I first met Gerry Ritz in the spring of 1998. He and a few newly elected Reform MPs came to Renfrew to introduce themselves and give a talk on the Reform Party. The meeting took place in the Renfrew Rec Centre. Garry Breitkreau, who became best known for abolishing the long-gun registry and worked on it for 17 years, was there. Diane Ablonczy and John Duncan were also there. Probably others but I don’t recall.
I wrote a column about the meeting and was critical of it as the organizers didn’t have coffee or any kind of refreshments for the audience after the meeting. This meant, no coffee chit chat afterwards. I remember writing about it and saying it was cheap, and this being a new party, it was a bad start sending folks home with no coffee and cookies.
Ritz, the Battlefords-Lloydminster MP, was just like an ordinary farmer and I recall I never thought he’d be Canada’s agriculture minister. He was quiet and very low-key. He certainly didn’t stir me up as being a bright new face in politics. But that was in 1998. In 2007 he was appointed agriculture minister and he kept the job until Harper’s government was defeated in 2015.
Ritz was the international trade critic for the Conservatives but being in opposition was probably not to his liking after eight years as a cabinet minister. The polls were telling him that the Conservatives would be staying in opposition for at least another term. And he was 66 years old, time to retire.
The Reform Party was a right-wing, populist, western political protest movement that grew to become the official opposition in Parliament in 1997. Reform played a role in the creation of the Canadian Alliance, as well as the demise of the federal Progressive Conservative Party — and the eventual merger of those two groups into today’s Conservative Party.
Ritz was first elected under the Reform party banner in 1997 and re-elected as a Canadian Alliance candidate in 2000 before winning the next five elections as a Conservative. As minister, he led numerous trade missions to open and expand international markets. He fought against the United States’ move to mandatory country-of-origin labelling for meat.
Ritz will always be associated with ending the Canadian Wheat Board’s single desk in Western Canada in 2012. Gerry Ritz knows most people will point to the end of the Canadian Wheat Board as his legacy.
Ritz said it was time to move on and make family his priority.
“We’re half-way through a session so there’s lots of time for someone to run in a by-election here, get their feet on the ground, get ready for a major election in 2019,” he said in a news release.
