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.
As I work my way through back issues of The Western Producer, starting in 1923, I have been waiting for the day when I began seeing bylines by reporters I worked with when I first joined the paper in the fall of 1986.
That day arrived when I reached the issue of March 15, 1979.
Barry Wilson, who went on to become the Producer’s long-time Ottawa bureau chief, had a front page story about how the expected cost of the federal government’s 10-year prairie rail rehabilitation program was probably going to be $900 million or more by 1987 instead of the $600 million that had been estimated when the program was announced in 1977.
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Worrisome drop in grain prices
Prices had been softening for most of the previous month, but heading into the Labour Day long weekend, the price drops were startling.
Adrian Ewins, who had the Producer’s grain beat when I first met him, covered a group of southeastern Saskatchewan farmers who were considering a class action lawsuit under the umbrella of the Souris River Protective Association against the Souris Conservation and Development Area Authority and individual producers upstream.
The group claimed that the upstream farmers had been conducting unauthorized drainage and that the provincial government had refused to compensate them for flooding damages for seven of the past nine years.
Adrian must have recently been on a road trip because the paper published his photo of a barbed wire fence near Hodgeville, Sask., on the front page.
There was also a photo of railway tracks near Swift Current, Sask., on page 14. Although its photo credit was simply “Western Producer photo,” I’m assuming Adrian took that one, too.
Liz Delahey, who was the farm living editor when I joined the Producer, wrote about a pediatrician’s presentation at the Saskatchewan Pro-Life Conference regarding the main health problems faced by young people during puberty. The number one concern, the doctor concluded, was pimples.
Another familiar name was Peter Griffith, who was still writing his Coping column for the paper when I started. His column in this issue was about the rights of parents.
