As he wandered around the National Farmers Union 40th convention late last year, Stuart Thiesson was a symbol of yesterday – a long-serving chief bureaucrat for the NFU now relegated to tales of the good old days.
Although the NFU is a farm organization more intent than most on recognizing the connection between history and the present, few in the crowd preparing the NFU for the future would have known who he was, what he had done for the organization, what he dreamed.
Thiesson was part of a cadre of strong farm organization bureaucrats in the 1970s and 1980s who kept the farm lobby relevant and usually punching above its weight – Dave Kirk, Ira Mumford, Jim Wright and Bob Douglas among them.
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But sometimes, ghosts from the past can speak to the present.
Thiesson is one of those.
More than 20 years ago, he was one of 60 Canadian leaders asked by Edmonton publisher Mel Hurtig to imagine what changes they would make if they were prime minister.
Some of Thiesson’s proposals still resonate.
He said he would offer low interest rates on development loans for resource industries like agriculture while high interest rates would be applied to purchase of luxury goods.
In 1987, when farm debt was below $20 billion and stable, he likely could not have imagined the peril and cost of even low interest rates on a current debt of $60 billion and climbing.
In 1987, he lamented a “cheap food policy,” specialization and farm expansion that forced costs and restraint on farmers while producing wealth for food industry players.
Thiesson insisted agriculture was not just another industrial sector: “Unlike many other industries, agriculture requires policy considerations which strike a closer balance between economic and social needs.”
He said as prime minister, he would enact policies to reduce the exodus from rural Canada and help young farmers buy into the industry.
“We need to be concerned about the future shape of our farming communities, about the very real problems that confront young and beginning farmers in the intergenerational transfer of farm land,” he wrote almost a quarter century ago.
Thiesson suggested more attention be paid to land tenure and other rules that help new farmers, an issue the current government says it wants to pursue.
He called for a policy that allows Canadian farmers to compete against foreign subsidized produce.
He warned against myriad provincial support programs that allow rich provinces to buy production, particularly in the meat sector, a condition that haunts the industry still.
Thiesson urged an expansion of collective marketing including extension of the Canadian Wheat Board to other crops and a national meat-marketing agency.
And he saw problems in supply management quota values that have haunted the industry ever since.
“Quota values, where they exist for current supply managed products, should be phased out since they cannot logically be justified.”
Many of his prime ministerial dreams have gone off the rails but many still resonate. Sometimes past voices can illuminate the present.
