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



The challenge ahead for Canada's dairy sector is to make the case for their worth to the voting public.

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


Flags are pictured during the fifth round of NAFTA talks involving the United States, Mexico and Canada, in Mexico City, Mexico, November 19, 2017.

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

Then-Conservative leadership candidate Maxime Bernier speaks at the party's leadership convention in Toronto on May 26, 2017.

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,


Editorial: Right questions, wrong answers

Reaction from farmers was swift to last week’s announcement by the Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) that it plans to phase out most uses of neonicotinoids in Canada over the next three to five years. Shock, confusion and anger pretty much sum it up. Some said that if this relatively new class of products is

Editorial: Fair fees

There’s an acronym long popular with right-of-centre thinkers from the late economist Milton Friedman to the science fiction author Robert Heinlein: TANSTAAFL. It’s an abbreviation of the concept, ‘there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,’ and has been used to convey the impossibility of getting something for nothing. One wonders if that’s what