Percy Schmeiser, a Bruno, Sask., area farmer, with his canola crop, on Aug. 11, 1999.Glen Berger/The Globe and Mail
Percy Schmeiser, whose family tilled the rich soil of his native Saskatchewan for more than a century, was taken to court for seed piracy in a case that generated headlines around the world.
The Saskatchewan farmer, who has died at 89, became a global figure in the movement against genetically modified foods. He was sued by Monsanto Canada Inc. in 1979 for violating the agribusiness giant’s patent for Roundup Ready canola seeds.
A decade-long legal struggle turned the farmer and his wife, Louise, into folk heroes in what was portrayed as a David-and-Goliath battle. The couple lost a landmark Supreme Court of Canada decision by 5-4 in 2004, though they did not have to pay damages. Monsanto had sought $400,000 for unauthorized use of their flagship product.
The farming couple was sued after private investigators hired by the company discovered the patented canola, resistant to the company’s herbicide, was growing on the family farm. Mr. Schmeiser claimed the seeds had blown onto his land from a neighbouring farm, or a passing truck.
The Supreme Court decision acknowledged the company’s plant genes and modified cells could be patented.
In 2008, the Schmeisers declared a moral victory after receiving a cheque for $660 from the company to settle a small-claims court case they initiated. They had billed Monsanto for the cost of having to remove the patented canola from what they described as contaminated fields three years earlier.
The dispute convinced Mr. Schmeiser to grow oats and wheat instead of canola. He eventually leased most of his acreage to other farmers.
The case made the couple a cause célèbre for their defiance in the face of a large, multinational corporation.
Earlier this month, a fictional movie about the case, titled, simply, Percy, was released, starring Christopher Walken as a curmudgeonly prairie farmer. The family praised the film, though they insisted the patriarch was not so much ill-tempered as principled.
“We wouldn’t wish what we experienced on anyone,” Mr. Schmeiser said in a statement broadcast by the CBC. “It was very stressful. It split our community and divided farmers.”
The couple was celebrated for their role in defying the multinational’s aggressive marketing, as well as for promoting biodiversity and sustainability. In 2000, Mr. Schmeiser travelled to India to receive a Mahatma Gandhi Award. He and his wife were also honoured by the Council of Canadians, the Canadian Health Food Association, and the Right Livelihood Foundation.
Percy Schmeiser was born on Jan. 5, 1931, in Bruno, about 90 kilometres east of Saskatoon. He was one of five children (a girl and four boys) born to the former Elsie Haselwanter and Charles Alois Schmeiser. Both parents had been born in the United States (she in South Dakota, he in Minnesota) before their families moved north to homestead in the Fulda area as part of a colonization program organized by the Benedictine monks of St. Peter’s Abbey in Muenster.
The couple operated a hotel before moving in 1930 to Bruno, a town named for Brother Bruno Fuchs, one of the monks who founded the abbey, where they opened a service station and operated a farm. Young Percy helped out at the gas station and the family’s farm implement business, while also lending a hand with the crops and minks.
Mr. Schmeiser earned a diploma in radio and television technology at the Radio College of Canada in Toronto. He later served as an on-call technician for RCAF Station Dana, also known as Sagehill, one of three radar defence stations built in Saskatchewan during the Cold War to form the Pinetree Radar Line to warn of a nuclear attack by manned Soviet bombers.
The farmer’s political career included election as a Bruno town councillor in 1961 in the first election following incorporation and later service as mayor. In 1967, he won the Watrous constituency for Ross Thatcher’s Liberals by defeating the incumbent Co-operative Commonwealth Federation member by 65 votes. He lost a re-election campaign four years later by more than 700 votes. He later joined the Progressive Conservative party. (His father had been an unsuccessful Social Credit candidate in Watrous in the 1938 provincial campaign and again in Humboldt in the 1945 federal campaign.)
A three-month-long continental bus tour at the age of 20 sparked a lifelong interest in travel. He visited more than 150 countries and all seven continents with his wife. His passport included stamps from journeys to Timbuktu and to the Mount Everest base camp. He also climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. Once, in the market in Panama City, he and his wife were accosted by knife-wielding hoodlums. He knocked one of them down, though his wife suffered three stab wounds to her right arm when she refused to surrender her purse.
Mr. Schmeiser, who had Parkinson’s disease, died on Oct. 13. He leaves the former Louise Weyland, his wife of 68 years; five children; 15 grandchildren; 15 great-grandchildren; and, a brother, James Schmeiser. He was predeceased by a sister and two brothers.
In 1969, Mr. Schmeiser served on a committee to select a new flag for the prairie province from more than 4,000 submissions. They chose a design divided horizontally with green for forests over gold for grain fields. The provincial shield of arms (a red lion on a horizontal gold band above three gold wheat sheaves on a green background) is in the upper left quarter, while the western red lily (Lilium philadelphicum) can be found on the fly.
The flag was based on a design by schoolteacher Anthony Drake, who submitted his proposal and immediately after left for his native England.
Mr. Schmeiser was the last surviving member of the committee when Mr. Drake returned for a visit last year. The men met at Government House in Regina.
The new flag “gave us something to show the people of Canada and our own province and make it proud of its heritage,” Mr. Schmeiser told the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix. “It brought the life of Saskatchewan people to the world.”