No one noticed,” author and historian Allan Levine says. “We’re talking about arguably the most important business institution in the city’s history, and it barely ranked notice in the city media.”
For Levine, author of The exchange: 100 Years of Trading Grain in Winnipeg, it was the moment he realized the grain trade in Winnipeg just wasn’t what it used to be.
This particular moment was in 2007, when the Winnipeg Commodity Exchange morphed from a stand-alone open-outcry trading pit to just another part of the ICE online trading platform, a U.S.-based amalgam of various smaller exchanges.
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The city barely cared, Levine says. “It was unbelievable.”
Agriculture had been at the core of Winnipeg, almost from the day the settlement began as a modest fur-trading outpost populated by French and Métis traders and Scottish refugees from the highland clearances.
Through almost all of its existence, grain trading was what this city did.
The downtown core of the city bustled with traders for decades. The sidewalks and later the all-weather walkway systems were full of runners carrying cash tickets between the offices of the grain companies that dotted the downtown and the Canadian Wheat Board.
Traders from the Winnipeg Commodity Exchange were regulars in the taverns, and at lunch time it was all but impossible to sit anywhere without hearing grain prices talked about at the next table.
That’s not exactly gone, but it’s a lot more muted these days. The grain companies have amalgamated over the years, and Viterra, one of the biggest, is now headquartered in neighbouring Saskatchewan.
Yes, the Canadian Wheat Board is still around. Stripped of its single-desk powers, however, it’s a shadow of its former self. Ditto for the Winnipeg Commodity Exchange — that august institution de-mutualized and joined the much larger ICE Futures online platform a few years ago, ending more than 100 years of open-outcry pit trading.
In just a few short years, the grain trade has faded from in your face to tough to spot. And with every passing year, the whispered question gets just a bit louder.
Is Winnipeg still heart of the grain trade?
Geographically, it’s on the edge of the Prairie region, so Saskatoon in many ways is seen as a more logical hub, given its more central location. The direction of trade has also reoriented over the decades, with the emergence of major Asian customers causing much of the grain to flow west through distant ports like Vancouver and Prince Rupert, instead of through Thunder Bay to the east.
Still beating
Winnipeg is still the heart of the grain trade, however, and some insist it’s a heart that is still beating strongly. On the face of it, there are a number of things that keep the trade off life support, Levine insists. Not least of these is that the remaining grain companies are almost entirely family-owned enterprises — outfits like Paterson, Parrish & Heimbecker and the Richardson family, arguably the city’s first family of the grain trade.
“We’re talking about companies and families that have touched every part of the city’s social and cultural fabric,” Levine says. “They’ve made Winnipeg much more important in many ways than its size might suggest it should be.”
That commitment has taken many forms, Levine says. For example there’s the city’s outsized cultural footprint as represented by institutions like the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, the symphony orchestra and the well-supported local theatre scene. There’s also the city’s role as a financial centre — something that grew along with, and because of, its role as a grain-trading centre.
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With these roots running so deep in the city, Levine says it’s unlikely most of the remaining companies will pull up stakes and leave.
Another source of Winnipeg’s incumbency in the industry is the role of various government-run or -funded institutions. For example, the Canadian Grain Commission is headquartered just a few steps from Portage and Main. In the same building — at least for now — is also the Canadian International Grain Institute (Cigi).
For many years, Cigi was jointly funded by the federal government and farmers, through the Canadian Wheat Board. It’s had to find a new path forward that involves more industry work following the death of the CWB’s single-desk powers, and in that process Cigi has bumped into limitations at its current location, where it’s been doing business since its inception in 1972, says Cigi executive director Earl Geddes.
“We were trying to build new industry relationships and we were finding we had to turn down business because we simply didn’t have the space and resources to take it on,” Geddes says. “That just didn’t sit right with me.”
That reality led to talk of finding new facilities, which placed Cigi at the centre of this emerging new dynamic. Almost immediately, representatives from the city of Saskatoon appeared, touting that city’s benefits and emerging status as a significant agriculture research hub. That’s hardly surprising — what was surprising is that a similar effort didn’t materialize from the Manitoba and city governments.
Ultimately, however, Winnipeg still makes more sense, Geddes says, and he says it’s a view that’s been underscored by comments from Cigi’s international customers when they come to the city.
“What they’re telling us is this is something that’s entirely unique in the world,” Geddes says. “There simply isn’t another location where they can come and visit all of their major customers in one place.”
And while it may have taken time, the city did rise to the challenge, and Geddes says the local downtown business improvement zone and the mayor’s office have been spending a lot of time making sure Cigi’s next home is inside the city.
“I think they’ve really gotten it lately,” Geddes says.
That power of incumbency also drew in another major new player recently, as the industry organization Cereals Canada named Winnipeg as the location of its new head office. Cereals Canada, freshly organized in the wake of cereal market deregulation, joins other major groups like the Canola Council of Canada and Pulse Canada in calling Winnipeg’s downtown core home.
Cam Dahl, president of Cereals Canada, says the board members of the organization chose Winnipeg for good reasons, mainly relating to the concentration of the industry, something he views as continuing even today.
“Traditionally Winnipeg has been the centre of the industry, and it does still have a major concentration,” Dahl says. “It makes so much sense for things like organizing meetings. The majority of the industry is still here.”
That’s not to say the city and provincial governments can rest on their laurels though. Dahl explains that what he’s talking about is a question of critical mass — and what is uncertain is what the threshold is, and the effect of falling below it.
“Right now it’s obviously less than it was 30 years ago, but it’s still there,” Dahl says. “I would suggest that’s something local policy-makers would want to pay attention to.”
Author Allan Levine also says there’s another reality that colours this debate, because in some ways what’s happened is that the city has continued to evolve and grow past its origins as a single-industry town. Today it has everything from a pharmaceutical and biomedical research sector to a major international currency printer.
“As the city’s business community has grown and evolved, it’s only natural the grain industry would appear less prominent,” Levine says.
Twin tracks
It’s impossible to crystal ball the future, but based on recent trends Geddes hazards a guess that Saskatoon’s prominence in the lifescience and agricultural research sectors will continue to grow.
Evidence of that can be seen in the coming closure of Winnipeg’s Cereal Research Centre by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the relocation of key research programs to the Saskatoon area. At the same time, Geddes expects to see the grain trade itself and organizations like Cigi continue to call Winnipeg home for the foreseeable future.
“We’ve been working closely with the city and with the SHED (Sports, Hospitality and Entertainment District) and I would say the lights have really come on in the corridors of power,” Geddes says. “They’re working to keep the industry here, and they haven’t had to before.”
If they can keep the critical mass in Winnipeg, it becomes a self-fulfilling cycle, as more players are attracted to the centre of the business. And while it may seem to an outsider that the business has become more muted, Cam Dahl says there’s still plenty of informal cross-fertilization that happens due to random run-ins over the lunch hour.
“I just went for lunch the other day and found it took me nearly 25 minutes to walk back, and it really shouldn’t have,” Dahl says. “I kept running into people.”
