On Jan. 4, Saskatchewan Liberal senator Herb Sparrow retired after 37 years in the Red Chamber, ending a career that saw him win international awards and an honourary degree for promoting soil conservation. But the years also often saw him in the Liberal doghouse as a senator just a bit too independent for the good of the party. Sparrow’s time in Parliament featured five Liberal prime ministers – half the party leaders since Confederation – and eight out of 21 Canadian prime ministers. His retirement ended the last direct Parliament Hill link with the government of Lester Pearson, Canada’s 14th prime minister.
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Late in 2004, an unusual request arrived at Canada’s Senate.
Could 400 copies of a 20-year-old Senate committee report on soil erosion and conservation be sent to Australia, which had come through a year of drought and blowing topsoil?
The report is Soil at Risk – Canada’s Eroding Future and tens of thousands of copies have been sent worldwide, 25,000 in the first year alone.
Herb Sparrow, chair of the Senate agriculture committee that wrote the report in 1984, recalls it as the most memorable achievement of his close to four decades of Senate work. That work ended Jan. 4 with his official retirement.
He travelled Canada and the world promoting soil conservation, saw millions of prairie acres moved from summerfallow to continuous cropping to reduce salinization and erosion and earned an honourary degree from McGill University and a United Nations Environmental Leadership Medal for his efforts.
“That time overshadowed everything else,” Sparrow said in his Parliament Hill office Dec. 15, the last day he would sit in the Senate chamber.
“I was in the right place at the right time. Farmers were ready for the message when they might not have been earlier. And I busted my ass, travelled a lot and spoke to anyone who would listen. But it worked.”
Through the 1970s, he had seen the impact of erosion on his own farm and had heard academics argue that traditional summerfallow was a major part of the problem. Hearings held by his Senate committee helped galvanize and focus the debate.
His proselytizing raised the issue’s public profile and a signed photo of environmentalist David Suzuki in his office, sent after a Nature of Things program on the issue, is a small indication of the impact he had.
But the report was far from Sparrow’s only moment of fame or notoriety in the Senate.
He was one of just two senators to vote in 1992 against the Charlottetown Accord because of what he saw as its unfairness to the West. He convinced British Columbia Liberal Ed Lawson to join him and then became a key and successful anti-Charlottetown voice at Saskatchewan meetings on the issue.
His vote in the mid-1990s against a Liberal bill on Pearson Airport effectively killed the bill and forced Ottawa to pay compensation to developers who had made a deal with the former Conservative government only to see it cancelled by the Liberals.
The ChrŽtien government wanted to deny the developers the right to appeal to the courts and despite the greatest political pressure of his career, Sparrow thought the lack of court appeal unfair.
He also voted against long gun registration legislation and anything else he thought would hurt farmers.
“I am a Liberal and I support
80-85 percent of what they propose,” Sparrow said.
“But being in the Senate and not needing re-election gave me the freedom to apply common sense sometimes. That didn’t always make me the most popular person at Liberal caucus meetings.”
Saskatchewan Conservative senator Len Gustafson had his own version of that fact during Senate tributes to Sparrow Dec. 8.
“He was always his own man. If
he did not believe in something, he told you. If he did, he told you as well.”
Despite that later independence, it was his Liberal pedigree that led to the early February 1968 call from prime minister Lester Pearson offering him a seat in the Senate. And it was no surprise.
Sparrow had been an unsuccessful provincial Liberal candidate in 1964 and then Saskatchewan Liberal party president after that. A Senate seat was open and Pearson wanted nominations from Saskatchewan Liberal premier Ross Thatcher.
One day when Thatcher was complaining about all the Liberals lobbying for the job, Sparrow told him he’d take it.
Thatcher nominated him and eventually, in the last months of his time in office, Pearson complied.
But it wasn’t just Sparrow’s Liberal credentials that made him worthy in Pearson’s eyes.
At home in North Battleford, Sask., he already was legendary for his public, and often private, good works.
He helped organize a school lunch program when the plight of hungry students was brought to his attention. He helped organize a food bank, helped establish a school for the developmentally delayed (and personally tended the lawn), bought a building for the Salvation Army (they paid him back) and committed many private acts of charity and generosity.
He was named North Battleford’s citizen of the decade for the 1980s.
Sparrow insists these acts of charity and generosity define his life far more than the grand political campaigns in which he was involved. He said he was emulating the acts of generosity done to him over the years, by local business-people and by more prominent figures like Thatcher and col. Harland Sanders, who made Sparrow his third Canadian Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise holder and became a friend.
“So many people have been kind to me, have been generous and trusting. I hope I have given some of that back to people who needed a boost, a bit of kindness.”
One of the autographed photographs from old friends that Sparrow treasures is a 1988 offering from legendary comedian Red Skelton.
The senator fancies himself a comedian and for years did stand-up comedy for $500-$1,500 an appearance. He said comedy has been a good way to cheer people up; to give them hope.
So it was that he found himself at a Reform party convention in Edmonton in 1989, speaking about his soil conservation crusade and typically causing a bit of a scandal in the Liberal party by being a featured speaker at a convention of a political rival.
In the audience was Stan Waters, elected in the first Alberta election as a senator-in-waiting and eventually appointed to the Senate by prime minister Brian Mulroney.
Sparrow spotted Waters in the audience and gave him a primer on what to expect if he ever got the call to attend the Senate in Ottawa.
“The Senate has some nice digs,” he said. “It sleeps 104.”
