Ken Ritter
Had history been a little different, Ken Ritter might have been federal agriculture minister. As it was, he chaired the reinvented Canadian Wheat Board for nearly a decade, having also helped frame the Saskatchewan Farm Security Act and followed his restless intelligence into many other areas. He died of brain cancer on Oct. 24 at the age of 64.
"Honest, smart, intense." Those were the three words someone at his funeral scribbled on a scrap of paper and showed to Ritter's sister, claiming they were the words that best described him.
His intelligence and intensity can already be seen in a photo taken when Ritter, born on Feb. 24, 1947, as the eldest of five children, was perhaps 10 years old. He has a large book open in front of him, and gazes with characteristic directness at the camera. Behind him, a large map hints at the keen awareness of world events inculcated by his parents.
Upon finishing high school in his hometown of Major, in west-central Saskatchewan, Ritter took an arts degree at Notre Dame College, south of Regina, followed by an education degree in Regina. He returned home in the summers to help his father on the farm, establishing a pattern that would mark his entire life, of shuttling between engaging the wider world at increasingly high levels, and returning to his farm and home community. Although he eventually had a hired man attending to the day-to-day operations, he remained in close and frequent contact with his farm and the people of the area, and to the end of his life thought of himself as "simply a Major boy."
Having taught for a couple of years (one of them in Australia), he returned to school in Saskatoon to study law, at around the same time as he married a girl he had known since childhood, Monica Schmidt, to whom he remained married for 23 years. The first of their three children was born while he was in law school.
Having obtained his LLB, he practised for a couple of years in Kindersley and Regina, before moving through a variety of posts: chair of the Saskatchewan Surface Rights Arbitration Board; assistant to the Saskatchewan minister of finance; commissioner of the National Transportation Agency.
It was while he was with the provincial government that he co-designed the Saskatchewan Farm Security Act, a 1988 response to a perfect storm of agricultural misfortune. Low commodity prices, record high interest rates, multiyear drought, grasshopper infestations, soaring input costs and plunging land values were driving many farmers off the land and threatening the provincial economy. By modernizing, consolidating, and adding to Saskatchewan's existing protective legislation, the Farm Security Act shored up the viability of the farm community. It very quickly became the most judicially interpreted ordinance in provincial history, and remains among the province's most significant pieces of legislation.
The broad reach of the act made it a perfect project for Ritter, whose commitment to learning staggered those around him. "[He]continually read books and periodicals at an amazing rate," recalled Larry Hill, a later Wheat Board colleague, in memories shared at the funeral. "To stay with Ken on any topic from finance to world affairs, one had to read steadily. He even got me reading The Economist on a regular basis."
"He was one of those people who knew everything about everything," affirms his daughter Felice Mourre, who recalls getting up in the middle of the night when the family was travelling to find him reading in the hotel bathroom. "You could never argue with him" – he had his facts straight, knew where he got them, and had them all analyzed. "You could never really get ahead of him."
This came out strikingly when Ritter, a long-time worker for the Conservative Party, decided to run in the 1997 federal election. "I always thought he should've been the minister of agriculture," says Mourre, and it's likely Ritter thought so too. Mourre recalls attending an all candidates' meeting in Harris, Sask., during his campaign. "He was such a good public speaker," she remembers, "and so professional," not making derogatory remarks about the other candidates, but instead using his immense knowledge to make his points.
Unfortunately, intelligence alone rarely wins elections, and he had chosen a bad time to run: the Reform Party was taking bites out of the traditional Conservative vote. Ritter lost the Battlefords-Lloydminster riding to the Reform candidate. Ironically, that candidate, Gerry Ritz, is now a Conservative and the federal Minister of Agriculture.
Ritter soon found a new outlet. In December, 1998, he was elected to the newly redesigned Wheat Board. Amendments to the legislation governing the board had replaced most of its federal government commissioners with farmer-elected representatives. Quickly emerging as a leader on the new board, Ritter became the first farmer-elected chairman in June, 1999, a post he held until March, 2008.
He was instrumental in developing the board's first governance manual, and throughout his tenure was valued both for his ability to keep it on task and moving, and for his skills in building consensus. He also drew on his previous experience with the National Transportation Agency during the Kroeger Process negotiations on the pricing of rail freight for grain. The resulting deal has saved farmers millions of dollars in transportation costs.
When first elected, Ritter had been among those favouring a dual marketing system, whereby farmers could choose to market their wheat and barley through the Wheat Board or through other channels. As he came to understand the workings of the board better, however, he came to appreciate the importance of the single desk, and became a staunch advocate of maintaining it.
After stepping down from the Wheat Board, Ritter continued to farm. Following the harvest season of 2010, some of his conversations with family members were a little odd, and he experienced some falls and dizziness, but they put it down to his recent heart problems. Early in the new year, thinking he'd had a stroke, they took him to hospital. Within days he had undergone surgery for a brain tumour. Multiple tumours continued to grow even while he received chemotherapy.
He leaves four siblings, two former wives, children Ramon Ritter, Felice Mourre, and Nicole Galbraith, and their families.
"He worked so hard for 10 years to build [the Wheat Board]up," Mourre said. "It's ironic that it's dying the same time as he is."
Special to The Globe and Mail