Rex Murphy takes stage at Ag Days

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Former CBC commentator Rex Murphy delivered a meandering, joke-filled salute to agriculture at Ag Days on Wednesday in front of a packed crowd in the show’s FCC Theatre.

Murphy, who is from Newfoundland, compared the Newfoundland fishery to Prairie farming and the hardiness of the people who work in both industries. He said both industries were vital in building the country.

“No one has direct understanding and appreciation of the natural forces, of the things that make things grow, of how weather and climate — the sky the sea the wind, sun, the seasons — how all these have a great interplay and how farmers and fishermen must, in their various tactics, must learn those things under pulses,” he said.

“It was the early efforts of people who did not have the supplementary equipment and the scientific knowledge and the vast resource of capital that gets built up over the generations. It was the early people in their absolute selflessness aiming better for their children.

“If we celebrate how great Canada is, we should remember it’s great because people laboured so selflessly and in conditions that we no longer could tolerate.”

Murphy recounted a story of covering the collapse of the cod fishery for CBC. He said after his stories aired, people sent in letters to CBC expressing their sorrow and some with money to try to help the out-of-work fishermen. After a trip to the CBC mailroom, he said he was surprised to find two-thirds of the letters were from Canada’s Prairie provinces.

He said it reminded him of learning of stories from the Great Depression, when the comparably better-off cod fishermen sent barrels of salt fish to the Prairies for those without food.

There are parallels, too, between the closure of many family-owned farms and the toll the end of the cod fishery took on many Newfoundland communities, he said. In both cases, the work that tied together generations of families and helped build the country was suddenly severed.

He asked the audience to imagine if their ancestors could see the combines and farming equipment filling the Keystone Centre for Ag Days.

“Those machines just starve your mind in their complexity. That’s how far the people who were before you (have come), they each built a ledge and on that ledge, the next generation built another, and the next another, and so all of this great Canada,” Murphy said.

“Without them, no us. Without the earlier enterprises in the most fundamental of all activities, gathering food, there would be no country. It goes back to the energies, to the courage, to the application of their personal character and industry.”

Murphy ended by saying the country’s leaders should get more acquainted with types of work like those in the agriculture and fishing industries.

“Essential to the continuation of the level, not of prosperity, but the level of contentment we have of this country that is Canada, to maintain that, those who call themselves our leaders have really got to get much more deeply involved in a knowledgable appreciation of the everyday work and habits of people in the most basic resources,” he said to applause.

Today is the last day of Manitoba Ag Days at the Keystone Centre.

 

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