The News Rundown

B.C. Tree Fruits co-operative shutting down after 88 years

People across Canada who love eating locally grown fruits like apples, peaches, cherries, apricots and nectarines, may find it more difficult to find them in stores with the surprising news that the BC Tree Fruits cooperative is shutting down after 88 years.
While you may not have heard of the coop's name itself, you have likely seen the iconic green leaf logo that has adorned fruit packaging and apple stickers for decades as a sign of BC-grown quality.
After operating in the Okanagan Valley for nearly nine decades, the B.C. Tree Fruits cooperative announced to growers on Friday it is dissolving and seeking court direction to liquidate its assets. The co-operative, which is made up of more than 230 farming families, have been informed by email that as of Friday, the co-operative would no longer be receiving fruit at its packing facilities and advised growers to "immediately search for another alternative to market your fruit for the balance of the 2024 season."
In a written statement, the company cited "extremely low estimated fruit volumes, weather effects and difficult market and financial conditions" as the reasons for dissolving the co-operative.
Mike Mitchell, a fourth-generation fruit farmer in Lake Country said “There’s probably 300 growers looking for a place to find a home for their fruit for this upcoming crop.”
The news comes as many Okanagan fruit farmers are facing catastrophic crop losses from extreme weather this winter that wiped out almost all of the valley's crops and severely damaged orchards. This is after three tough seasons for fruit growers, beginning with the heat dome that cooked the province in 2021. Following that were more heat and drought concerns, wildfires, smoke issues and January’s sudden cold snap that damaged this season’s stone fruit crop.
Mitchell, who is also a former board member of BC Tree Fruits, called Friday’s news “the icing on the cake.”
“The tonnage that BC Tree Fruits handled completely dropped off. And then apple estimates that were to be received by July 5, the projected volume was only in the 30,000-bin range when they needed to be upward of 70,000-plus. The tonnage coming in didn’t support the cooperative model. And they wouldn’t be able to financially return any types of decent returns or even close to the costs of production to the grower body.
With the Okanagan apple harvest just weeks away for some varieties, members of the co-operative are now faced with the task of finding a buyer for their crop. Parminder Saini, whose family grows apples in West Kelowna says the news is 'really sad' and 'shocking' and that farmers are now left with questions on how they can get their product to market: "What do we do next? How do we pick our fruit? How do we haul it to an area where it can be stored for cooling? How does it go from coolers into the stores."
However, in recent years, the co-operative has faced financial challenges and opposition from a large proportion of its grower membership to decisions made by the board of directors.
In 2022, B.C. Tree Fruits shuttered its Lake Country fruit packing house, forcing central and north Okanagan growers to ship their fruit to Oliver in the south Okanagan. In protest, Saini and other growers tried unsuccessfully to dissolve the board of directors at a special general meeting of the co-operative's membership.
Kelowna-based apple grower and former board member Amarjit Lalli is also critical of the direction B.C. Tree Fruits had taken in recent years, including the move to the Oliver packing house and the selling off of the co-operative's assets: "It's been one blunder after another. There is a lot in the background. The government needs to come in and do a full audit and an investigation into the downfall of B.C. Tree Fruits."
With the co-operative's sudden collapse, Lalli and other fruit farmers are meeting this weekend to discuss how they can get their fruit to market this year, he said.
"The private packers don't have the capability to pack all of that fruit. They will take some of it, but not all of it, and it's going to be a devastating year for some growers."
Jennifer Deol, who runs There and Back Again Farms in Kelowna, said that means small farmers are losing access to cold storage and distribution infrastructure needed to sell their crops to wholesalers, in the middle of what has already been a catastrophic growing season for many.
Deol said: "With our table grapes, if we don't find an avenue to store them, they're going to spoil. It's not worth it for us to pick it. We've always worked with B.C. Tree Fruits where they store the product for us, and they sell it for us, and now we're facing a future where we have to figure that out ourselves."
In a written statement, the BC NDP Minister of Agriculture and Food Pam Alexis said ministry staff have been "engaging and consulting with B.C.'s tree fruit sector to understand the impacts." Alexis said the province will continue to work with growers and the B.C. Fruit Growers' Association to understand the impacts of the decision to dissolve the co-operative.
"Our government has been supporting the tree fruit industry through a tree fruit stabilization plan, which included supporting governance changes at the B.C. Tree Fruit co-operative," Alexis wrote.
In the end, Mike Mitchell says “We are businessmen and we have to act like businessmen and find a way. Farmers are resilient. We always get up and we will find a way out of this. We’ll figure this out, one way or another.”
For people who have enjoyed BC fruit for decades, we certainly hope so. If Canada is going to be able to sustain its ever growing population, and it will continue to grow, then we need to figure out how to feed ourselves. Geopolitics has shown in recent years that we cannot afford to rely on food imports, and if we really want to keep prices down and support Canadian jobs, then the governments need to stand with Canadian farmers.
Supplementals:

Over the past week and a half Global has seen a series of layoffs and early retirements across its news division.
Why? Parent company Corus has been making changes as part of an “efficiency review process”.
In total it is expected that 300 or so jobs will be cut by the end of August.
AM radio stations will stop operating in Vancouver and Edmonton with the eye of looking for more cost saving opportunities in the future.
This has impacted news programming across the country but most notably in Kelowna, Kingston, and Peterborough.
For Global Okanagan the focus will be on supper hour and late night weekly news programming. Global News in general of course will still focus on provincial and international news coverage on the weekends and on news streaming channels.
But the shift away from local will be felt due to the cutbacks in jobs which are looking to be more than 20 at this point in time.
Global Okanagan began as CHBC-TV but was later rebranded when Shaw purchased it and had it rebranded to Global Okanagan.
The coverage of these changes in the media landscape points to “broader trends in the media industry”.
Corus co-chief Executive Officer Troy Reeb said that local news in small markets is difficult because "There was a time when a local television station could have ... a good hold on the local advertisers in the market. Now local advertisers can go to literally hundreds of other options."
Corus also cited the 2023 Hollywood strikes that delayed production of key programs as well as inflation and challenges from competition.
In general this is the story of media cutbacks in Canada and it has been used to justify continued infusions of cash from the federal government but there’s something else going on with Corus.
The stock price of Corus explains everything. The price has plummeted to as low was 10 cents. A year ago, it was $1.50. In March it was 73 cents. Then in June this year it plummeted from about 50 cents to 12 cents.
Why?
On June 10, 2024 Rogers signed a deal with NBCUniversial and Warner Bros. Discovery to bring lifestyle and entertainment content to Canadians.
This deal includes channels like HGTV, Food Network, Discovery, Animal Planet, and others.
Corus owns channels like HGTV, Food Network, the Cooking Channel, Magnolia, and OWN.
Corus used to own the rights to broadcasting the American programming but Rogers outbid them.
With Rogers outbidding Corus this caused a substantial drop in money flowing into Corus causing the stock price to tumble and the company to begin looking at cutbacks.
It gets even more interesting because the Shaw family still owns Corus but after the Shaw acquisition, Corus has more power to acquire these kinds of broadcast rights.
Troy Reeb also made a comment on this change back in June saying, “I want to reinforce Corus’ intent to continue operating the country’s largest and most widely distributed lifestyle channels based on the strength of top-rated Canadian programs and alternate foreign content supply.”
This paints a picture of a broadcast landscape that is now dominated by two power players, Rogers and Bell. Rogers acquisition of Shaw has undoubtedly made things worse in the broadcast landscape and who’s to say this won’t happen for Shaw customers as well.
At the end of the day this story is another example of the Canadian regulatory framework that is supposed to protect against this sort of thing failing drastically.
Competition we were promised but it never arrived and that is something that has become emblematic of the state of affairs in Canada.
Except in this case this week with Corus and the fallout to Global stations, no one in the media bothered to follow the money instead painting it on changing dynamics of the news landscape.
Supplementals:

Rubio, Colleagues Warn of Terrorist-tied Gazans Crossing Northern Border

Canada's acceptance of Gazas refugees has some US senators concerned about an increased risk of allowing individuals with ties to terror groups easy access to the United States.
In a letter Wednesday to U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, United States Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) wrote “On May 27, 2024, the Government of Canada announced its intent to increase the number of Gazans who will be allowed into their country under temporary special measures. We are deeply concerned and request heightened scrutiny by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security should any of them attempt to enter the United States at ports of entry as well as between ports of entry.”
Cosigning the letter were fellow Republican senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Mike Braun, Joni Ernst and Josh Hawley.
Last month, Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced a five-fold increase in the number of Gazan refugees let into Canada, upping the program’s cap to 5,000 people. The government’s initial cap on Palestinian refugees was 1,000. As well, Palestinian refugees will be able to apply for work and study permits without charge.
The issue, the letter states, centres around the refugee travel document, which can be used in lieu of the refugee’s passport for international travel, adding the United States is among those nations that accept such documents.
“After arriving in Canada and being issued this travel document, Palestinians can then travel outside Canada since the Refugee Travel Document becomes a valid form of identification, which is recognized in 146 countries for the purposes of filling out paperwork and applying for visas. However, with little to no reliable records or background checks of these individuals from the Palestinian Territories, these policies unlock opportunities for individuals with ties to terrorist groups to enter Canada, receive new forms of identification, and then try to enter the U.S. along the porous north border.”
Rubio’s letter also accused the Biden administration’s lax border policy of enabling criminals and terrorists to cross into the United States, including via Canada.
“Unfortunately, so far in FY24, U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Field Operations has encountered more than 233 suspected terrorists at our northern border, with many more likely going undetected. This is already higher than totals in previous years.”
Observers have noted worrying levels of anti-Israel extremism in Canada since the October 7 terror attacks in Israel, which saw Hamas terrorists conduct a campaign of murder, kidnappings and sexual assault on Israeli residents of Gaza-adjacent communities.
Earlier this week, 21-year-old Zachareah Adam Quraishi of Cold Lake, Alta. was killed after an attempted terror attack against armed guards outside Moshav Netiv Ha’asara in southern Israel. Israeli officials say Quraishi arrived in Israel the day before the attack, posing as a tourist.
In a statement issued several days after the release of Rubio’s letter, Immigration Minister Marc Miller maintains that Canada supplying refugee travel documents as a replacement for their origin-country passports is “categorically false.”
“Canada only issues refugee travel documents to individuals who have been found to be legitimate refugees through a separate assessment process,” the statement read, adding that it’s equally false that all applicants are eligible to apply for Canadian citizenship.
“All successful applicants to our program receive either a TRV (temporary resident visa) or a temporary resident permit, which is only valid for transit to Canada, not the United States.”
The same statement says 609 temporary resident visas were approved for Palestinians outside of Gaza since Oct. 2023. Under the current special measures, 434 people who exited Gaza on their own were approved, with 189 of those already arriving in Canada.
Miller also pointed out that if those who come to Canada want to go to the U.S., it’s up to the U.S. whether they are let in or not.
It's undeniable that Canada has seen an alarming rise of anti-semitism, not limited to the protests at university campuses this summer. We need to be aware that importing more and more Palestinians into the country will not help that situation and will reverse course on any progress made to integrate immigrants into our Canadian values. We do need to be worried about this, and that intolerance of other cultures has absolutely gotten worse.
Supplementals:

Firing Line

Ottawa let wildfire fuel pile up in Jasper for decades

The biggest news story of the week for Alberta, Canada, and even some global media has been the wildfire ravaging Jasper National Park and the townsite.
Initially it was thought that upwards of 50% of the town could be lost, this number was revised down but the loss for many is staggering.
It was revealed late Thursday that critical infrastructure such as the water treatment plant, hospital, schools, and the trans mountain pipeline were saved.
Jasper Park Lodge had fire on their property but most of the iconic resort is safe.
That doesn’t change the fact that this fire is life changing for those who live in Jasper and those who visit. The province has stepped up as have surrounding communities to provide places of refuge and safety.
The town is not out of the woods yet and a dousing of rain helped the fight.
Premier Smith was brought to tears while delivering a statement after the fire entered town, she said, “We share the sense of loss with all of those who live in the town, who care for it, and who have helped build it. And to those in Alberta and around the world who have experienced the magic of Jasper: The magic is not lost, and it never will be.”
She pledged to do whatever the province could to help rebuild.
Across the border in BC the small town of Barkerville was able to be saved from flames but was facing the prospect of a similar fate to Jasper.
The town is an iconic 150+ year old gold rush town full of historic wood built buildings. Up to this point fire crews have been able to keep the town safe but as we know in the realm of fires things can change very quickly.
Barring weather changes Barkerville could have easily become Jasper.
The province and federal government are working very closely on the Jasper wildfire since the national park is federal jurisdiction. The province has provided whatever resources were asked for but lacks the ability to call shots in this situation.
This is incredibly interesting because media outlets, online commentators, have routinely throughout this catastrophe cited purported cuts to Alberta’s wildfire fighting budget.
The reality though is that for 2024 Alberta is spending more to combat wildfires. Following last season the 2024-25 wildfire budget is close to $2b.
The province has invested in night vision capable helicopters, two new air tanker contracts, and more drones for aerial surveillance. None of these aspects can be deployed by Alberta into Jasper without the federal government asking for them.
In 2019 there was a cut to a helicopter firefighting repel team and this made for a convenient Press Progress story in the 2023 election that seems to have worked its way into the commentators of today.
The reality is though that fire prevention and spending on forest management in Alberta is trending upwards.
It would also seem as though the usual suspects on talk radio and in opinion columns and even editorials from the Toronto Star are keen to blame this fire on climate while thousands are displaced.
The ironic part though is that the Toronto Star can’t even get their facts right. They claimed in the original editorial piece that the fire that nearly destroyed Fort McMurray was 2011 but it was indeed 2016.
They also cite of course the fires in Lytton BC that we talked about the recovery effort of just a few weeks ago on the podcast.
The editorial piece from the Toronto Star ends by simply saying that “Climate change is real. Climate change is devastating.” as though that’s the entire picture of what happened - it isn’t.
Forest management played a huge role in the Fort McMurray fire. Anyone who has lived off the land or explored the back country knows that we have been falling down.
There have been stories that have emerged this week from back country explorers saying that something like what we’re seeing in Jasper isn’t a surprise.
Cut lines that were supposed to be fire breaks have become littered with dead brush and other tinder materials making them impassable.
There’s also questions about what the Park Management plan had to do with the fire as well.
The natural landscape of somewhere like Jasper sees pine trees up the slopes and more bush like vegetation in the valleys. That natural landscape would have been maintained by fires keeping the conifers out of the valley and up on the slopes.
Parks Canada has employed a strategy where any specific small fire is put out rather than being let to burn.
Some say this has resulted in the park deviating from its natural landscape further exacerbating the problem we see.
Parks Canada has also not kept up with the number of prescribed burns needed.
According to a 2022 Parks Canada report the scale and frequency of prescribed burns hasn’t compensated for the loss of fire disturbance from removing Indigenous ignition practices and applying wildfire suppression actions after World War II.
The mountain pine beetle has also killed an increasing number of trees allowing them to become fuel for fires and this warrants discussion if it is related to climate change since winters don’t get as cold as they once did.
From 2015-2017 733 hectares were controlled burned while in 2018 360 hectares of trees were removed to expand the fire guard near Jasper. Jasper National Park is about 1 million hectares in size.
With the park by-in-large remaining as much as 86% underburned depending on elevation, it was a tinderbox. Only the old growth forests in the park were of sufficient burn rate at 33% below target. Everything else was rated poor.
These figures themselves come from Parks Canada.
So before the preeners of climate change seek to blame this on protracted weather patterns otherwise known as climate, let’s look at what’s actually happening.
What’s worse? The same could actually happen to the south in Banff National Park and the surrounding Bow Valley.
Supplementals:

Quote of the Week

“We share the sense of loss with all of those who live in the town, who care for it, and who have helped build it. And to those in Alberta and around the world who have experienced the magic of Jasper: The magic is not lost, and it never will be.” - Premier Danielle Smith on the Jasper wildfire.

Word of the Week

Cooperative - a farm, business, or other organization which is owned and run jointly by its members, who share the profits or benefits.

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Show Data

Episode Title: Fruits and Fires
Teaser: The BC Tree Fruits cooperative shutting down spells disaster for farmers, Corus cuts hundreds of media jobs, and US senators are worried about Canada’s Gaza refugees. Also, Jasper burns as a result of bad forest management.
Recorded Date: July 27, 2024
Release Date: July 28, 2024
Duration: 57:25
Edit Notes: None

Podcast Summary Notes

Duration: XX:XX