When I showed up at The Western Producer in November 1994 I was handed a Macintosh laptop and shown how the company email system worked. That was pretty cool. Instead of being shackled to a boxy desktop computer, I could take my sleek laptop wherever I was reporting from, plug into a phone line and […] Read more
Tag Archives Blog
Newspaper journalism has faced a digital tsunami
The internet and social media are cool, but the right-side/wrong-side journalism it has created are a curse
BLOG: NFU must do more to avoid fringe reputation
The National Farmers Union is a serious organization with serious ideas. But ordinary farmers may not be listening. This week the NFU held its 50th annual convention in Winnipeg with NFU members from Nova Scotia to British Columbia in attendance. At the event, the NFU unveiled a 98-page discussion paper called Tackling the Farm Crisis […] Read more
Farmers’ attitudes and realities evolve over a quarter-century
(And so does the observer)
Farmers sure have changed in the past 25 years. Or have I changed in the quarter-century I’ve been covering farmers and farming for The Western Producer? Do the same things just look different to my older, more experienced and physically degraded eyes? It’s probably a bit of both, but looking back over these 25 years […] Read more
Lots changes, but much remains the same, in both farming and journalism
In 25 years of reporting on farming, everything seems both different and the same
How do you find a farmer? Finding farmers and getting their views has always been a core part of my job. It wasn’t easy to do 25 years ago, when the internet was a just-beginning thing, almost nobody had a mobile phone and most farmers lived far from the cities I was living in. Fortunately, […] Read more
With Canada-China relations, how did things ever get so far?
An opportunity for China to calm down things with Canada?
How did things ever get so far? I’m hoping somebody high up in the Chinese government is thinking that today, as its relationships with multiple countries are strained and have suffered considerable damage in the last couple of years. Canada is not the least of those strained relationships and deepening bad blood, with two Canadian […] Read more
Life in the afterglow of the commodity boom: Is this why we’re all so mad and raging?
Everybody wants somebody to blame. Better blame Mr CommoditiesCycle
It’s a truly dark time in Canada, with the rise of an angry, raging, denunciatory politics taking over this nation the way that it has been doing in the U.S. for a few years now. The federal election supplied ample evidence of this, with ill will and personal attacks hanging over the entire campaign. Beyond […] Read more
Could Canada run a two-track trade policy?
One track for the rules-following folks and one for the cheats?
We keep hoping this present worldwide binge of protectionism, geo-political bullying and bad-will will fade, subside and JUST GO AWAY! But if it doesn’t, what does Canada do? How do Canadian farmers adapt to that fact? It’s like with climate change: We hope it can be stopped, but if it can’t be, what do we […] Read more
Maybe, just maybe, Trump’s right on trade. Maybe Canada should learn
Donald J Trump is appalling in many ways. Maybe in most ways. He’s a bully and a liar. He encourages racism and xenophobia if it helps him politically. He’s undermining his nation’s constitution on a regular basis. His disgraceful conduct is coarsening American mores. But maybe he’s getting one thing right, or mostly right. Maybe, […] Read more
When farmers pay the price for trade disputes, Canada bears the cost
I was struck by something Tyler Fulton, the director of risk management for Hams Marketing, said to me the other day. “We’re just in a new time, I guess.” He said that after apologizing for always in recent interviews noting that its hard to assess the market outlook these days because there are so many […] Read more
BLOG: China dispute much bigger than canola sales
In 2015, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis released a report about intellectual property in China. Normally, reports on intellectually property rights are about as appealing as flavourless oatmeal, but the document contained at least one remarkable tidbit. “We estimate that as of 2010, more than half of all technology owned by Chinese firms was […] Read more
