ON A cold night in early January 1935, Calgary-based Conservative prime minister R.B. Bennett climbed from his room at Ottawa’s ritzy Chateau Laurier railway hotel where he lived while in the capital to the CRCO radio studio on the top floor to issue a remarkable political deathbed repentance.
It was the second of five national broadcasts in the pre-election depths of the Depression during which the millionaire capitalist Bennett tried to convince Canadians he had gentler, kinder, more collectivist solutions to the nation’s ills.
On this night, he dealt with agriculture as one of his topics, pledging strengthened bankruptcy protection, state credit and marketing powers for farmers.
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The Canadian Wheat Board became one of the creations that flowed from that broadcast. Legislation was passed by Parliament in the months leading to the 1935 election that decimated the Conservatives.
That night, Bennett turned on his until-then capitalist friends and supporters when he described the plight of the farmer.
“His income depends upon the market, that is his income depends on the quantity of produce sold multiplied by the difference between the selling price and the cost of production,” said Bennett. “The selling price depends upon demand. The demand, of course, depends primarily upon the basic conditions of trade.”
Then he ventured into CCF territory.
“We must admit that it (demand) is also sometimes unfairly influenced by unconscionable monopolistic purchasers or by certain types of middlemen and distributors, some of whose activities would properly include them within the classification of economic parasites,” Bennett said to a patched-together network of private radio stations in what is considered the first national radio broadcast in Canadian history, paid for out of his personal fortune.
These were strong words from a man who abandoned Canada in 1939 to become a British viscount, a member of the House of Lords and an embittered political refugee from an ungrateful nation.
Fast forward 72 years to March 28, 2007, when agriculture minister Chuck Strahl used the same hotel as the prop for his announcement that on barley, he would return the CWB to what Bennett created – a voluntary marketer. Strahl is working for the first Calgary-based prime minister since Bennett.
Presumably, he decided to use a room at the Chateau Laurier for his announcement because it would offer space for a clutch of smiling prairie Conservative MPs to surround him, rather than because of any sense of historical symmetry.
But a student of Canadian political history finds the parallel irresistible and can’t help wondering what Bennett would say.
To listen to the critics, all those rapacious monopolistic buyers, middlemen and carriers are waiting in the wings, salivating at the prospect of powerful corporations against 60,000 barley producers. The capitalists have found ways since 1935 to significantly reduce competition among themselves while farmers have been genius at increasing their divisions.
Pre-election Bennett likely would say farmers are as marketplace weak now as they were then. Support their market power.
Post-election viscount Bennett likely would survey his ill-fated attempt to be a market power fixer and say: “Bring it on.”
