A number of columnists are misleading the public. It may be that they simply don’t know history. Hopefully it isn’t because they are malicious.
The deception is about the need for a strong military in Canada. The latest criticism is about our country’s need to defend our borders and air space. It was announced that a couple of Canadian air force planes intercepted a couple of Russian planes in the high Arctic. Some would argue that there was some political expediency about announcing that event while our Prime Minister Harper was on an arctic visit. Fair comment. But the columnists who seem to love criticizing anything that remotely resembles defending our borders want us to believe that all things military are a waste of time and money. They are so wrong.
These people simply don’t know their history. If they don’t believe that Russia and China would love to have control of Canadian resources, they are deceived. Of course they would and the aggression exhibited by both those countries within  the last 60-70 years evidences that position.
Even if Canada wasn’t vulnerable, we need to maintain the integrity of our borders. And it isn’t that Canada’s borders haven’t been threatened in the past. During WWII, the west coast of Vancouver Island was actually shelled by a Japanese submarine. As implausible as an actual invasion might have seemed, it was scarily obvious that enemy ships could and did penetrate well into Canadian waters. The sub in question was only 400 yards off the shore and didn’t inflict damage with several shells simply because they couldn’t get the range accurately. Several shells fell near a village and lighthouse. During the same time frame, my uncle, while serving with the Royal Canadian Navy, claimed he saw a German U-boat in Halifax harbour. Reading accounts of the time, he may well have and the only reason the U-boats didn’t attack is that they wanted to get home alive with accurate intelligence about the eastern seaboard of Canada.
Some will say, that WWII was then and this is now. The old enemies, Japan and Germany, are now allies. Russia used to be a threat but it is no longer. We should all be friends. That kind of thinking just about lost Britain to Germany and Hawaii to Japan. Any country can be threat to another it makes that decision. In smaller skirmishes around the world, borders are continuously shifting because of conflicts.
Admittedly, one of Canada’s strengths is that it is huge and its borders are somewhat distant from potential enemies. An actual invasion of Canada from the sea would be unlikely. Unlikely that is, if you don’t count terrorists, if you don’t count infiltrators, if you don’t count spies posing as students and business people.
Those who want to ground our planes, dock our ships and send our troops on permanent leave don’t understand history, they don’t understand nationalist aggression on the part of ill-intentioned countries. They certainly don’t understand religious based terrorism.
Our planes need to keep flying, our ships need to keep patrolling and our troops need to continue training. The cost is great but the consequences of not investing in military strength is far greater.
Again referencing my uncle, his first trips out onto the North Atlantic in WWII were with ships with wooden dummy artillery guns to fool the enemy into thinking there was some strength there. Subsequent trips had sailors holding wooden training rifles for a show of strength and later when real guns were actually available, no bullets were issued. Had Nazi Germany known  how weak we actually were, they could have torpedoed and shelled Canada at their will and pleasure. 
A country must ever be ready to defend itself, Canada certainly wasn’t ready in 1939-40. Any move to make it less ready in 2010 is absolutely foolish.

The town of Pine Falls received bad but not unexpected news this week. Their Tembec paper plant will not likely find a buyer and about 300 people will not be going back to work. The plant is over 80 years old and apparently is in need of huge upgrades. It makes newsprint and it seems there’s an over supply of newsprint in North America.
If  the plant is outdated then there has not been the necessary upgrades. A few years back a bunch of money was put into de-inking ONP (old newspaper) in an attempt to bolster re-cycling and save trees. That didn’t work out as processing new or virgin wood was cheaper. That’s not surprising but it is disappointing. The newspaper industry would like to see a strong market for ONP as every household and every business has some to feed into the system. Recycling is a good concept, it just didn’t seem to work out at Tembec.
I have no way of knowing whether the Pine Falls plant could have been made viable. I do know that Neepawa’s  Springhill Hog Plant is only about 20 years old and has undergone some upgrades in it’s relatively short lifetime. Then when Hytek bought it a couple of years ago, they proceeded to marshall $69 million into it in improvements. No where near that kind of money has been put into Tembec and apparently it shows. Tembec has placed their resources elsewhere and is poised to sell off it’s equipment. They can’t be blamed for that, it’s their money and they need to place it elsewhere. It’s been reported that just to heat the buildings cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Some blame can be placed with the NDP Selinger government though. If what local MLA Gerald Haraniuk says is true, and Haraniuk is a pretty straight shooter, the government took three months to even visit the place after the closure was announced last year. They also recently paid Tembec $2 million dollars in compensation to not cut timber in provincial parks but didn’t attach any conditions to that grant that would have secured jobs. Neither of those moves seems very bright but then governments aren’t noted for business skills anyway. 
At least the NDP government through Labour minister Jennifer Howard have acknowledged that there are still  large timber resources that could be utilized in some way. If they are hoping to attract other users they may have a bit of a struggle as there is considered to be an oversupply of lumber in the system now. If they are looking for a pulp user, this particular patch of bush may find itself too far from a plant to transport the wood for processing. Someone, someday, will want to sustainably harvest the eastern Manitoba timber and use it for lumber or pulp or whatever but it may take a long time. 
So, what in the long run is a government to do. The answer quite simply is “less”. If governments, at all levels, were to seriously look at where they put  our money there could be huge savings. There could, in turn, be reduced taxes across the provincial and federal spectrum. Taxes could be reduced for citizens and corporations. Government involvement in business should be minimal. Food inspection, health and safety regulations are areas that need to be under government. Granting money to industry, or to farmers for that matter, isn’t what governments should be about. However, we are so ensnared in a government network direct government employment and of grants, loans, incentives and even insurance that the economy has become very heavily dependent on government. 
The net result is that our levels of unnecessary regulations and over-taxation has burdened us down so badly that more businesses may not survive. Even worse, fewer industries will come here, it’s just too much hassle to meet all the government regulations. For example, Manitoba is faced with a housing crisis but government regulations for solid existing buildings “being brought up to code” is a major hindrance to investment.
Manitoba has always been an economy based on renewable resources. For all of it’s history, the abundance of resources has been Manitoba’s reason to be. From the buffalo harvest  to the canola harvest, Manitobans have utilized  resources to advantage. It will always be that way but it might be less of a struggle if governments were not so intertwined into the economy. 

One advantage of running a weekly newspaper is that you get to practice your trade every day and in a weekly cycle. When you are successful, you can build quickly on that success by making more improvements the very next week. If you make a mistake, you can adjust the following week. There’s a pattern, a cycle in the weekly newspaper business that, if handled properly, allows a paper to advance in manageable increments. All changes that are made hopefully make for a better, more efficient product for our readers and advertisers.
Because of the news gathering and advertising experience that we have in the weekly newspaper business, we are in an ideal position to adopt and adapt the internet (web) to give more back to our readers and advertisers. Many readers may have already checked out our double duty website, myWestman.ca where we feature news and advertising from the wider area. It has links to The Neepawa Banner, the Rivers Banner and links to several businesses and organizations. In the coming weeks and months, we plan to add in more advertisers. Why would we do that? The answer is quite simple, it will provide better service for our advertisers. It’s cheap for our advertisers and it makes revenue for the papers. If we didn’t make money, we and all our employees wouldn’t be here.
People read newspapers and people read the internet. The key word is “read” and for a website to be readable, it has to have news, pictures and ads. Just like a newspaper. So we have all three on our website and as an added bonus we have our You-Tube channel which is shared with The Neepawa Banner, the Rivers Banner and Neepawa’s NAC-TV local access channel.
Our myWestman.ca hasn’t just happened overnight. It’s been slowly developing for a few years now. We’ve had some challenges but we think we have it figured out now. With over 180,000 hits in a recent month, we know it’s being read. Our combined circulation of the Rivers Banner and The Neepawa Banner is 10,000 papers. That’s about 40,000 per month. If each of our papers gets read twice that means 80,000 “hits” as they say in the website lingo. Our web site has more than twice the hits of our newspaper so we are thrilled with that growth
A few years back, a few naysayers proclaimed that newspapers would die in the onslaught from the web. We old newspaper guys put on our thinking caps and soon figured out that we had heard all this before. Radio was supposed to kill newspapers. TV was supposed to kill newspapers. Well, some us aren’t quite that old, we had actually read about it somewhere, likely in a newspaper. Radio and TV didn’t kill newspapers and the web won’t either. It will change newspapers no doubt, but it will make the good ones better. We think that our papers are good ones and that they are getting better, enhanced by the internet
And that brings us to where we are at with The Neepawa Banner and Rivers Banner. We are gradually building our web presence so you can access us from anywhere in the world at any time of the day or night and any time of the week. If you just can’t wait for the latest news, then you can click on our web site. More and more western Manitoba stuff will be there all the time if our plans all work out, more news, more ads too. And I can promise you that, as of now, there is no way I want to have those annoying pop-up or overlay ads. They are as annoying as having your little brother purposely stand in front of the TV just to bug you.
We feel The Banner is heading in the right direction. You can be a casual news reader on our websites. You can get all of either Rivers or Neepawa electronically by subscribing on-line. You can subscribe and get  a hard copy in the mail. If you are in our paper coverage area you receive it in your mail box for free and you can also go on-line as many times as you like at myWestman.ca, for free of course.
The Banner wasn’t built in a day and neither has our website been done overnight either. Both are a work in progress and that’s a good thing. We are adaptable. As always, we appreciate our readers and our advertisers. If you need a newspaper ad you can phone us at 476-3401 or 328-7494. If you want to contact us by email you can use ads@neepawabanner.com or info@riversbanner.com.
If you want us to build you a website, we can do that too. We’d be happy to direct you to some we have built.
And you can always get hold of me personally by dropping in to the Neepawa Banner office at 243 Hamilton Street in downtown Neepawa or by phoning either phone number above and leaving a message. I can also be reached by email at kwaddell@neepawbanner.com.
I have been receiving suggestions about the newspaper business for over 20 years, so please don’t stop now. We have lots more growth to achieve together in the years to come.

The upset mother exclaimed, “I can spend $10,000 on vet bills for my dog but in Manitoba I can’t spend $10,000 on my daughter’s health.” The words spurted out with a mixture of anger, irony and black humour.
What the lady said is absolutely true. It doesn’t matter how much money you have or how badly you might want to spend it, you can’t pay for most health care procedures or surgeries in Manitoba no matter how much it might improve a person’s health. At the same time you can spend thousands on the health of your dog or cat.
Why is it that you can’t spend your own money on improving your own or your child’s health? The answer is quite simple and it’s buried deeply in the NDP party doctrine. Just ask former health minister Dave Chomiak, the old Gary Doer foot soldier. Chomiak will tell you that if you “allow” people to spend their own money on health care you will set up a two tier system and all the “good” doctors will quit working for the government and go and work in the private sector.
There’s bad news for Mr. Chomiak. Millions of dollars of good Manitoba money is being exported out of Canada for health care being purchased by Manitobans in other countries. People are not dumb nor are they unresourceful. If they have a health condition and if they want to try and fix it, they simply go on the internet and find a place that will give them what they want. It could be in Bottineau, Minot or Fargo, North Dakota. It could be in Rochester, Minnesota. It could be in India or Puerto Rico. It’s even got a name. It’s called “medical tourism”.
In the meantime, those same millions of dollars could be spent or invested in Manitoba. More research could be done, more jobs created and, lo and behold, new cures and procedures developed and promoted. It could be that the people who couldn’t afford to go to Puerto Rico or North Dakota might actually gain some benefit from the extra research, training and development.
Manitoba has a fine health care system as far as it goes. Unfortunately, how far it goes is heavily regulated and heavily restricted. You can do this but you can’t do that. You can have this test but not that one. You can go here, but not there.
In the bluntest of terms, it’s a screwy system.
We have accepted a heavily unionized, heavily regulated, entirely top-down run system and every day another batch of people suffer. Frequently, perhaps daily, a person dies because they can’t get better care. Our family has experienced it first hand.
If you are going to be sick, be sure you have an advocate near by, especially if you are old. The health care system is so over-burdened and underfunded that neglect in our hospitals is rampant. It isn’t malicious neglect, it’s just plain, old under-staffed, over administered and under-funded neglect.
The government has taken us down the wrong path for too many years. Here are some solutions:
1. Set up a system where capital investments can be brought in from the private side. If a new hospital is needed then let the private market build it on a long term lease basis. If a private firm builds a hospital care home to a certain set of agreed upon specs, you can guarantee it will be built cheaper and faster. It’s called on-time and on budget because they are looking to make buck on their investment.
2. Open up the health care system so that people can purchase procedures. If a certain procedure has a long waiting list, then hire more staff and pay them with the collected fees. Get rid of the waiting lists.
3. Have elected hospital and care home boards. Have the chairs of each local board in a region form the RHA boards.
4. Prioritize all government services and drop the lowest priority. Privatize the next priority. Keep the highest priority, the essential levels of service.
These are  fundamental changes that need to happen in Manitoba. We are being taxed to death and getting little to show for it. Health care is devouring all our tax resources while roads and infrastructure are failing at a remarkable rate.
The current process is simply not sustainable. Taken to its logical conclusion we will either be spending all our tax dollars on health care or we will be getting poorer and poorer health care. Until the majority of the voters in Winnipeg see the light, we will continue on this road to disaster.
Ed. Note: The Winnipeg Free Press reported on Wednesday that a mobile clinic is to be located across the Manitoba-U.S. border in Pembina, North Dakota. Clinic owner Randy Spielvogel said he anticipates the clinic will be flooded by eager Manitobans. He said he’s received hundreds of calls from desperate Manitobans frustrated by the province’s wait-and-see approach regarding MS sufferers wanting a new test on their veins to detect a possible blood flow restriction. Spielvogel, a nuclear medicine technologist and former Winnipegger, said he wants to give patients the chance to know whether narrowed veins could be a factor in their MS symptoms and he expects it will cost between $300 and $500 for the test.