Memorial services will be held Saturday at Kindersley, Sask. for the farmer and lawyer who became the Canadian Wheat Board’s first farmer-elected chairman.
Ken Ritter, who farmed at nearby Major, Sask. and chaired the CWB’s board of directors from 1999 to 2008, died Sunday in hospital in Kindersley of complications from the brain cancer with which he’d been diagnosed in January, board officials said Tuesday.
Ritter, who practised law in Regina and Kindersley and taught high school at nearby Marengo and in Australia, had a substantial resume in Prairie public policy predating his stint with the CWB.
Read Also
Alberta crop conditions improve: report
Varied precipitation and warm temperatures were generally beneficial for crop development across Alberta during the week ended July 8, according to the latest provincial crop report released July 11.
During the 1980s he worked for the Grant Devine government in Saskatchewan, where he helped design and implement the legislation for the province’s Farm Security Act. He also served as chair of the province’s Surface Rights Arbitration Board.
At the federal level, Ritter sat as a Prairie commissioner with the National Transportation Agency of Canada from April 1989 until it was replaced in 1996 by the Canadian Transportation Agency.
Near the end of his tenure with the NTA, Ritter would witness the Chretien government ending the grain freight subsidies the agency administered under the Western Grain Transportation Act.
Ritter also took a run at federal politics in 1997 for the Progressive Conservatives, placing fourth out of four in Saskatchewan’s Battlefords-Lloydminster riding, captured from the NDP that year by a Reform Party candidate named Gerry Ritz.
“Convinced”
Ritter then ran in District 4 in the first-ever round of Canadian Wheat Board director elections, on a platform open to at least partial deregulation of the board’s single marketing desk for Prairie wheat and barley.
Ritter had a conversion of sorts, however, upon seeing the board’s sales figures and documentation of the economic activity it generated. “I’m thoroughly convinced that a single desk makes money for farmers,” he said in a 2002 interview with Grainews.
Ritter, whose boardmates elected him as chairman in 1999, “presided over some of the CWB’s defining moments as it transitioned from a government entity to a farmer-controlled grain marketing organization,” current CWB chairman Allen Oberg said Tuesday.
“He brought his considerable knowledge, insight and diplomatic skills to the board table, serving as a consensus-builder and a champion for farmers.”
Condolences to Ritter’s family and friends Tuesday also came from Grain Growers of Canada executive director Richard Phillips who, as a staffer for then-federal CWB minister Reg Alcock, would work closely with Ritter.
“Ken would always answer the phone no matter if he was on a tractor or playing bridge with his wife and friends,” Phillips said Tuesday.
A funeral mass for Ritter will be held at 11 a.m. on Oct. 29 at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, 600 Fourth Ave. W. in Kindersley. Donations in Ritter’s memory may be made to the Canadian Cancer Society or to the Kindersley Area Food Bank.
