Manitoba farmers are caught in the middle of a nasty spat between Ottawa and Broadway. The province recently scrapped its carbon tax proposal after learning Ottawa would be imposing its own. That concerned local farm groups as the provincial proposal had some hard-fought recognition for the precarious position of the province’s farm business community. Most
Editorial: Stuck in the middle
Editorial: Changing times on the farm
I had the opportunity over Thanksgiving this year to reacquaint myself with driving a Peterbilt when the weather lined up to actually allow a few days of combining. Actually, there were three Peterbilts, as my brother seems to be working with a collection. There’s the best of the three, a nondescript brown unit that quietly
Editorial: Leadership needed
One of the most important roles of our political leadership is right there in the job title. We hire these folks to lead. Often that means making the hard decisions and telling people what they won’t want to hear. Naturally some are better at it than others. The late U.S. president Harry Truman popularized the
Editorial: Reaching out during a tough harvest
What do you say to a farmer with 80 per cent of the crop in the field and snow on the ground? That’s not a rhetorical question, nor some elaborate setup for a punchline, though it may feel like a bad joke this fall. It’s the reality for a lot of producers this year. The
Editorial: Seeking allies
The rubber has hit the road in U.S.-Canada trade negotiations and the news isn’t good for Canadian dairy producers. It appears they’re set to lose as much as 3.5 per cent of their market to tariff-free U.S. dairy imports. That’s on top of similar concessions made during negotiations for the Canada-European trade deal that saw
Editorial: Self-reflection
As the debate over the fate of the Canadian Wheat Board was coming to a head a few years back, one of the key points repeatedly raised was how Canada’s quality assurance system gave it a leg up. Having a centralized sales desk meant there was an entity with a rational reason for maintaining and
Editorial: Mission improbable
It’s that time of year when all the hoping and wishing — or fear and loathing, depending on the year — gets put to the test. In a lot of grain-growing regions around the world this summer, our own included, most farmers probably weren’t predicting a bountiful harvest. From Europe to the U.S., Australia to
Editorial: Gone Hollywood
One of the great issues of the modern hyper-wired information age is the perniciousness of false facts. It seems to be all but impossible to stamp out an untruth, once it’s been released into the wild. No matter how many actual facts one presents, there’s still going to be a cohort of people somewhere who
Editorial: A new view on Canada/U.S. trade
If you’ve been too busy on the combine to keep up with the latest developments or, like many, have simply become numb to the rhetoric and brinksmanship after nearly two years of threats and bluster, there’s been a big and not-so-good development on the trade front this week. It turns out those side negotiations between
Editorial: A big boom
It’s been quite the week in Ottawa. Even in the midst of harvest it was impossible to ignore the very public departure of former leadership front-runner Maxime Bernier from the Conservative Party of Canada’s benches. He didn’t just burn the bridges as he left, he took the time to dynamite the piers as he went,
Cyber-Savvy Farmer
