All Things Considered: July 2006

“ When you get to the point of knowing airport ticket takers by name and airline schedules by route you know you know too much.”

As many of you no doubt know by now Tony Greaves Parting Shot is falling silent.I say many of you no doubt know this because you likely turned first to his column when you opened this magazine. If you didn’t you should have.

The Parting Shot has been the anchor of this magazine for many years. It includes wit, wisdom and well-informed opinions. The style is relaxed, laden with anecdotes, insights and observations drawn from a rich personal history and almost 50 years of deep involvement in the Canadian poultry industry.

Anyone who has been involved in the poultry industry has likely met Tony or at least saw him at one of the innumerable meetings he attended on behalf of this magazine.

His schedule was to say the least daunting. Those of us in journalism know how draining and difficult it can be.

When you get to the point of knowing airport ticket takers by name and airline schedules by route you know you know too much. When you know the best and quickest routes from airports to hotels and meeting halls better than the taxi drivers, you know you know too much.

And when you know the best and most economical restaurants in cities from Atlanta, to Minneapolis, to Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, Red Deer, Moncton, Halifax, Saskatoon, Winnipeg and elsewhere, you know you know too much.

What few people seem to recognize, at least consciously, is that when they saw Tony at a meeting taking notes and pictures, his work had just begun. The stories still had to be written, the pictures processed and all of it made to fit on magazine pages ill-suited to the task. At times it makes putting the round peg in the square hole seem like child’s play.

But as editor of Canada Poultryman Tony and wife Claudia did it and had fun in the process. It must have been a labour of love driven by a determination to provide the best possible magazine for you the readers. If it had been just a job, it wouldn’t have been done nearly so well, if it was done at all.

Tony has also left those of us who continue with the magazine a legacy. Not just a legacy of quality journalism (which we can only hope to emulate) and not just a legacy of dedication to the welfare of the industry, but also a well-reasoned, thoughtful and staunch support of supply management.

When supply management has come under attack, during the GATT round of the 1980s and more recently during the WTO talks Tony didn’t defend he counter attacked.

Through his columns, articles and editorials he provided ammunition, in the form of detailed information and pointed analysis that demonstrated to anyone except the ill-informed, shallow thinking, ideologically driven or U.S. based profit hungry corporate interests that supply management is a good deal for Canada. His logic was and is irrefutable.

But Tony didn’t restrict himself to the just that hot topic. He wrote about anything and everything poultry. In this he did what good journalists do, he worked with the experts and took their messages on poultry husbandry, equipment design, water and feed quality and every topic imaginable and made the information available to producers. He also had a knack for taking the sometimes difficult language of researchers and turning it into common English.

That is no mean feat.

Most importantly Tony played a role – he would likely (wrongly) say a small role – in the success of Canada’s poultry industry. Simply put, Canada’s poultry industry is better today because Tony Greaves was a part of it.