"These people were not criminals," Harper said.

Some members of Farmers for Justice, as the small group called itself, were charged under the Customs Act for trying to bring their grain to the United States illegally. Some spent time in jail for refusing to pay the resulting fines.

The government would later say that it had granted the farmers an "ordinary pardon," a rarely used form of clemency under the Royal Prerogative for Mercy.

At the time of the announcement, tens of thousands of traditional pardon requests sat unanswered in a backlog of the Conservative government's own creation.

The pardoned farmers couldn't all be identified at the time because of privacy laws. Recently, the Parole Board of Canada revealed that 10 farmers received pardons. The farmers who came forward on their own accord, though, expressed immense relief at having their records sealed.