TURTLEFORD – The council chamber for the Rural Municipality of Mervin is not a fancy room.
The walls are painted a light grey and one wall has a one-by-two metre map of the RM, which is located about 90 kilometres northwest of North Battleford.
On the other walls, there are maps of nearby municipalities and a white and green 2025 calendar from Prairie Steel, a Saskatchewan company that makes grain bins and culverts.
There are about a dozen office tables, arranged in a horseshoe, and a grey office chair behind each table.
At 9 a.m. on July 18, sitting at one of those chairs was Gerry Ritz, who served as Canada’s minister of agriculture from 2007-15. Ritz has spent many hours in that chair because he’s the reeve of the RM of Mervin and has been since 2020.
Ritz lives about 40 km north of the RM office in Turtleford, population 500.
The town and its three-block-long Main Street is very different from global capitals such as Beijing, Washington, D.C., and Brussels, where Ritz once represented Canadian interests inside massive meeting rooms and negotiated with powerful people wearing $8,000 suits.
But sitting on his chair at the RM office, wearing black cowboy boots and jeans, Ritz was in a cheerful mood. He spoke for about 35 minutes about his time as Canada’s agriculture minister and 30 minutes about his current role as reeve.
“It’s good, it’s busy,” he said, adding that the RM of Mervin has a budget of $7 million and 24 employees.
Ritz could be the country’s best-known ag minister over the last 50 years, or probably second to Eugene Whelan, who was famous for wearing a green Stetson hat and befriending former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev.
He wasn’t as flamboyant as Whelan, but Ritz likely had a larger impact. He will always be remembered as the man who eliminated the Canadian Wheat Board and its monopoly on marketing wheat for prairie farmers.
Leaning back in his chair, Ritz recalled what life was like as the agriculture minister in 2012, when the CWB single desk officially ended, and how that compares to his current job as a reeve.
“(Nowadays), my death threat numbers have gone way down,” he said.
“I used to (joke) that when we were doing the wheat board thing, if I didn’t have a death threat by Tuesday, it was a slow week.”
Ritz was first elected to the House of Commons in 1997, representing Battlefords-Lloydminster for the Reform Party. When the Conservatives won a minority government in 2006, he became the minister responsible for agriculture and the Canadian Wheat Board in 2007.
Ritz served as agriculture minister for eight years, until former prime minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal party won the 2015 federal election.
Losing power is never easy, and Ritz knew that his days in the House of Commons were coming to an end.
“It was time. We went back into opposition, and it’s no fun sitting on the other side of the aisle when you’ve had a taste of government.”
In August 2017, Ritz resigned as an MP, saying he wouldn’t return to his seat in the fall. However, that announcement was soon overshadowed by an infamous tweet.
In September, Ritz called environment minister Catherine McKenna “Climate Barbie” on Twitter. He quickly apologized, but the Barbie comment became a global story about sexist attitudes toward women in politics.
After leaving Ottawa, Ritz returned to his quarter section on Brightsand Lake in the RM of Mervin, where he still lives with his wife, Judy.
His retirement was short lived.
“When you’ve gone 150 m.p.h. for 20 years, to come home and say I’m retired – and sit there – it doesn’t last long before your wife says, ‘don’t you have to be somewhere?’ ”
A controversy about property rights in the municipality got Ritz out of the house. The RM council was proposing a bylaw that would prohibit the parking of RVs on lots to encourage landowners to build a home or cottage.
To Ritz and others, that concept was an over-reach and ridiculous.
“This is lake country. We started with an RV (on our land),” said Ritz.
“It’s my property and I can’t even put my camper on it?”
Instead of complaining about the RV bylaw at the Turtleford coffee shop, Ritz decided to get involved.
He put his name forward and was elected reeve in November 2020.
Ritz obviously enjoyed his first stint as reeve because he ran again in 2024 and was re-elected to another four-year term.
He likes that it’s possible to change a bylaw or address a problem in only one meeting.
“What we did at the federal level, sometimes it took three years before you see the result you were shooting for,” Ritz said.
“(Here) you can see results, right away.”
While he is semi-retired and could be playing pickleball, Ritz would rather get things done in the RM and promote conservative values in Saskatchewan.
This summer, a Saskatchewan MLA invited Ritz to a golf tournament. Ritz accepted the offer on the condition that he could talk to the MLA for an hour about municipal issues in the province.
Ritz’s continued involvement in politics and public service is simple to explain, said Tyler McCann, managing director of the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute.
“My experience was that Gerry Ritz was someone who absolutely wanted to change things,” said McCann, who was a policy adviser to Ritz.
“(If) you’re no longer a member of Parliament, it doesn’t mean that interest in changing things goes away.”
Some politicians want to become MPs to represent their constituents or for the “greater good” of society, McCann said.
Ritz wanted to have an impact.
“He was a minister that wanted to do things…. It was a really great place to (work),” McCann said.
“Lots of ministers sit in cabinet without the same motivation to get things done.”
Ritz sits on the board of a Saskatchewan company, Dominion Blockchain Solutions, and he and his wife spend part of the winter in Arizona.
His passion, though, is about having an impact on public policy.
When he talked about challenges in the municipality — fire prevention, road maintenance, helping small communities in the RM and public safety – Ritz became animated.
He leaned forward in his chair, waved his left hand in multiple directions or unleashed a one-liner to make a point.
He does miss some things about being agriculture minister, such as international relations. Ritz told the story of when former prime minister Stephen Harper’s government restored access to China for Canadian beef after the BSE crisist and how he recognized the Chinese officials who made it happen.
“I had a dozen cowboy hats made in Vernon, B.C. It cost $1,000 a piece…. On the inside was a Chinese and Canadian flag and the name of the person that helped us get beef access,” he said.
“I handed these hats out, and these guys all thought they were John Wayne. They had the world by the tail … and our beef exports (to China) went whoom (up).”
Whether he was working on beef trade or dismantling the wheat board, Ritz was a minister who provided a clear direction for his staff, McCann said.
There are people who still disagree with his actions, but he got things done.
“He may not like the analogy, but (Ritz) and Mark Carney may be similar types of politicians,” McCann said.
“They’re doing things.”
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