The Rural Community and Political Leadership in Saskatchewan

Abstract

The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (C.C.F.) movement in Saskatchewan is the first avowedly socialist group to win an electoral majority in any province or state of Canada or the United States. Many have expressed surprise that a socialist party should have won office in the most rural province in Canada. This paper is an attempt to throw some light on this question through a study of the leadership of the C.C.F. as compared with that of other community groups and political parties in that province.The significance of the growth of the C.C.F. party can best be expressed in economic class terms. The movement has two important aspects. Essentially, it represents the latest historical phase of the almost continuous conflict of the western grain farmers of the United States and Canada with eastern business interests. Secondly, within the province, success of the movement has resulted in a political transformation in which the representatives of the rural majority supported by the working class of the cities and towns rejected the political control of the urban middle-class business and professional groups which dominated the Liberal and Conservative parties and the government of the province.Since 1901, the farmers of the West and of Saskatchewan in particular, have been attempting to reduce the hazards of a one-crop wheat economy which is perennially subject to extreme fluctuations in income, as a result of the variability in grain prices and climatic conditions. At the turn of the century, Saskatchewan farmers organized the Territorial Grain Growers' Association (later the Saskatchewan Grain Growers' Association) to force the Canadian Pacific Railroad to provide loading platforms and freight cars for their wheat.