Mac Runciman: A Life in the Grain Trade PDF
Preview Mac Runciman: A Life in the Grain Trade
Mac Runciman A Life in the Grain Trade Mac Runciman A Life in the grain the trade Paul D. Earl THE UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA PRESS © Copyright Paul D. Earl 2000 © Foreword copyright Gerald Friesen 2000 The University of Manitoba Press Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada R3T 5V6 www.umanitoba.ca/uofmpress Printed in Canada on recycled, acid-free paper Cover and text design: Karen Armstrong Frontispiece: portrait of Mac Runciman reproduced by permission of Yousuf Karsh. Cover: Mac Runciman, c. 1934. Photographs: Unless otherwise indicated, all photographs are from the collection of Mac Runciman. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the University of Manitoba Press, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from CANCOPY (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 6 Adelaide Street East, Suite 900,Toronto, Ontario M5C 1H6. Canadian Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Earl, Paul D. (Paul David), 1941- Mac Runciman Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-88755-666-3 1. Runciman, Mac, 1914— 2. Farmers—Saskatchewan— Biography. 3. Grain trade—Prairie Provinces—History— 20th century. 4. United Grain Growers—Biography. I.Title. HD9044.C22E37 2000 380.1'4131'092 COO-920129-7 The University of Manitoba Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for its publishing program provided by the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP); the Manitoba Arts Council; and the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage and Tourism. Special assistance for the publication of this book was also provided by the United Grain Growers and the Canadian Pacific Railway. Contents Preface vii Foreword by Gerald Friesen xvii 1 The Boy: Scotland, 1914-1928 3 2 The Young Man: Saskatchewan, 1928-1939 19 3 The Soldier: England, Sicily, Italy, 1940-1945 41 4 The Farmer: Saskatchewan, 1945-1961 69 5 The UGG President: 1961-1970 115 6 The Industry Leader: 1965-1975 137 7 The Statesman: 1970-1981 175 8 The Retiree: 1981-2000 217 Appendix 235 Notes 239 Index 249 To Pat who was always therefor me. Preface This book, to begin with, tells the story of Alexander Mclnnes (Mac) Runciman, a man who is best known as a former president of United Grain Growers (UGG). However, the book is more than Mac's story. It also provides an analysis of one of the most difficult public policy issues faced by the federal government, farmers, the grain industry, and the rail- ways in the last half-century: the modernization of grain handling and transportation in western Canada over the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, it chronicles a major paradigm shift in farm opinion in western Canada, in which the wisdom of maintaining the highly centralized and regulated grain marketing and transportation systems came under increasing criti- cism within the rural community. A word about each of these stories is in order, beginning with Mac's. Mac played his most prominent role in public life as the president of United Grain Growers from 1961 to 1981, and as an outstanding leader in western Canadian agriculture. However, he was much more than that, and others will remember him as a director of a number of major Canadian companies, as the founding president of the Rapeseed Association of Canada (now the Canola Council of Canada), as a former chair of the University of Manitoba Board of Governors, as an appointee to the Order of Canada, or as filling one of several prominent roles he played in Canadian affairs. Mac was born in Scotland in 1914, and emigrated to Canada when he was thirteen years old, in 1928. His family had farmed in Scotland and they took up holdings in Saskatchewan, not far from Balcarres, shortly after they arrived. Mac first farmed with his father and continued to live on the family farm until the war. However, in 1934, in addition to his responsibili- ties at home, he began to work, on his own, a quarter section that had been purchased by his grandfather for him (Mac) and six other grandchildren (his brother and sister and their cousins). In 1940, he joined the Canadian Army (Ordnance Corps) and served overseas until the spring of 1945. It was during the war that his leadership abilities began to emerge in a substantive way. He started his military career viii Preface as a private and, by the end of the war, had attained the highest non- commissioned officer rank. He was selected for officer training, but a curious quirk of fate prevented him from taking it. The family farm was given up during the war, but Mac was determined to resume farming and so he purchased property near Abernethy, Saskatch- ewan, shortly after his return. He then became interested in United Grain Growers and was elected secretary of the UGG "local board" in Abernethy in the early 1950s. This brought him to the attention of the company's directors and in 1955 he was asked to join the board. It seems likely (al- though Mac himself does not know for sure, and hard evidence is lacking) that he was former president John Brownlee's choice as successor. Regard- less, when Mr. Brownlee resigned from office due to illness, the UGG board selected Mac as the company's new president. In 1961, therefore, Mac left farming a second time and moved to Win- nipeg. The presidency of UGG was the first step in what became a distin- guished career in corporate and public life. Over the following twenty years, he assumed a broad range of public service responsibilities - in in- dustry, government, and the community at large — and emerged as an out- standing leader who was often spoken of as standing "head and shoulders above his peers." After retirement from UGG in 1981, he became chairman of the board of governors of the University of Manitoba, and continued what was even- tually to be more than two decades of involvement with Victoria General Hospital and the Victoria Hospital Foundation in Winnipeg. He finally stepped down from the board of the foundation in 1999. In 1983, he was invited to become one of the founding directors of Power Financial Cor- poration. The formal positions and honours are indicative of Mac's stature, but convey little of the admiration in which he was held. Everyone who was involved in the western Canadian grain industry trusted and respected him. He was often consulted by the grain industry's senior leaders on critical issues or at critical decision points in their own lives and careers. He was the kind of man who attracted such confidences, and to whom people would turn for advice. His leadership abilities were formally recognized on many occasions. He was asked by the federal government to be the founding chairman of the Canada Grains Council; he was selected by his peers in the industry to be the founding president of the Rapeseed Association (now the Canola Council); and at one point he was asked by the Trudeau government to take a cabinet post, which he refused. Preface ix As this biography was coming to completion, Mac was eighty-five years old, and had, only one year earlier, stepped down as president of the condo- minium complex in which he resided. In this role, he had been involved for several years in a difficult legal case, which the complex had advanced against the construction companies that built the condominium. This was no trivial legal matter. Part of the legal proceedings had been taken earlier to the Supreme Court, and, if the matter had not been settled out of court, he would have to be the condominium's prime witness as the case re- turned to a lower court to move through its next step. It is not only the details of Mac's life that merit some public record, but also the way he exercised the leadership role into which he was thrust. He governed himself by a set of values he absorbed from his family, and from which he never wavered: honesty, fair play, justice, and respect for others. Despite his accomplishments, Mac has remained a very down-to-earth person. He is at home in whatever company he finds himself, and possesses the rare knack of putting anyone - regardless of their personal position, wealth, or rank — at ease. One former employee of United Grain Growers once very aptly described him as "courtly." And while he is not without criticism of others when it is called for, he does not criticize unjustly, and one has to be fairly close to him before one will hear harsh judgements from his lips. As he put it in 1976, speaking to an audience at Knox United Church in Winnipeg on ethics and business, "my standard of judgement is fairness, not softness, and the judgements are mine."1 It was during his presidency of United Grain Growers that the other events recorded in this book unfolded: government and industry attempts to deal with the grain handling and transportation problems, and the shift- ing tide of farm opinion. When Mac assumed the presidency, the grain industry was just begin- ning to come to grips with the issue that absorbed more of his time and energy than any other: the need to rationalize and modernize the grain handling and transportation system. Even as late as 1970, this system had changed little from the 1930s, when farmers hauled grain to market with horses and wagons. What was not widely understood in 1961 was the way a tightly woven web of institutional constraints, arising from well-intentioned but questionable policies, combined to frustrate the development of a modern and efficient system. Nor was there a willingness to acknowledge the role of railway freight rates on grain - the Crow's Nest Pass Rates2 - in the arrested development of the system. These rates were looked on as the Magna Carta of the west, a view that was simply not open to examination or discussion.
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