What people most like about rural Saskatchewan is the way it can be disconnected from the rest of the world.
Whether it is a simple drive into the wide opened spaces of the south or the more forested area of the north, rural Saskatchewan is a place where one can get away from things. That’s harder to do in the cities — even in cities like Regina and Saskatoon that have lost a lot of their small city charm during the recent booming times.
Unfortunately, there is no escaping all the things that may effect your life. We do, after all, live in an interconnected world where decisions and events thousands of miles away increasingly tend to impact where and how we live.
And sometimes those far away events are years and decades in the making.
This thought crosses one’s mind in wake of the recent World Trade Organization ruling by its compliance panel in favour of Canada and against the U.S.’s Country of Origin Labelling (COOL).
“This final ruling demonstrates the need for the United States to bring COOL in line with its WTO obligations,” Saskatchewan Agriculture Minister Lyle Stewart said last week. “COOL does not address the best interest of the public and it unfairly discriminates against Canadian cattle and hog exports.”
Obviously, this would seem good news for rural Saskatchewan that produces 2.9 million head of cattle and 2.1 million hogs.
But notwithstanding Stewart’s optimism, it might be awhile before this fight is over.
While the favourable WTO ruling — the third ruling against COOL after wins in June 2012 and October 2014 — gives Canada the right to take retaliatory tariff action against things like California wines and Florida orange juice, Stewart stresses this is not what the Canadian government wants to do.
Instead, it is hoping that the U.S. Congress passes a contemplated law to repeal COOL — a notion that has the support of the U.S. meat packing industry. The problem, however, is that laws aren’t easily passed in the States as it gets closer to a U.S. presidential election. And this particular law — a relatively popular one with most Americans — now has to get past a protection U.S. Senate.
For rural Saskatchewan, it’s a reminder that while it might seem easier to disconnect from the rest of the world, it’s still heavily impact by events and decisions made far away.
It all started in the 1986 in England when the first case of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy — BSE or mad cow disease — was discovered. Between 1986 through 2001, the British outbreak believed to be caused by using ground up animal parts in feeds. would affect about 180,000 cattle and devastate British farming communities.
By 1996, the first case of the deadly Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) — the human equivalent caused by eating BSE-infected meat — would be in diagnosed. There would be 229 such cases of CJD from 1996 to 2014 worldwide — the vast majority of which (181) would be in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Canada’s first case of mad cow disease would be confirmed in an eight-year-old cow in Alberta in 2003. Even though that cow never entered the food chain, it would be enough for the United States to close its borders to Canadian beef. Mexico, Japan and South Korea would quickly join the ban followed by 36 other countries. It would devastate the Canadian beef industry.
And while the borders would eventually be reopened to Canadian beef, the Americans decided to proceed with COOL in 2008 and extend it to pork and poultry products — a move that has cost Canadian farmers an estimated billion dollars.
Even in rural Saskatchewan, where it sometimes seems easy to get away from the rest the world, you can’t always escape things that happened long ago and far away.
Murray Mandryk has been covering provincial politics for over 22 years.
