,” he said.
Read Also
European wheat production makes big recovery
EU crop prospects are vastly improved, which could mean fewer canola and durum imports from Canada.
On Nov. 10, the day he turns 75, Gustafson will have to vacate the Senate seat he has held since his surprise 1993 appointment by exiting prime minister Brian Mulroney.
For 14 years before that, the farmer, businessperson and local evangelical church leader had been the Progressive Conservative MP for the Assiniboia riding in southeastern Saskatchewan.
He took it from then Liberal MP Ralph Goodale in 1979 and held it against another run by Goodale the next year.
Agricultural issues were a constant thread through Gustafson’s political career.
He led a government task force in the 1980s on the impact of a severe prairie drought, recommending an aid package that the government delivered. He lobbied publicly and privately for farm support programs and expensive bailouts during the export subsidy wars of the 1980s and 1990s.
As chair and vice-chair of the Senate agriculture committee, he presided over studies on issues as wide-ranging as trade, broken farm programs and rural poverty. He teamed up with former Liberal agriculture minister and senator Eugene Whelan to oppose Monsanto’s bid to introduce a bovine growth hormone product to Canada’s dairy industry.
After all those years inside the political establishment, Gustafson the farmer said he has concluded there is not a deep enough political commitment to rural Canada nor a deep understanding of rural issues and rural importance among the country’s leaders.
“Americans, I don’t care if it’s a senator from New York or Los Angeles, stand behind the heartland,” he said.
“It is ingrained in the American outlook. You don’t get that in Canada.”
However, he also conceded that finding the right amount of government support without too much regulation or intrusion is a “difficult balancing act” for any government.
Simply sending out wads of money is not a complete policy.
“Farmers for the most part are not socialists,” said the conservative Conservative.
“They’re free enterprisers. They want a government that supports them but they don’t want to live on handouts either.”
He lamented that many people in large urban areas where the political power resides see farmers mainly as people with their hands out, always asking for more.
“That is not good for rural Canada and it’s not good for the country.”
Gustafson, an unabashed fan of Mulroney, said the 18th prime minister was the exception to the rule that rural issues do not receive the political and national attention they deserve.
“He understood the need for a strong rural Canada and agriculture,” Gustafson said.
“He once said that farmers are the only businesspeople who get penalized for increasing productivity.”
Gustafson’s political career was closely tied to Mulroney.
Although elected in 1979 under Joe Clark’s leadership, the rookie Saskatchewan MP was not a fan.
One day, he said, fellow Conservative MP Don Mazankowski brought Mulroney to his office.
“He told me he had to support Joe because he had been in his cabinet but he knew I was looking around and here was a guy I should meet. I had never met him before.”
The meeting changed Gustafson’s life.
Mulroney, an ambitious Montreal lawyer who had lost the PC party leadership to Clark in 1976, told Gustafson he had no caucus support in 1976. He was interested in taking the leadership from Clark but needed MP support.
That day, he recruited Gustafson as his first MP and gave him the job of watching other caucus members for signs of unhappiness with Clark’s leadership.
“If they are interested in a change, let me know and I’ll meet them at the Chateau Laurier (hotel in Ottawa),” Mulroney told him.
By the time of the 1983 leadership convention, Gustafson had helped recruit 25 MPs and senators.At the convention, Gustafson nominated Mulroney.
After his sweeping electoral victory in 1984, the prime minister rewarded Gustafson by making him his parliamentary secretary.
And on a summer day in 1993 when Gustafson had decided to support Jean Charest in the race to replace Mulroney, he visited the prime minister to ask permission because he did not want his endorsement to be seen as a reflection of Mulroney’s thinking.
“He said it would be fine,” Gustafson said.
” ‘Besides, I’m going to put you in the Senate anyway.’ That was the first I had heard about it.”
Until that day, the four-time MP was preparing to run in the election that reduced the PC party from majority to two seats.
“I was going to run but I would have lost,” he said. “I could feel it coming.”
Instead, Mulroney rewarded his loyalty with a secure and well-paid Parliament Hill job for another 15 years.
Now, he is heading home where he will tidy up some of the details of transferring most of the control of the farm to his three sons, who are effectively running it.
“It is a time of a lot of change for me but that is the way life is,” Gustafson said on one of his last days in a Senate office that offers a magnificent view of Parliament’s Peace Tower.
“I will spend more time on the farm and (wife) Alice and I will do some travelling.”
