Calgary & Southern Alberta

Flood Irrigation
Courtesy of the Western Irrigation District

Unstable wheat prices were a chronic problem for southern Alberta farmers. During World War I, the government controlled prices through a wheat board. When the government board closed after 1919, farmers again had to contend with wild price fluctuations and powerful middlemen. In 1923, after a divisive contest between those who favoured re-establishing a wheat board, and those who felt a pool would address price problems more effectively, farmers formed The Alberta Wheat Pool. The Pool built a modern storage elevator and terminal system. By 1928, it was Alberta's largest grain company.

Another source of frustration for farmers was the CPR. Some of the animosity farmers felt toward the CPR originated with its immigration and colonisation promotional campaigns. Since these campaigns were highly stylised advertisements designed to attract immigrants, they frequently exaggerated the beneficial aspects of critical settlement factors, or neglected to mention problems settlers were likely to encounter.

Excavating irrigation canals, 1928
Courtesy of the Western Irrigation District

Immigrants often found that their southern Alberta homesteads did not resemble those depicted in the appealing CPR posters displayed in their homelands. Those who settled on the massive CPR irrigation block at Brooks, for example, faced unexpected difficulties almost from the moment of their arrival. Although crop yields in the irrigated areas were greater than in non-irrigated locations, individual plots were too small to make farming profitable. In addition, land and water costs were high. Farmers either left their land or formed associations to negotiate with the company. The CPR, claiming it could not make money on the irrigation project, turned the project over to the farmers in 1918.

The most serious disagreements with the CPR centred on high freight rates, boxcar shortages, and unfair treatment at grain elevators. In 1898, the public outcry against the CPR's monopolistic freight rates caused the federal government to negotiate the Crow's Nest Pass Agreement with the railway. The agreement provided lower transportation rates on wheat and flour moving eastward, and on settlers' possessions moving west. The "Crow rates", as they were called, were set aside during World War I, and farmers once again campaigned for national equalisation of freight rates.

Beyond a doubt, the most serious problem to Alberta farmers was the protective tariff of the National Policy. The tariffs dictated that farmers had to buy their manufactured goods at the high prices generated in a protected national market. They could sell their wheat, however, only on the open, competitive international market. The "farmers' party" of the Liberal government elected in 1896 succeeded in lowering tariff rates in 1899 and 1907. The reductions, however, were not enough to satisfy western farmers, who continued to see the tariff as a strategy designed by central Canada to keep the West subservient.