Bob Speller, Canada’s 29th agriculture minister, may also turn out to be one of the country’s shortest serving.
Speller, appointed minister Dec. 12, lost his Haldimand-Norfolk riding to Conservative Diane Finley Monday night, spelling the end of a term many farm leaders said offered them hope. He was seen as a listener and a farmer-friendly minister, rooted in the agricultural area of southern Ontario.
“Bob Speller not being in government will be a huge loss,” Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Bob Friesen said June 28. “He understood agriculture. As a backbencher and a minister, he was there for us. We had high hopes for him.”
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Friesen seemed shocked by the news of Speller’s defeat despite a national Liberal minority win. He called back late in the night to be certain he had heard the news properly.
“It is a huge loss. He will be missed.”
At Augustana University College in Camrose, Alta., academic dean and rural prairie analyst Roger Epp held a similar opinion.
“I think he just might have been the best agriculture minister the Prairies have seen in awhile,” he said. “He seemed to listen and he seemed to want to make things better.”
Speller, 48, fell victim to a hard campaigning Conservative businessperson, who said from the beginning of the campaign the agriculture minister was vulnerable.
“He has a profile as minister but I ask my constituents what he has accomplished for us since 1988 and the answer is, not much,” Finley said in a late-May interview.
Speller was one of the Ontario Liberals who under-polled the combined Canadian Alliance – Progressive Conservative vote in the 2000 election.
This time, he insisted he was doing better than he ever had, despite the fact that his majority had been shrinking since 1993 and in 1988, he won the formerly-PC riding by a slim plurality.
Speller, before he became a Liberal, had worked for a Progressive Conservative MP.
His tenure as agriculture minister was marked by handling the BSE and avian flu crises and promising farmers that he would fix the safety net program if it was flawed. Farm groups generally welcomed him as more sympathetic than predecessor minister Lyle Vanclief.
As agriculture minister, Speller was expected by the party to spend days outside the riding campaigning for other candidates. He insisted in a mid-June interview that his seat was safe and he could afford the time away.
Speller’s record as one of the shortest serving agriculture minister’s may be eclipsed only by one of his mentors, Ralph Ferguson, who served for less than three months as John Turner’s agriculture minister in 1984.
