IN THE early 1980s, Ottawa successfully broke the mystique of the Crow Rate as an untouchable prairie policy when some Crow defenders agreed to compromise.
It was summer 1980, and farm leaders were worried about what amounted to a capital investment strike by railways that refused to invest in grain transportation infrastructure because of losses dictated by frozen grain freight rates.
Leaders of prairie grain co-operatives and farm organizations told a newly elected Liberal government that if Ottawa committed to cover railway losses under the fixed-rate Crow, farmers would be willing to discuss increasing freight rates that had been frozen since 1898.
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It effectively ended the debate about whether the Crow would go. It became a debate about when.
As the late Arthur Kroeger, then deputy transport minister, described it in his 2009 book Retiring the Crow, that promise to negotiate rate increases sealed the Crow’s fate.
Years of internal government political battles and shifting farm organization positions made the resolution process long, convoluted and tumultuous but through the byzantine internal Liberal struggles, the anti-Crow advocates had a strong fall-back position.
Farmers were the ones who asked for it, even if they later changed their minds.
Once the prairie pools, among others, conceded that the Crow rate wasn’t sacred, the moral ground evaporated. By denying the Crow god, theology seeped out of the debate and it became just a question of the price.
It is an illustration of the power and pitfalls of compromise that modern agricultural lobbyists must consider.
Is there any percentage in being a 100 percenter, standing by your demand to government no matter what?
Is the offer of compromise in hopes of getting some movement, any movement, from a resolute government worth the almost-certain result that you get far less than what is needed?
Canadian Pork Council leaders have faced criticism for so quickly dropping their summer request for government aid after the Conservatives said no. The CPC quickly crafted a government-friendly loan program.
Canadian Federation of Agriculture leaders have faced criticism for becoming (at least in critics’ eyes) less troublesome for the Conservatives after agriculture minister Gerry Ritz told them last year that if they didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear on the Canadian Wheat Board issue, he considered their views irrelevant.
Liberal agriculture critic Wayne Easter says this is an abdication of farm leadership obligations to stand up to government.
Easter presumably would look approvingly on Jane Jacobs’ tactics. She was the most influential urban planning activist of her generation in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, raging against mega-development.
Biographer Anthony Flint recently wrote that her key insight as a tactician was to refuse compromise.
In a Globe and Mail review of Flint’s book, John Barber wrote that Jacobs faced down developers, often to the anger of citizens.
Could a mobilized farm lobby really fight government to a standstill these days?
Most farm lobbyists seem to think not. They’ll compromise in hopes of some small concession.
It may be the best they can do.
