Employers — including many agricultural employers — seem to have fallen for the trope that ‘nobody wants to work anymore.’ It’s a handy way to back away from any personal responsibility for the industry’s labour woes and one that conveniently avoids looking in the mirror for the source of the problem. We’ll start by looking
Editor’s Take: Everybody wants to work
Editor’s Take: A medical mystery
Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and I was a teenager in rural Saskatchewan, my small hometown of 1,100 people had its own hospital. Built during the booming 1970s, it replaced a 50-year-old structure the community had long outgrown. It had the usual services, including emergency medical treatment when needed. But these days, that building
Editor’s Take: There’s money on the table. Use it
Earlier this summer, serious funds to help farmers lower fertilizer emission levels landed in Manitoba. The Prairie Watersheds Climate Program, administered by the Manitoba Association of Watersheds, is part of the federal government’s On-Farm Climate Action Fund, which promises to spend $200 million over three years. The program will fund a dozen programs aimed at
Editor’s Take: Going up
The Bank of Canada removed any lingering doubts last week about its commitment to fighting inflation. It delivered a jumbo rate hike of 100 basis points — or a full per cent — while facing an annualized inflation rate of more than seven per cent, according to the most recent figures from Statistics Canada. South
Editor’s Take: A return to normalcy
What a long, strange trip it’s been, to quote the old song. Back in March 2020, most of us were probably expecting a brief interruption — a few weeks at most — to our lives. Needless to say, that’s not how it played out. It’s been more than two years of cancellations, delays and shelved
Editor’s Take: Harsh lessons
I had an unexpected front-row seat to the unforgiving nature of… well, nature… this week. I was sitting in my backyard enjoying the cool of the evening and waiting for the sun to set when a songbird flew over my head. No sooner had its presence been registered by my eye, than a brownish-grey streak
Editor’s Take: Planning for the unplannable
How do you plan for — and manage — the kind of weather risk Manitoba farmers have suffered through lately? First it was years of prolonged drought, including last year’s acute blast. That crippled crop production, all but halted forage growth and raised the serious risk of some rural communities running out of drinking water.
Editor’s Take: End of an era
A very strange thing happened this week, as we put this edition of the Co-operator together. You can see it yourself, on our featured article at Farmit Manitoba. It’s the very last story that Allan Dawson will publish in these pages as a staff reporter. I say strange because most of us can’t quite imagine
Editor’s Take: That’s really not COOL
Our American cousins are like a lot of extended family. We might love them, most days. But sometimes we watch their antics, scratch our heads, and wonder what the heck they’re thinking. And there aren’t a lot of issues being pursued through their political system that make less sense than the perennial push for mandatory
Editor’s Take: Getting weather whiplash
If you’re feeling weather weary these days you’re not alone. Most of the province probably shares your feelings. It was only eight or nine months ago that we were worried the rain would never come again. Then came the winter that wouldn’t go away, where it only warmed up long enough to snow, only to
Cyber-Savvy Farmer
