City notebook: Stanfield’s steps up

By COLLIN GALLANT on April 4, 2020.

cgallant@medicinehatnews.com@CollinGallant

My dad was from Cape Breton and for his entire life would settle for nothing less than Stanfield’s long underwear.

That firm employs about 500 workers in Truro, N.S., and kept stubbornly at it even as coal mines and fisheries suffered decades of decline.

It was a point of pride, and dad felt supporting the firm by way of a biannual skivvy purchase was important, a small way to help keep it going.

If only he knew how important.

This week the company announced they will convert production to hospital gowns and other protective garb as part of the effort against COVID-19 – one of many manufacturers across the county to do so.

Hatters were likely imbued with the same sort of pride after hearing last week that this season’s first greenhouse crops were on the way.

The pandemic response is asking many things of citizens and is marshalling resources from our industries.

But, it comes after decades of general worry, but also a general inaction, about the health of the manufacturing landscape in this country.

Politics in the Western Hemisphere has been shifted by populist cries about the “hollowing out” of domestic manufacturing.

It’s not new for people to publicly support local products, local jobs and keeping money local, but actual purchasing hinges, more often than we’ll admit, on low-prices, the convenience of online shopping and no-charge, no-fuss shipping.

Companies and governments – and consumers, too – seek to keep costs low through centralization, sending production offshore and relying on a global trade network that, now, seems all too tenuous.

And if underwear and green peppers seem frivolous, on Friday, U.S. president Donald Trump moved to restrict exports to Canada of protective gear from the American industrial base.

And as for food production, a great conversation about a “100-mile diet” faded away a few years ago.

The main questions is what we’d be eating if you could only get it from within a reasonable distance.

Locally, there is an abundance of beef, grain, potatoes, sugar, and greenhouse veggies, but the rest of the basket looks pretty bare, and that’s not factoring in processing that is increasingly centralized elsewhere.

That conversation and others should begin anew and with great urgency.

A look ahead

City council will hold its regularly scheduled meeting on Monday, though the public and media members are not allowed to attend.

Instead the proceedings will be live-streamed on the city’s website, the agenda was posted Friday night at http://www.medicinehat.ca (an outline will appear in the News on Monday morning), and reporters will have a conference call with officials afterwards.

This week should also feature the release of the City’s 2019 year-end financial statements.

100 years from now

Medicine Hatters rejected a move to change the city’s name, the News will report on April 4, 2120. As part of weekly plebiscites, citizens voted 2 to 1 against renaming the city as “Hamilton” – a nod to honour the city’s greatest mayor, John Hamill, who was elected to nine consecutive terms in the first half of the 21st century.

Collin Gallant is covers city politics and a variety of topics for the News. Reach him (still) at 403-528-5664 or via email at cgallant@medicinehatnews.com.

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