The Rural Voice, 2005-01, Page 16CANADA
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12 THE RURAL VOICE
Mabel's Grill
The
world's
problems
are
solved
daily
'round
the table
at
Mabel 's.
"Well at least we got a free turkey
for Christmas," said Dave Winston, -
as everybody groused around the
table the other morning in a very un -
Christmas -like mood. "My son works
at the grocery store part time and
they gave him a turkey."
"Huh, good job he works at that
end of the food chain," grumbled
George McKenzie. "If I hadn't
already laid off my hired man the
most I could afford to give him
would have been a quail."
"Hey with today's prices even a
turkey seems a little small," said
Hank Vanderplast. "I could have sold
that store owner a whole cull cow for
the price of a turkey."
"Yeh but then he still has to
process it and there's a lot more
money in processing a cow these
days than selling it," said George.
"Yeh, there's always a fly in the
ointment for any plan," Hank said.
"Well," said Cliff Murray, "at
least it's nice to know we've got one
thing in common with Wal-Mart."
"What do you share with Wal-
Mart other than the fact your whole
farm's about the size of their parking
lot?" wondered George.
"Didn't you hear that they claim
they're losing money in one of their
stores?" said Cliff. "Of course it
happens to be the one store in Canada
that's been successfully unionized.
They're hinting they might have to
close the store if the union gets too
good a contract."
"If this union thing spreads, it
might be amazing how many Wal-
Mart stores we find out are losing
money," said Dave.
"Well I was reading the other day
about one crop we could could grow
that would make money," said Hank.
"What, marijuana?" asked George.
"Exactly!" said Hank. "The
business columnist in Maclean's
magazine was talking about how they
should legalize and commercialize
marijuana growing. He was saying it
was worth twice as much as hogs and
three times as much as wheat."
"Yeh but he's talking about the
street value of the drugs," said Cliff.
"That's like adding up all the money
people spend on bread and talking
about that being the value of the
crop, not the few cents a loaf the
farmer gets for his wheat."
"Yeh, the grower will only make
money on marijuana as long as it's
illegal," said Dave. "You legalize it
and the distributors and retailers will
take all the money and the farmer
won't be better off than if he was
growing corn."
"Sometimes I wish they'd make
beef illegal," said George. "It might
be the one way it would be worth
something."
"As if the distributors and the
retailers wouldn't be bad enough, this
guy was talking about government
getting $2 billion in tax revenue,"
said Hank.
"Oh, that would be an incentive
for them to legalize pot alright," said
Dave. "It's funny how fast something
that's bad like booze or gambling,
becomes good when the government
can make money from it."
"Sometimes I think we shouldn't
have argued so much against them
taxing food," said George. "The one
thing I can think of that would end
the cheap -food policy would be if the
government had an incentive for
raising the price of food because they
got eight per cent on every food
dollar."
"Yeh, then maybe they'd want to
keep us in business instead of just
shrugging when we,go down the
tubes," said Cliff.
"I don't know, did you hear that
the government is trying to put the
little guys out of business who have
been licenced to grow medicinal
marijuana?" said Hank. "They want
to give all the business to a few big
suppliers like that company out west
that's growing marijuana hundreds
of feet down an old mine shaft."
"Huh, and I always thought they
were trying to closed down the
underground economy," said Dave.O