MOOSOMIN — This past year has been a challenging one, and those problems are likely to continue into 2025 according to Brandon-Souris MP Larry Maguire.
Items like the ever-rising cost of living that’s been escalating up the use of food banks and rising rates of violent crime have Maguire very concerned for people in his riding.
“We’ve got the carbon tax that’s higher than ever,” he began. “It’s going up again 19 per cent on the 1st of April, which is an irony, given the government says they’re going to give everybody a little tax break here, which is a tax trick. Really, it’s just a tax trick putting an exorbitant cost on small businesses to change their systems over for two months and then put it back on again.”
Maguire isn’t convinced that the rebate associated with the carbon tax, delivered quarterly to Canadian households, is going to benefit the average person significantly—especially when compared with rising food prices.
“It’s not going to save very much money at all for anyone in regards to the food price, considering that it’s driven food prices up considerably over the last year already and we’ll be going up at least three per cent again next year, costing the average family about $800 more next year than what it does now for food,” Maguire said. “I think that’s pretty self-explanatory from all the people that I’ve talked to. There’s those who need it, but certainly, the $250 being available to somebody with a $150,000 net income isn’t going to do much for them.”
As for food bank usage, estimates indicate that over two million Canadians have visited a food bank in March 2024 alone—a 90 per cent increase from 2019.
“Those are pretty high levels,” Maguire said. “Right here in Brandon, I know the Samaritan House Food Bank saw nearly 2,000 more people with just about a 50 per cent increase in accessing their services in the last two years. And four out of every 10 of those people are children, and one out of every 10 is a senior.”
Another area of concern Maguire highlighted is crime and gun control laws, noting that violent crime has gone up 116 per cent since 2015.
“They spent $75 million in a firearms buyback program and haven’t collected a single gun yet,” he said of the federal government program. “They just finished putting another 300-and-some firearms on that list, and they haven’t even picked up one gun from their process that they put in place yet for firearms buyback, and it’s estimated it costs $2 billion in the long run, but they haven’t done any yet.”
Maguire feels that the program impacts legitimate owners of firearms far more negatively, and has not succeeded in decreasing violent crime as intended.
“This is a confiscation of legal gun owners’ firearms, it’s taking firearms away from law-abiding farmers, hunters, and Indigenous peoples that are using them for food.”
Crops and construction
were positives
On the plus side, Maguire noted the past year yielded nice crops for grain producers, and construction has been booming in Brandon-Souris.
“We had a good harvest, there were some very good wheat yields,” he confirmed. “Cereal crops were mainly good in that area. Little bit of depression in the canola yields because of some of the heat and at the wrong time of flowering stage there this year, but the crops ended up being pretty good.”
Grain prices are a bit lower than favourable, but cattle producers are enjoying some reprieve when it comes to selling beef.
“Cattle prices are high right now for selling at least, so those are good things,” Maguire said.
He’s also noticing other industries bouncing back from the downturn caused by the pandemic.
“There is a lot of construction still taking place our in our region, and some businesses are taking the opportunity to expand a bit as well,” Maguire said. “A little bit more oil drilling again back in some of the areas than what we’ve seen over the past few years and through Covid. So there are certainly a few things that are in our favour for sure.”
