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.
In the 1930s, the federal government asked Justice W.F.A. Turgeon to conduct a royal inquiry into the marketing of Canadian grain.
The judge released his report in 1938, but in the fall of 1937 he was holding hearings to gather information for the inquiry.
In early October it was the Manitoba Co-operative Conference’s turn to share its thoughts with Justice Turgeon, and the Oct. 14, 1937, issue of The Western Producer didn’t spare the ink as it covered the testimony.
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The coverage took up most of page 5 before jumping deeper into the paper.
The gist of the testimony was that free markets were a myth and that abundance under the present system spelled ruin for producers. Instead, the co-operatives urged the implementation of controlled markets.
The Producer not only covered the testimony at the hearing but also reprinted the Manitoba Co-operative Conference’s entire brief. Today, the Producer might do that on our website, but we certainly wouldn’t do it in print. It’s just another sign of how times have changed in the newspaper business.
The brief made the following recommendations:
- Organize wheat marketing into a marketing agency and operate on a pooling system.
- Establish a crop insurance system.
- Modify the government’s tariff and trade policy to reduce the cost of farm inputs.
- Investigate Canadian dietary conditions and the possibility of increasing “protective foods.”
That was definitely a wide-sweeping set of recommendations.
This issue of the paper was also the first time I encountered a sports page, which dedicated all of its real estate to a story with the headline: Yanks win world series four to one; Lefty Gomez hangs up double triumph.”
Increasing world tensions, which unbeknownst to Producer readers were leading inexorably toward the Second World War, also dominated the paper’s pages, including stories about the Spanish Civil War and Italy’s continuing incursions into Ethiopia.
