For the next year, this column will mark The Western Producer’s 100th anniversary by taking a deep dive every week into a past issue of the paper.
The Jan. 12, 1961, issue was dominated by a war of words between farm groups and the federal government over Canadian Wheat Board regulations that would allow feed mills to buy grain directly from farmers outside the quota.
Thundered the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool: “We believe that the new policy will have several serious effects. Most obviously, farmers who deliver directly to mills at negotiated prices are losing the opportunity to collect the interim and final payments on this grain. Very often, too, the negotiated price is below the initial payment which they would receive by delivering to the wheat board through an elevator.”
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Saskatchewan Farmers Union vice-president Roy Atkinson took it one step further by challenging federal agriculture minister Alvin Hamilton to a debate over the issue.
In that same issue, the Quebec government appears to have taken at least one writer at The Western Producer by surprise by tabling a brief to the MacPherson Royal Commission on Transportation.
Not only did Quebec rarely get involved in long-haul transport freight issues because of its ample truck and water competition, the reporter wrote, but the province tabled a “detailed and comprehensive brief that showed a broad knowledge of and sympathy with the problems faced by other Canadian regions not so well-favoured geographically, and perhaps most surprising of all, Quebec deserted the traditional isolationist attitude toward the rest of Canada and said she was willing, nay eager, to sit down with other provinces and the federal government and work out the solutions to transportation problems for the whole nation.”
Almost as surprising was a photo further back in the paper of a chimpanzee smoking in a convertible with the headline, “Cheta the chimp in a pensive mood,” with the caption, “I wish they’d hurry up before I smoke myself to death.”
We don’t run stuff like that anymore.
