Milestone tells the story of farming in Quebec
Brenda O’Farrell
The Advocate
The history of Quebec has many chapters and spans several centuries, but it is the story of the province’s farms and its farmers that will be showcased later this year as the Union des producteurs agricoles celebrates its 100th anniversary in Quebec City.
And that is where it all started.
It was on Oct. 2, 1924, in the provincial capital that the Union catholique des cultivateurs was formed. On that autumn day 100 years ago, this forerunner to today’s farmers’ union, the UPA, brought together about 2,500 farmers from across Quebec. The goal of joining forces in a union was to speak to government with one voice. And what they had to say charted a course that changed the rural landscape.
The UCC demanded that the electrical grid be expanded from the cities into the outlying regions. It also advocated for income protection and educational initiatives and information resources for agricultural producers.
But the organization’s success over the decades that followed stemmed from its duality – its ability to bring not only farmers from every region of the province together, but unite the different type of farmers – and their different types of specialties, like dairy, pork, beef.
“We protect all the models of agriculture,” said UPA president Martin Caron in a recent interview. “The greatest wealth we have in Quebec is all the diversity in relation to different productions and the models of agriculture, whether large or small farms.”
Creating local farmers’ group was always at the core of the organization’s approach.
The first of those groups was founded within the first week of the UCC’s founding. It was formed in St. Nazaire d’Acton in the Montérégie area, between Drummondville and Acton Vale. The second group was established in the parish of St. Edmond de Coaticook in the Eastern Townships. By 1925, there would be 255 local groups, that included more than 11,000 farmers, about 10 per cent of the province’s agricultural producers at that time.
Laurent Barré became the organization’s first president. He served in that capacity from 1924 to 1926.
Barré would then run for a provincial seat in the National Assembly as a member of the Quebec Conservative Party, winning a seat in 1931. In the 1935 election, we would run under the Union Nationale banner, winning again. He was defeated in 1939, but returned to be part of the Union Nationale government in 1944, when he was named Quebec’s minister of agriculture until 1960.
In 1972, the UCC rebranded itself, becoming the UPA and the only representative of farmers in Quebec through the adoption of the Farm Producers Act. Caron is the 14th president of the UPA.
Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, the UPA was part of a number of campaigns championing the rights of the province’s farmers.
Everything from the fight against the expropriation by the federal government of vast tracts of farmland in Mirabel to build an international airport, to the creation of quota systems for the dairy, poultry and egg sectors were tackled.
In the 1990s, issues of environmental protection began to emerge, as well as global trade pacts.
In 1999, the UPA called for the creation of mechanisms to provide farmers with insurance and financing, leading to the creation of La Financière agricole du Québec in 2001.
Today, the UPA represents more than 42,000 farmers, and the organization is at the forefront of the movement to protect agricultural land from being dezoned for other uses.
As Caron has often cited, only 2 per cent of the land in Quebec is zoned for farming. That represents about a quarter of a hectare per resident, a ratio that is the lowest of all other jurisdictions in America outside of Canada.
Farming in Quebec has evolved from merely a way of life to a way of life that feeds a growing portion of the world. But it still faces a wide variety of challenges.
Those challenges will be the focus of the UPA’s next chapter.