Reading Time: 2 minutes John Diefenbaker was no longer Prime Minister when I got to shake his hand. Still, there was an election in the air, and my father, who distrusted Liberals every bit as much Dief (especially when they were led by Pierre Trudeau) had hauled his four boys to the high school auditorium to hear the great […] Read more
Editor’s Desk: Getting rail back on the political agenda
Top court’s dismissal halts farmers’ suit over CWB assets
Reading Time: 3 minutes The bulk of a proposed class action by four Prairie farmers, over what they called the federal government’s “expropriation” of Canadian Wheat Board assets, has hit its final wall. The Supreme Court of Canada on Thursday dismissed, with costs, the farmers’ application for leave to appeal their 2013 loss in Federal Court. The four — […] Read more
Quality issues with some wheat crops, but it’s not all bad
With 2014 in the bin, there may be pricing opportunities as the trade turns to blending to hit grade specs
Reading Time: 5 minutes Just over a year ago, Bruce Burnett, the Canadian Wheat Board’s head of weather and crop research, stood in front of the 2014 Cereals North America conference and spun the unlikely tale of a late harvest that delivered a large and high-quality crop. Rolling the clock forward to this fall, Burnett again took the podium, […] Read more
Australia’s approach to grain co-ops
Owned by 4,200 farmers, the giant CBH Group adds a whole new dimension to phrases like value-adding and diversification
Reading Time: 6 minutes Given the demise of the prairie pools and the recent sales of a number of Canada’s new-generation co-operative grain terminals, it would be understandable if many Canadian farmers, grain traders, farm advisers and policy makers believe co-operative grain marketing ventures are simply not viable in today’s world. Just don’t try and tell that to Western […] Read more
Grain drain
Winnipeg has long reigned over Western Canada’s grain trade — but can it keep the crown?
Reading Time: 5 minutes No one noticed,” author and historian Allan Levine says. “We’re talking about arguably the most important business institution in the city’s history, and it barely ranked notice in the city media.” For Levine, author of The exchange: 100 Years of Trading Grain in Winnipeg, it was the moment he realized the grain trade in Winnipeg […] Read more
Ottawa’s gamble
A year after pulling the plug on the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly, Ottawa is funding a new generation of Ukrainian co-ops
Reading Time: 6 minutes When Camil Côté landed in Ukraine’s capital Kiev last July, he was on a mission to establish grain co-operatives in a country that used to be the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. But if there was any irony in a Canadian going to the heartland of communism to build new co-ops, it wasn’t on anyone’s […] Read more
Churchill enjoys busy shipping year
Reading Time: < 1 minute Churchill is nearing the end of a busy grain shipping season, with the tonnage moving through the northern port expected to come in well above the previous year. “We’ll be wrapping up in the next 10 to 12 days,” Darcy Brede, president and chief operating officer of OmniTRAX, said last week. More than 500,000 tonnes […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
