Some things never change

By Kate Procter

The winter often brings time to reflect as we think about what went right, what went wrong, and how the heck did it go by so fast? Farmers deal with weather, markets, politics, changes in science and technology, guaranteeing that no two years are ever the same. But in some ways, at the risk of sounding old, somehow we always get through and sometimes it seems as if the more things change, the more they stay the same. 

I passed a milestone this year as my eldest son turned 30. How is that even possible? It does not seem that long since I was 30 myself. I don’t really feel that different. I took the advice of some parenting magazines to tuck away a newspaper or magazine from the week of your child’s birth, kind of like a time capsule. It was one of the pieces of advice I actually took – and when sorting through boxes recently, I came across that magazine. It was a Maclean’s issue, back from November 1995. 

For some reason, I always read the back page of a magazine first and in this particular issue, the story back there was about the referendum on Quebec separation. Allan Fotheringham spilled a fair bit of ink on predicting who would be the next Prime Minister. There was the usual criticism of the politicians at the time, and Jean Cretien, who was the current PM, was described as looking like “a frightened kid on TV.” Having his own riding vote yes for separation, the author wrote off Chretien, saying he would have no chance of forming government again. As it turned out, he was just beginning his time in office and ended up holding the title of Prime Minister of Canada for ten years, from 1993 to 2003, winning three consecutive elections. Fotheringham was right, however, about there being no appetite for another referendum any time soon. 

Another thing that jumped out at me in this issue was the surge of nationalism that was brought out by the referendum. We have seen that again over the past year as threats of becoming the 51st state have caused many of us to reflect on what it means to be Canadian and why we care. 

In Charles Gordon’s column in the Maclean’s issue, he writes about this nationalism – and how at the time, Canadians took the initiative to promote love for our country, bypassing politicians and political rhetoric. About 100,000 Canadians travelled to Montreal from across the country to rally in support of a united Canada. BC Tel also got its knuckles rapped for offering free five-minute calls for people who wanted to call Quebecers to encourage them to stay in Canada. And 55,000 British Columbians took advantage of that offer! Unfortunately, it broke the Quebec referendum rules. 

Anyway, Gordon writes of the importance of emotion and of hope – things that still ring true today as we navigate unpredictable and often frightening times. People are motivated to act not because of spreadsheets or dire reports about the economy, but because they become emotional about an issue – or, to use the lingo of today, it “hits them in the feels.”

Hope is something that most farmers have in abundance. It keeps us going when so many things are out of our control. Looking back on this cropping year, I think about the warm spring where I broke my iron-clad rule of not placing a seed in the ground before the first day of May. A hot, dry April had me out in the planter on the 28th and then cursing myself a few weeks later when a cold snap turned the baby corn a sickly yellow colour. I tried to make myself feel better by thinking about half of the crop that was still in the ground. 

Hope helped me forget about the rows of yellow corn plants as spring turned to summer and the corn looked none the worse for its early chilling. By then it stopped raining and we couldn’t do anything about that.

Now that all of the crop is safely in the bin and we are going over the numbers for the past year, we are happy to see that in spite of the chilly start and the dry summer, our yields were surprisingly good. We grew a few different varieties and tried fungicide on some of the crop, so there is always variation. It is not easy to draw definite conclusions. It would have been easy to succumb to worry and fear about crop disaster, but we held onto the hope that it would turn out all right in the end. There is always some new thing to worry about.   

But back to the time capsule. There were some headlines in that 1995 Maclean’s issue that could have been written last week – conflict in the Middle East, alarming cries about the state of Canadian health care, scandals about misbehaving public figures. Obviously, the details change and there are some very dated things, especially related to technology and where the internet was 30 years ago. However, reviewing this old magazine helps me remember the importance of hope, taking care of what matters, and that people can rise above the conflicts of the day by working together and caring for each other. ◊