Wendy Holm

SEVERAL weeks ago, United Nations Habitat’s World Urban Forum brought more than 10,000 people together for five days at Vancouver’s Trade and Convention Centre to ponder the future of cities. The forum marked the 30th anniversary of the first United Nations conference on human settlements held in Vancouver in 1976, which led to the creation […] Read more

THE ISSUE of BSE testing caught my eye a few weeks go when Cam Ostercamp stuck a thoughtful analysis under my nose. Ostercamp, an Alberta cattle producer, has a view that the industry has become too concentrated, that three players dominate the market and play it like a fiddle, that the tune they expect farmers […] Read more

T ROUBLED Waters, Troubling Trends, released last week by the Alberta-based Pembina Institute, should be a wake-up call for all Canadians, and first out of bed on this issue should be Canada’s farmers. The oil industry’s thirst for Canada’s water is old news. Most Canadians, certainly those in Western Canada, know oil extraction processes through […] Read more

IN A MARCH poll, Leger Marketing found that 92 percent of Canadians surveyed place more trust in farmers than in any other occupation. Only firefighters (96 percent) and nurses (95 percent) scored higher. At the other end of the scale? Car salesmen, who had the trust of only 19 percent of Canadians, and politicians, who […] Read more

SPEAKING at last week’s Canadian Federation of Agriculture meeting, federal agriculture minister Chuck Strahl continued to defend prime minister Stephen Harper’s dual desk agenda for the Canadian Wheat Board. If implemented, this will take $30 to $45 a tonne from the pockets of Canadian wheat and barley producers – $10 to $15 a tonne in […] Read more

ALTHOUGH a vocal minority will no doubt portray it as such, it would be a mistake to interpret Stephen Harper’s minority victory as a vote against the Canadian Wheat Board. The spin doctors will, of course, tell you different. But on this point farmers should be perfectly clear: abandonment of Western Canada’s single desk system […] Read more

ALTHOUGH you couldn’t tell from the mainstream media, those of us watching the farm press know that farmers are getting a lot more attention this election than they have for a long time. Google “farm” and “election” and “Canada” and the difference is readily apparent. Leading up to the 2004 election, the preponderance of stories […] Read more

A SCANT year and a half after we did it, we’re at it again. In the dead of winter and for no good reason, Canadians are going to the polls in an election we neither want nor need. In February the taxpayer purse will be some $300 million lighter and another minority government will be […] Read more

WATCHING Canadian prime minister Paul Martin bray at the Americans over softwood lumber makes you wonder if the man eats for a living. All this posturing on timber and not a peep on beef? Of course forestry makes an important contribution to Canada’s economy. So does agriculture. More, in fact. In 2004, crop and animal […] Read more

Stretching from Lloydminster to the Montana border and from the Rocky Mountain foothills to Saskatchewan, Alberta’s coalbed methane reserves lie squarely atop the province’s fertile farmlands. Coalbed methane, or CBM, is natural gas trapped in underground coal seams. Recognized in the late 1990s as a “huge, untapped energy source” and now dubbed the new clean […] Read more