In the early 1980s, Yakovlev accompanied Mikhail Gorbachev, who at the time was the Soviet official in charge of agriculture, on his tour of Canada. The purpose of the visit was to tour Canadian farms and agricultural institutions in the hopes of taking lessons that could be applied in the Soviet Union; however, the two began, tentatively at first, to discuss the need for liberalisation in the Soviet Union. Yakovlev then returned to Moscow, and would eventually be called the "godfather of glasnost", the intellectual force behind Gorbachev's reform program.