Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

Today the weather was nice, but the tutition was frozen to 2008. This is the first good news for students to come from the supposedly “student friendly” Lorne Calvert in his entire term as Premier. Tuition has jumped more than 200% in the past 20 years, but I’m sure student organizations like the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) could give you more accurate details on how the NDP government has neglected post secondary education if you’re interested. The irony is that the CFS is very buddy-buddy with the NDP, yet gets little or nothing each year from the province which is responsible for education funding.

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Foam Lake’s Post Office over on Main Street.


The water tower picture is actually from a few weeks ago when I was last in Foam Lake working at the library. Today I talked with a Town administrator who has a son working in the computer industry almost exclusively for SaskEnergy, although he’s employed by a company that contracts his time out. He’s making much less money than me though, which I found surprising.

This house at the end of the street with the library, had a few tractors parked next to it. One old tractor the owner started up while I was taking this picture, and I didn’t get a look at the business next to him, but I bet it’s related to farm equipment ;-)While in the library I saw the Foam Lake Review paper, featuring David Karwacki the SK Liberal leader’s visit to the town and area a few weeks ago. He’s been touring rural SK and learning more about the agriculture industry and he says what he’s seen is for the most part “distressing” how “desperate” producers are for help. Help doesn’t have to mean money directly from the government, because they need better laws to balance the marketplace.

It’s not possible for farmers to make a profit producing grains anymore. Railways, processors, input providers, and retail outlets take any profits that might arise from a good crop year, and there’s no way to compete with subsidized markets around the world. Karwacki mentioned the risk of drawing import tarrifs from the US and other competing countries if we give our farmers enough of a fair profit for their product. Well I’m of the opinion that things can’t get much worse and we should worry about tarrifs when they come and for now help keep farms in Canadian hands, and out of large foreign corporations or those who’d sell their land to those companies on a whim.

It’s not a coincidence that First Nations people in Canada had their land taken out of their control, and today they have the highest poverty and crime/victim rates of all Canadians. The loss of land is a loss of control over money making influence or power, aside from being the loss of someone’s home which alone is devastating. Everyone’s been homesick, but imagine not being allowed to eventually go home. Saskatchewan’s farmers are in danger of falling prey to the same fate, although this time it won’t be waves of European immigrants outnumbering the Natives, it will be a multinational-multibillion dollar corporation like Monsanto or Cargil taking the land with market manipulation and co-operation from banks and railways, and apathetic and impotent NDP, Liberal, and/or Conservative governments.

Linked to Sam Burns Open Trackback Weekend.