A call for help
By Ken Waddell
Rural Manitoba needs help.
Examine the background and a quick look at history will show that rural Manitoba has supplied many things to our cities, to our province, to Canada and internationally.
We export our young people to staff the offices, factories and companies of the world.
In times of war, we send our youngsters off to battle. In fact, McCreary is noted for having sent more men per capita off to battle in WWII than any other centre in Canada. That’s a thought worth pondering as we approach Remembrance Day.
Rural Manitoba has always contributed heavily in many ways.
We feed ourselves and we feed the province, the nation and to some extent the world. 
We have educated our best and sent them off to research and develop the best grains, livestock, technology and science known to man.
Whenever the call goes out for people, for food, for ideas, for innovation, for bravery, rural Manitoba has always answered the call.
But the time has come when we need help and especially so in western Manitoba. On two fronts we are being grieved, one passively and one actively.
On the passive side, we are desperately short of good housing. Be it towns like Gladstone, Neepawa, Rivers or Minnedosa, we need affordable housing. In Neepawa we are so short of housing that it’s at a crisis stage. We don’t seem to have the capacity from developers and our town council to make it happen. Neepawa is short at least 150 units of housing as we stand today. But having never had to do “big” housing projects we have not developed the capacity to do so. Neither the money, the expertise nor the ability to manage a project are attracted to area. We need help badly. We need capital, building capacity that goes beyond our own capable trades peoples’ capacity. We need expertise to manage rental and purchased housing projects. And we need it fast.
So the appeal needs to go out, we need help and there’s an opportunity for a reward to those who answer the call. In this area we have 45 Ukrainian families that need housing, 125 Filipino, and over 60 Korean families. And that doesn’t count the shortage of housing that existed before the Hytek-Sprinhill expansion that brought the workers here.
We need help, and considering all that this area has contributed to the well being of Manitoba, I think we deserve it.
On another front we are being actively grieved.
Rural Manitoba is being assaulted by provincial government regulations on waster water management. Farms and rural residential holdings have had septic tanks and fields or pump out ejector systems for decades. About 30 years ago rural holdings were forced to put in ejector systems as it was considered better than a septic filed. Ejectors are efficient and with them sewage is treated in a very cheap way by plant growth, oxygenation, and sunlight. Now ejector systems are about to be banned. Many rural properties will not be able to be sold due to these new regulations. There’s no science behind the regulations. The rationale is one more kick at rural people in the mad-dash by government to pretend to be protecting the environment. Pretend I say, as the City of Winnipeg regularly flushes raw sewage into the Red River.
 If there is a problem with individual sewage systems due to inadequate capacity or age then the individual systems should be upgraded. Against that there is no argument. But to take the approach that has been taken by the province is both drastic and unfair, and as is often the case with politically driven solutions, the desired results are not the real results. Even if every sewage system in rural Manitoba somehow was shut down, it would make minimal difference to the lakes and rivers. It’s a matter of simple math. The sewage from 200,000 people filtered out over thousands of square miles can’t possibly have the effect of the sewage from 700,000 people concentrated into a few square miles. Picture all of southern Manitoba and then picture the city of Winnipeg. A rational person should get the picture.
On both these fronts, rural Manitoba needs help and deserves it. Given the gravity of these two situations, we need help fast and and we need it from our city cousins. We can only hope they are listening.