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Based on its celebratory 40th anniversary convention in Ottawa last week, the National Farmers Union seems to be feeling good about itself these days.
The convention featured a changing of the guard and an emphasis on younger leaders.
Along with the usual messages about the evils of corporate control and globalization, there was enthusiasm for new thinking and priorities. Key among them was the launch of a program to help attract new younger farmers into the business.
The convention showcased problems at the World Trade Organization negotiations, long a target of the NFU. It featured complaints from Liberal MP Wayne Easter, a former NFU president, that while livestock sectors experience an economic meltdown, other farm group leaders have been silent or supportive of the government.
With membership rising, the NFU thinks the wind is in its sails as the policies and corporate market concentration they have denounced for years appear to be producing the apocalyptic results for some farm sectors that the NFU predicted.
As usual, they even take pride in the fact that theirs is a minority opinion in Canada, rejected by most. Those who can’t see the wisdom of their theology are merely fellow travellers with the corporate players and their dupes.
“Our message is not always treated with respect or even listened to,” newly elected NFU president Terry Boehm told the convention. “That’s OK.”
Former women’s president Colleen Ross essentially finished the sentence: “We are making a difference,” she told delegates. “The government will catch up to us.”
The NFU’s 40-year journey has been a tumultuous one.
Unlike many other organizations, it has been little interested in negotiating the gritty details of policies and more interested in critiquing whether they contribute in the long run to farm power.
It has left them on the outside of decision making for years and that suits them just fine.
It has organized demonstrations, chased ministers down hallways, fiercely defended farmer marketing agencies now largely extinct outside of supply management, opposed the railways, fought the end of the Crow rate, defended the Canadian Wheat Board and fought biotechnology companies, seed patenting and genetically modified crops.
Predecessor groups like the Saskatchewan Farmers’ Union organized farmer strikes and closed down highways.
“If they are not sometimes afraid of you,” former SFU president Alf Gleave once told me, “you don’t have any leverage to make them feel good when you’re nice.”
Former transport minister Otto Lang quit meeting with them during the transportation battles of the 1970s and while Liberal agriculture minister Eugene Whelan would speak at their conventions, they routinely repaid the favour by roughing him up verbally.
At 40, the NFU has a history of activism, John the Baptist wilderness preaching, strong research and analysis and a prickly public persona.
And it thinks that finally, industry events are proving them right.
Is the wind in their sails?
