Harry Siemens - I brought this post back to the front page because the comment section on this one is is setting all records for comments and rightfully so. Please go to the bottom of the  post and read the comments. You won’t be disappointed, and please feel free to add your own on this one and any other post that spurs you on. 

Rolf Penner- Friday night at the Western Canadian Wheat Growers banquet I had the honour of giving out the annual wheat grower award called the “Shovel of Gratitude”. This years recipient was Jim Chatenay and the following is a transcript of the tribute that I gave him. At the end of this tribute Jim got an instant and tremendous standing ovation from the crowd.

Unfortunately he was not there to see and hear it for himself as his wife is very sick in hospital and he is by her side. Nonetheless he is certainly deserving of recognition. 

When you are done reading the script, come back to listen to an audio interview Harry did with Rolf Penner.

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Tribute to a border runner

 Last year, in Minneapolis, I was honoured to receive the wheat grower’s ’shovel of gratitude’ for my work on the wheat board file. This year I’ve been asked to pass it on to another individual who I believe is truly deserving of recognition by his peers.

It’s never easy deciding on who that individual should be, as there are many, people who work very hard every year on making our industry better and improving the lives of Western Canadian farmers.  There are a number of people the Wheatgrowers considered for this years award but in the end we kept coming back to one name - Jim Chatney-

With Jim retiring as a farmer elected wheat board director this year after three successful terms in that position we thought that this was the perfect time to honour Jim’s service to his fellow farmers.  

Sometime before Christmas I was walking through a shopping mall and a poster for a new World War II movie caught my attention, the tag line under the title read, “Freedom begins, with an act of defiance“.  I immediately thought of Jim Chatney and all of the other farmers who decided to engage in acts of civil disobedience, by running the border with their own grain . 

In my mind that’s really how Jim’s story starts, with an act of defiance. He was a farmer from Alberta who was tired of being forced to sell his wheat and barley to a government monopoly and he was determined to show his fellow farmers and the world how unjust this really is in a so-called free society.   

 13 years ago, in the spring of 1996, Jim joined a small group of farmers at the Alberta/Montana border. Some had tandems, some had semi’s, some were in pickup trucks. Jim had the family van and in the back of it he had something truly dangerous, a weapon of mass anarchy and destruction, … a bag of Wheat.

He took that bag of wheat across to the US and he donated it to a 4-h club. That was Jim’s act of defiance, that was his act of civil disobedience, and that is what ultimately got him put in a Canadian jail. What others had just talked about doing, Jim and his friends actually did.

All of those farmers who ran the border made a very important contribution to the cause of freedom and Liberty in Canada. Until they did it the Wheat Board could always pretend that it was a benevolent organization. It was implied that if you sold your grain to someone else you would go to jail but until it happened nobody really took it seriously. What the border runners did, is they took what was implicit and they made it explicit. There was no longer any doubt that it was a crime in western Canada to sell your own wheat and barley. 

And boy did they get noticed. Media from all over the world swarmed in to tell the story. 

The Wheat Board was embarrassed and the politicians were embarrassed. But they were also intransigent. They didn’t want to give us our freedom, they didn’t want to give us the right to sell out own grain, but the heat was on. The world was watching and they knew they had to do something, and they did…  Instead of getting the politics out of the industry they decided to go for broke and double down. They invented farmer elected wheat board directors.

They created the illusion that farmers controlled their own marketing when in fact they still don’t.

They thought they were pretty clever, but they forgot one thing. They Forgot about Jim Chatney. Jim was not done fighting for a farmer’s right to choose. Not by a long shot. And He was not done being… defiant. 

He ran in the very first election in ‘98, and wouldn’t ya know it, the son of a gun won. He won by a wide margin. He was now on the inside of the organization that he had been trying to change from the outside.

Now the Justice system being what it is, Jim’s case still hadn’t worked its way through the system when he got elected. It wasn’t until Halloween day 2002 that he and the others were finally convicted under the Canada customs Act.  The irony was delicious… to say the least. A farmer with no previous criminal record, and no less than a sitting wheat board director was going to jail not for selling his own wheat but for having the audacity of giving it away to a 4-h club.  

Some of the farmers paid the fine the very next day and got out, some lasted about a week. But Jim and three others Ron Duffey, Bill Moore and John Turkata(?) stayed the full term. They didn’t think they had done anything wrong and they’d be dammed if they were going to give the government any of their money.

Jim had a few adventures while he was in the slammer. You know how in the movies all the prisoners get to lift weights for their “recreation” time. Well this one also had a small tractor, a plow, and some land. Well some how when it was time for recreation Jim got to run the plow. I guess you can take the farmer away from the farm but you can’t take the farm out of the farmer.  

Not a lot of people know this but while he was in prison Jim also got an education. He’s now officially certified to run a… chainsaw. That’s our tax money hard at work people. If you always wondered where the next generation of lumberjacks is going to come from, well now you know.

One day Jim thought he was in real trouble. He got called to the wardens’ office. When he got there he was feeling pretty nervous. Getting called to the principles office when you’re a kid in school is one thing but the wardens’ office that puts you in a whole other state of consciousness.  Jim was asked to sit down and the warden turned on the news. Jim couldn’t believe it; his neighbours had all gotten together and they were finishing off his harvest for him. And the local TV news was broadcasting it for all the world to see. If there was ever any doubt in Jim’s mind that farmers didn’t support what he was doing, in that instant it vanished. 

The warden told him he could watch for as long as he liked.

Jim and his buddies got out sometime before Christmas and when he came home he was sporting a beard. This was another act of defiance. In prison Jim had decided that he wasn’t going to shave his beard until the monopoly was gone and when he went to his first board of directors meeting after he got out he told them exactly that. 

As time went on and the beard grew he started to look like a cross between Charles Manson and the guys from ZZ top. I think that it was probably his wife Olive, that finally told Jim, the beard can stay but for gods sake you’ve got to trim that thing every once and awhile.

Jim ran in two more director elections, he won each time by increasing amounts. The last time was by acclamation. He holds the record for the highest % win.

Jim never forgot why he was at the wheat board, and he represented the farmers who elected him well. For ten years he pushed, he pulled, and he prodded the board of directors to simply let farmers go their own way. 

For the longest time he was alone around that table and the monopoly directors never let him forget it.  They tried everything to try and get him to change his mind, they made fun of him, they humiliated him, they tried to intimidate him and they alienated him. At times they would kick him out of the boardroom and make him sit in the hallway.  In short they put him through hell because he believed in something different than they did.

Jim believed in freedom, in justice and that a farmers grain belongs to the farmer who grows it.  And Jim’s presence was a constant reminder that yes in Canada a farmer can go to jail for selling the product of his efforts. Jim’s presence was also a constant reminder of the immorality of the entire monopoly system and they hated being reminded of it.

Jim persevered, he put up with all of the abuse and he remained defiant right till the end. He never got bogged down, sidetracked or taken off course. He stayed true to his principles. He also did something else which is remarkable considering the circumstances and everything he went through.  Jim did not get bitter, he was not spiteful and he remained gracious with all people, even the ones who didn’t agree with him.

In the end Jim spent far more time and effort trying to use the powers of persuasion, reason, logic and common sense to bring about change but he is best remembered as the border runner who became a wheat board director.

There are some who are uneasy about Jim’s act of civil disobedience; they don’t like the idea of having to break the law and engage in “Criminal activities” to try and achieve justice.  And in a sense it seems contradictory to do so.

But I’m reminded of the words of Martin Luther King when people talk about this and what Doctor King said was and I quote,

“   In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that his conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.” unquote

And that’s what I think about when I think about Jim, he was not a criminal all those years ago, he was somebody who was the exact opposite he was somebody who was fighting -injustice-. And that is what he was doing around the Wheat Board, board of directors table for all of those years as well. Like the movie poster said, “Freedom begins with an act of defiance” we may not have our freedom yet but we are a lot closer to it because of Jim’s acts of defiance and all of the hard work that he has put in on our behalf over all of these years.    

And that is why today we are giving Jim Chatney our Wheat Growers -Shovel of Gratitude-.