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.
Politics was the name of the game in the Oct. 3, 1935 issue, which I suppose was to be expected, considering the country was in the middle of a federal election.
It was an election that Conservative prime minister Richard Bennett lost to former Liberal prime minister Mackenzie King, and the stakes were indeed high, according to coverage in The Western Producer.
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C.A. Dunning, minister of railways and finance in an earlier Liberal government under King, warned that his party was the only one to ensure democracy and parliamentary norms. The Social Credit and Reconstruction parties represented a fascist form of socialism, he said, while the CCF represented the Marxism form.
“(Conservatives) stand for increased regimentation of the people and furtherance of the bureaucratic tyranny which has grown up in the last five years under the Bennett government,” he was reported as saying.
Meanwhile, Bennett was campaigning in Saskatoon, where he told an audience of 2,000 that a vote against his government would be a vote against its wheat stabilization policy, against its efforts to uphold the price of wheat and against the newly formed Canadian Wheat Board.
Besides the federal election, Western Producer editors were also focused on the threat of war with several stories highlighting increased tension around the world, including Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia.
There was also prairie farm news.
The Saskatchewan Wheat Pool encouraged farmers to support the wheat board, while the Saskatchewan Debt Survey Committee estimated there were $207 million worth of farm mortgages in the province.
And then, weirdly enough, the paper ran a photo of five women dressed in different flags of the world with the headline: “Texas history in review,” and the caption, “Five nations whose flags have flown over Texas were represented by these beauties, who depicted the Republic of Texas, France, the Confederacy, Spain and the United States during a pageant in the state.”
There was news for everyone, I suppose.
