"Canada's co-operative province"

Soon, however — and especially with the takeover of the co-op elevators — the pool became a ubiquity in rural Saskatchewan, its vast network of elevators more or less identical to the network of settled points in the agricultural south of the province. [...] For the first quarter-century of the province’s history, the producer co-ops represented the overwhelming importance of the agrarian settler economy, the con- fidence and progressivism — even boosterism — of the province’s people, and the many similarities to American farmer issues and agricultural regions. [...] When Clifford Sifton — the former minister of the Interior who had supervised the mass immigration to the Canadian Prairies — addressed the Regina Canadian Club in 1927, he used the occasion to denounce and ridicule “socialism.” And yet in the next breath he continued: On the other hand I have nothing but praise for the co-operative enterprises which the farmers of Canada are conducting with such [...] The dynamism of the movement, as it grew in the 1930s and 1940s, did contribute to the grass-roots level of the new CCF. [...] The federal government came to the pools’ rescue in 1931, taking over the marketing of the western wheat crop in the first of a series of interventions that eventually led, in the 1940s, to the establishment of the Canadian Wheat Board.