ALVIN Hamilton’s death last week, with his reputation as one of the country’s great agriculture ministers, offers a chance to reflect on the attributes that make the 29 men who have served in that office successful, popular or memorable.
Prime minister Paul Martin soon will pick the next minister, since Bob Speller was defeated in his Ontario riding June 28.
Like all prime ministers picking cabinets, Martin will not be able to choose from the theoretical best crop of candidates but from the limited crop of possibilities the voters have given him.
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His crop of potential ministers, interesting rural MPs or MPs familiar with the agricultural industry, is shallower than a prime minister has faced in decades.
Still, history would show that an agricultural background, longevity or strong accomplishments in office do not necessarily translate into greatness as judged by farmers or historians.
Saskatchewan’s Jimmy Gardiner holds the record for most years in the office (1935-57) and was a member of what many historians consider the strongest federal cabinet in Canadian history (1940-45) but is rarely judged as great.
He is credited with few legacies, the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration being one possible exception.
Lyle Vanclief (1997-2003) secured as much money for agricultural funding as any agriculture minister in history, between $10 billion and $15 billion depending on how the accounting is done and more than offsetting the cutting that went on under predecessor minister Ralph Goodale (1993-97.)
But Vanclief left last December as one of the least popular ministers in recent history, particularly on the Prairies where he was seen to be invisible, unsympathetic and disinterested. Part of the dissatisfaction was that program design often did not get money to farmers who needed it in sufficient quantities or quickly enough but still, the evidence is that bags of money do not win farmer loyalty or approval.
Based on farmer opinion, farmer nostalgia and historical judgment, the most successful or at least most popular ministers in the past half century have been Hamilton, Eugene Whelan (1972-79, 1980-84) and Speller.
Tributes to Speller may be a bit suspect because he held the job for just seven months, was part of just one major announcement – close to $1 billion in BSE and general aid money – and mainly won kudos for not being Vanclief and for promising farmers he was on their side.
Instant farm leader nostalgia may be little more than regret that they finally had a minister who said he would do what they told him to do.
But the common trait of those three ministers, whatever their real accomplishments, was that they made as the core of their political theology that they were on the side of farmers, not the side of the process, the bureaucracy or the brokers.
They often spoke broken English (Alvinisms, they were called in 1962, Whelanisms a decade and two later) but they connected themselves to farmers.
Speller promised he would fix the flawed farm programs the bureaucrats designed. Whelan laboured in a government that had little farm representation but never left farmers in doubt that he represented them to Pierre Trudeau, not Trudeau to them.
It sounds simple enough.
