"We're selling our cattle and shuttering our farm."

For the last 50 years or so, Alberta has been known for its high-quality beef. It’s one of our country’s signature exports. And, alarmingly, it’s in trouble. Several summers of drought have made life very challenging for cattle ranchers. Farmers spend hours every summer day hauling water to their pastures. They can’t grow their own hay, and the cost of buying it has become prohibitively expensive.

In Maclean’s, a third-generation Alberta cattle farmer named Bob Tolman describes the heartbreaking decision he and his wife recently made to retire early and sell off their cows, more than 100 years after his grandfather settled on the ranch. There just wasn’t enough rain over the last few years to sustain their farm. “Water is everything to a farmer,” Tolman says in his moving essay, “and without rain and snowpack melting into river basins, crops suffer and cattle have nothing to graze.”

Tolman never uses the word “climate change.” Nor is he in any way political. He’s just describing what he has experienced: a way of life that sustained his family for generations coming to an end. “We had always planned to retire on our own terms,” he writes, “but the possibility has been taken from us.”

—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief

In this essay for Maclean’s Year Ahead issue, UBC professor Stepan Wood predicts that governments will respond to homelessness in ways once considered unthinkable: legalized encampments, transitional tiny homes and universal basic income. “Let’s be clear: everyone wants tent cities to be a thing of the past, their residents included. But encampments afford residents the chance to live in stable communities close to support services, like respite and health centres,” Wood writes.

Audra Williams and Haritha Gnanaratna met in Toronto in May of 2018 and moved in together a few months later. But soon, they started to feel like Toronto didn’t love them back. Their monthly rent held steady at $1,800, but the cost of living forced many of their good friends—and their beloved brunch restaurants—to high-tail it elsewhere. So they moved to Port Medway, Nova Scotia, and opened a dreamy little general store.

FROM THE

JANUARY/FEBRUARY

ISSUE

Pronoun arguments and French-English language tensions will ensnare school boards. International students will get extra government protection, but find housing harder to come by—and fewer will come from India. For the rest of us: AI lessons. Read our top 10 stories for the year ahead in education here.

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