Sumo ads
To the Editor:
I take exception to the disgusting “Target” centrefold (pp. 24 and 25, April 18). Ciba-Geigy’s picture of the “500-pound gentleman” head to head with a Canada thistle has been popping up in many papers and TV commercials. His belly-flop weed attack into the dust insults the intelligence of grain producers’ preschoolers.
A message to herbicide companies: Come on! Does it require something like this to sell the product or to get the attention of sleep-deprived, post-calving farmers? Any farmer worth his crow knows that Canada thistle must be attacked at the root.
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Late season rainfall creates concern about Prairie crop quality
Praying for rain is being replaced with the hope that rain can stop for harvest. Rainfall in July and early August has been much greater than normal.
Dollars misspent on ads such as this should be directed to keeping product costs down.
– Evelyn Schnaider,
Barthel, Sask.
U.S. for CWB
I enjoy getting your paper. I am a farmer from Minnesota.
I sure would keep the Canada Wheat Board if I were a Canadian farmer.
These check-off commodity groups in the United States are all dominated by big farmers, primarily farm bureau members, and for the last 40 years have always lobbied for cheap farm prices.
They voted for NAFTA and GATT. Destroy the farmer across the border, be it the Canadian farmer, Mexican farmer or the European farmer as well as their own neighbors.
I was on the Minnesota Wheat Growers board for the last three years. Not one Board member was in favor of working for a fair price for wheat in Washington.
You farmers in Canada should work together to protect your own interests. By the way, I don’t like those Canadian farmers hauling their wheat across the border in violation of your laws.
– Warren Maus,
Maynard, Minn.
Systems co-exist
To the Editor:
Sir Austin Robinson, the economist who founded the Central Statistical Office in England in 1941 observed, “no economist is more dangerous than the pure theorists without practical experience and instinctive understanding of the real world.”
Is it possible that the economist’s habit of working from models is blurring the issues in the CWB debate? The report, “Pooling, cash market can’t co-exist: expert,” (April 11), might be a case in point. There are a number of examples of pooling and cash market systems co-existing, even here at home.
Apparently, the authors based their conclusion on experiments which show that sellers have an incentive to leave a pooling system for the cash system when the cash price is higher.
They should have shown too that there is an incentive to come back when the cash price is lower.
That’s how a pooling system and a cash system remain competitive and co-exist.
More unsettling for this debate, however, if those experiments are correct in showing that a pooled price system can’t be competitive over the long term, comes from the fact that the demise of the CWB is then a foregone conclusion.
Producers in other countries can succeed in their attempts to exclude Canadian producers from international markets on the grounds that the Canadians are dumping their products and trading unfairly.
Sounds like the Western Grain Marketing Panel, from itself and others, will need all the patience it can find to sort out the confusion of expert opinions.
– Isabel B. Anderson,
Saskatoon, Sask.
B.C. politics
To the Editor:
The political climate in B.C. seems to be heating up of late. This is because the Liberals are becoming rather scared of their prospects at the polls, come election day.
Glen Clark has outdone them at every turn. There was a lot of complaining when Clark put a freeze on ICBC rates; this should have been done a long time ago. Instead of controlling those who were insistently having all of the wrecks in B.C. ICBC only raised the rates for everybody, so that we all paid for the stupidity of those who refuse to learn how to drive on difficult road conditions. …
Then Clark freezes secondary tuition fees for students hoping to get an improved education to put themselves into a competitive position in this everlastingly highball world where we are being forced to get by, relying on computers instead of base industries which are rapidly running out and nothing constructive being done about it.
Now that Clark has frozen hydro rates, the uproar is on again. This is something else that should have been done before. If these corporations would start by trimming the fat in their operations, then these problems would be far less and easier to solve. The way it is, the only ones who can get an education are the wealthy, and that is the way the free enterprisers want it. So Clark is a thorn in their side, and they have to discredit him in every possible way. To improve anything, you have to spend some money, and Clark is only juggling what little he has to the best advantage, and that is what disturbs Campbell, because there is a real good outlook that it is going to work.
Mike Harris of Ontario is setting a real good example of the full-fledged rule of extreme right hand control will do, and a lot of people in Canada are starting to wake up, so Campbell is getting pretty terrified, especially after he was so sure that the NDP were down, out and dead, and are now making a comeback.
– Grant Bunce,
Pritchard, B.C.
Destroy history
To the Editor:
I was sorry to hear that the old grain elevator in Regina will be reduced to rubble and burned, gone and forgotten.
My philosophy has always been if you want something done do it yourself. I bought a grain elevator in 1981 (see picture, Western Producer, April 22, 1982).
My three sons and I took the building down the same way it was put up, a plank at a time. The foundation was ready at home and in seven months we had it dismantled and rebuilt again.
All this at an out-of-pocket cost of $700, most of which was for the new foundation.
All we had was my old half-ton and trailer. Probably the biggest asset on my side was, as a younger man I worked with a crew building elevators and annexes so was familiar with this style of construction.
I am appalled at the destruction and waste that goes on all the time.
Quite often the building that goes up in place of the old is no better and often less attractive.
I look at the world with a pair of old eyes, I suppose, but with so much debt we would do well to cut corners and work a bit harder.
– Noel Light,
Lloydminster, Sask.
