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SERVING MANITOBA FARMERS SINCE 1925 | Vol. 73, No. 25 | $1.75
June 18, 2015
Progress on COOL
But Canada is still threatening retaliation By Alex Binkley
manitobacooperator.ca
After 70 years, farming still puts a spring in his step Cartwright farmer Jack Pawich says some things about farming never change
Co-operator contributor with files from Reuters
W
hile the House of Representatives has voted strongly to repeal the country-of-origin labelling program, the Senate and the Obama administration need to act quickly as well, warns Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz. Otherwise Canada along with Mexico will be putting their case for retaliatory duties to a special meeting of the World Trade Organization Dispute Settlement Body on June 17, the minister said in a statement. The vote “marks a positive step. The only way for the United States to avoid billions in retaliation by late summer is to ensure legislation repealing COOL passes the Senate and is signed by the president,” the minister added. “The administration and Congress know that COOL is costing thousands of American jobs and billions in economic harm to our highly integrated North American livestock industry.” The WTO has ruled four times that COOL violates international trade rules the United States helped draft. Canada has said it’ll be seeking WTO authority to impose just over $3 billion a year in duties on American food and consumer products starting
Cartwright farmer Jack Pawich, 90, has done many jobs over the years, but farming remains his passion. PHOTO: Evelyn Ginter
See COOL on page 7 »
BY ALLAN DAWSON Co-operator staff / Cartwright, Man.
Publication Mail Agreement 40069240
H
ow does a southern Manitoba farmer end up pumping gas for Elvis Presley? Serendipity. But it was love of farming and a lot of hard work rather than luck that resulted in the 90-year-old farmer sowing his 70th crop this spring on the farm he was raised on, now operated by his son Randy and daughter-in-law Donna. “I just love working the land,” Jack said as he sat at the kitchen table one cold, cloudy day in May. “I look forward to it every spring. “It gets in your blood.” Jack enjoyed being his own boss, but
he also knew the wage-earner’s life. In the early years, that’s how he supported his farming addiction. It’s also how he met Elvis. In March 1957 Jack was working at a gas station in North Hollywood when Elvis Presley stopped to fill his Cadillac. “He gave me a $20 tip.” He picked lemons in San Bernardino, sold Watkins products in Nor th Hollywood and worked in a General Motors assembly plant in Long Beach. He hawked encyclopedias, but quit because he didn’t like high-pressure sales. There were many other jobs — waiting tables at a Winnipeg Salisbury House, bus building at Motor Coach, delivering packages for Eaton’s, working in lamps and shades for the Hudson Bay, working at a tool com-
pany in Los Angeles, building boilers in Toronto, selling cars and farm equipment and assembling Massey Harris combines in Toronto — where he insisted they be built right. “One guy said to me, ‘What the hell do you care? You’re getting paid.’ I said, ‘I’m a farmer from out west and I want that pulley on straight.’” For a while Jack delivered beer in Winnipeg from 7 a.m. until 6 p.m., then drove a taxi until 2 a.m. “I held two full-time jobs,” he says. “But when I started farming, I put $200 on a tractor and paid for it before they delivered it. In them days a tractor was $1,500. It was a lot of money, but I owned the tractor before it come to the yard.” See JACK PAWICH on page 6 »
WEATHER: Split-flow pattern to continue » PAGE 16