Madam Speaker, it is great to be here today. Everyone should be celebrating Mennonite heritage week.

As I get a little further in my political career, I tend to focus a little less on policy and more on the people it impacts. Certainly, I have a large Mennonite community in my riding. These folks have very similar qualities. A lot of them come from a rural background. Many of them immigrated here from Europe about 100 years ago. They are known for being frugal, thrifty and generous. As well, they are known for being inventive and entrepreneurial. Typically, they are known for having a very deep faith.

I want to thank my colleague from Abbotsford for bringing forward this motion and giving me a few minutes to speak it.

I would like to speak about one person who I met over the years. He is a leader in the community in Swift Current and comes from Mennonite heritage. His name is Frank Rempel. He was born in 1924, which puts him in his 95th year. The other day I was talking to him while he was driving down the highway. He was frustrated because he was only able to go 103 kilometres, trying to stay under the speed limit on a Saskatchewan highway. His comment to me was, “I'm thinking that maybe I need to buy another airplane and fly it”, so he did not have to go as slow.

He is one of 10 children born in Swift Current to a Mennonite family. He was born in the time of the three bottom plow, which was pulled behind the oxen. It typically had three blades and turned the ground over.

It was a time of celebration for many people. Families were big in those days and Christmas was a time for family gatherings. It was also a very difficult time in our part of the world as we moved into the 1930s, with the tumbleweeds, dust and dirt on the fence lines. Certainly, Mr. Rempel lived through that.

In those days, family was really all people had. They had very little beyond that. The kids went to school and learned to get along there, usually in a one-room schoolhouse.

Mr. Rempel started to work when he was very young. At 14, he went with his father and brother to Coaldale, Alberta to stack hay all summer. That is what they did to make enough money to keep their family on the farm. They did trapping in the winter and things like that. He said at that at the age of 14 or 15 he learned how to make a saddle, which he sold to his brother. That was when he learned about the word profit. He is a very successful business person, so he learned that word well.

He travelled to and worked in many different places. In 1942, he met a young woman named Helen. He was 18 and she was 14. He had to wait, and so he did. He went out and did some things, like breaking in horses for a while. He said that after one particularly bad result, he was left wondering where he would have ended up if that had been his very last ride. In 1944, he rekindled that relationship. In 1945, he bought her a ring. In 1946, they were married. In 1947, they started a family.

After moving around a little back and forth, they resettled in southwestern Saskatchewan in 1953. He began a job as a mechanic. He got involved in his church a bit more. He stepped out in faith, bought a lot and built a grocery store. He and his wife sold the only truck they had to raise the money. It was all of $550 to buy the lot so they could begin to build their own business.

He has some great stories in his book called About our Father's Business. There are great stories about learning how to sell cookware, going out and selling it to housewives and being able to use that to keep his family going. They built the Hillcrest Shopping Centre and moved into that. He sold cars as well to keep it going. He mentions that he took the Dale Carnegie course along the way and thought that made a huge difference in his life. He did well at the store and in 1964 he and his wife sold it.

However, the real story of his success began when a neighbour came to him and wanted to sell him a chaff blower, a product that is used by farmers at harvest time. This person was manufacturing them. He came to Frank because he was good with his hands and was good at creating tooling and machinery. He asked him to take it over, so he did.

He and his wife began manufacturing and started their own business. They started in a 40 foot by 40 foot shop and formed what they called Rem Manufacturing. For the last 50 years in our riding, Rem has survived. Frank saw it not just as a business, but a calling for himself.

He added a number of lines of things, like dump wagons and vacuum feed blowers. He expanded into the United States market. In 1969, when business slowed down, it was really the United States' sales that saved REM Manufacturing.

Frank Rempel built harvester for forage plots for some of the agriculture research stations and sold those. Then he got into making coil springs. That might sound kind of strange for people, but since hardly anybody makes coil springs, he was one of the only ones who did that. He developed some new processes. To this day, he has 300 varieties of different hay rakes, bailer teeth, coil springs and those kinds of things. He sells them all over North America. His products go around the world. He bought a farm just a little outside of Swift Current, settled on it and he and his wife raised their family there.

Eventually Frank Rempel retired, but the interesting thing is that he is not done. He is in his nineties and he is still moving ahead. He is working on a small tractor. The initial genesis of this idea came when he really wanted to put another aspect of his faith into action and create something to which third world country farmers and developing country farmers could have access. Therefore, he was trying to make a tractor that had both attachments to the front and the back, that was a simple piece of machinery that people could then use and not have to spend a lot of time repairing and fixing it.

As I mentioned, he has written a book called About Our Father's Business. It is about a man who is committed to doing business well and committed to living in his small town and still continuing that rural way of life, someone who has been frugal, but has also been very generous. He has kept a number of schools and camps going over the years. He has put a lot of money into various places that he thought were important to support.

He has been an inventor. He has the coil spring business, but many other things right from when he was a young child. He is someone who has that Mennonite interest in things mechanical and inventing them, becoming a very successful entrepreneur. Most of all, I know he would want me to talk about the fact that his faith in Jesus Christ, as with so many people in the Mennonite community, is one of the driving factors of his entire life.

As I mentioned, he is in his 94th year. The other day I talked to him. He was driving down the highway just talking about having to stay under the speed limit. I know he loves to drive his car and he loves to get around.

This is just another example. I know I am at the end of my time. I wish I had more time to talk about him, but he is one example of so many of the people in my area of Mennonite heritage who have provided that leadership in their communities. They still live there. They have families who are important. They have been entrepreneurs and have been very faithful people in their community.

David Anderson

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