Larry Powell Powell is a veteran, award-winning journalist based in Shoal Lake, Manitoba, Canada. He specialize in stories about agriculture and the environment. For decades, he worked for broadcast outlets in all four provinces in western Canada. This included a 5 years stint as Senior Editor for CBC Radio News in Saskatchewan. He is authorized to receive embargoed news releases on important, global stories, through the Science Media Centre of Canada, the Royal Society, Nature Research and the World Weather Attribution Network. He's a member of the Science Writers and Communicators of Canada, the Canadian Association of Journalists and a past member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2020, Powell joined an international team of writers providing articles for the Swiss-based online journal, Focusing on Wildlife - celebrating the biodiversity of Planet Earth. In June, 2014, he was a panelist at a world conference in Winnipeg entitled Holding
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Pilot project -Hog factories proposal to western Manitoba. This article has a familiar ring to it. Let's go back to 2008.
Quote:"Manitoba’s Conservation Minister, Stan Struthers, promises that past mistakes in the way factory hog barns have grown up in parts of the province, will not be repeated elsewhere.
In the face of sustained and sometimes vicious opposition from the hog lobby,
Struthers (also the Minister responsible for the environment) recently piloted a law through the provincial legislature, freezing the development of new factory hog barns in three areas of the province; the Interlake, the Red River Valley and the southeast.
But new ones will still be allowed in the rest of the province!
In that regard, Struthers has reassuring words for people in these areas (like myself) who might fear they will be adversely affected by new barns".end of quote.
This same question remains now, as it did then.
"Why does Minister Struthers,and now other involved parties, indicate that by simply changing locations, polluting industries suddenly become good and caring environmentalists?
With the present, province wide phosphorus rate of over 800 pounds per acre, it will not take very long, that phosphorus will be in a state of over abundance.
Ignorance at a High Level in Manitoba.
Ag. minister, Ron Kostyshyn,is actually ignoring all the work,the studies and legislation that have factually stated; the Hog industry has to change it's ways.
Yet, here they are weaselling their way into something, which I am very much afraid will end up as full scale operations, God forbid, and end up, like in the Interlake, the Red River and eastern Manitoba areas.
And what will they say then, Whoops, we made a mistake!
The victim will surely be Lake Winnipeg itself; for these new barns will not be required to have the "cutting edge technology" required by the "Save the Lake Act," for reducing phosphorus releases into the water.
Surely this is the thin edge of the wedge which will lead to a scuttling of the Act, unanimously approved nearly four years ago by all provincial MLAs. This was a combined effort to help save Lake Winnipeg and Manitoba waters. Why would anyone assume that by simply changing locations, polluting industries suddenly become good and caring environmentalists?
This leaves me with the impression that the two faces of
the Roman God Janus are not just suited to mythology;for the unacceptable scuttling of Lake Winnipeg is beyond reason.
Those hard-learned, and grim lessons of the Interlake, the Red River Valley and southeast areas of the Province must not be taken lightly.
John Fefchak.Virden, MB.