Fields of study

I was so pleased to see the review of Paul Earl’s book, The Rise and Fall of United Grain Growers in your February-March 2021 issue.

Earl mentions that the early UGG was “established by Edward A. Partridge and other farmers at Sintaluta, Saskatchewan.” My grandfather A.J. Quigley was one of those other farmers. He was its first secretary and helped contribute to the $2,500 needed to purchase a seat on the Winnipeg Grain Exchange so farmers might gain some control over the marketing of their own wheat. The story of these intrepid farmers needs to be told, and I look forward to reading Earl’s book.

Dr. Allan Quigley, Ed.D. via email

Many thanks to Canada’s History and to Lyle Dick for the review of my book The Rise and Fall of United Grain Growers in the February-March 2021 issue.

One clarification, however. The book was not begun as commissioned research. It was conceived as such by the company, but I suggested that it would have greater credibility as an independent academic research project, and that is how the project was done.

I was pleased that Dick found my treatment of the cases for and against the takeover of the company to be balanced. It was important to stress that the proponents of each position acted in good faith, each believing they were doing the right thing. However, I was never neutral about the takeover itself. I deeply regretted the disappearance of the company, because I thought it still had an important role to play in the grain industry. I also believed that a more vigorous defence against the takeover should have — and might have — been mounted.

As the reviewer comments, the book does not deal with the federal government’s failure to develop regulations for the protection “of both prairie farmers and the country.” However, I believe it would have been inappropriate for this book to do so.

The problems the company faced at the end of its life were not specifically related to failures in government policies. They were, rather, internal difficulties that had been neglected, as well as legal issues regarding (and current practices with) mergers and acquisitions, both of which the book deals with at some length.

Paul D. Earl Senior Scholar Asper School of Business University of Manitoba