The turning of the calendar page to February means that March is close behind, and with March comes the promise of spring and new growth.

The International Peace Garden has just these thoughts in mind as they plan for the new season spring planting.

“We’re pretty focused on getting ready as if it were going to be a normal year,” shares CEO Tim Chapman. “Obviously, it won’t be quite back to normal but we’re hopeful that as the vaccines continue to progress that more visitors will be able to visit this year, including Canadians. Obviously, we don’t know yet as to when the border will open up, but we’re excited to continue to plan.”

“We’ve got a lot of projects going on and we’ve got a lot of staff who we want to bring back. So, at the Admin level we’re just focused on making sure we’re managing all the COVID relief grants that we’ve received on both sides [of the Canadian/US border] as well as we can, and that we don’t see a dip in productivity, which we didn’t see last year.”

“Despite all the challenges, we had a good year, as far as getting everything done, keeping everything maintained, and we’re really looking forward to a non-COVD year,” he adds.

Chapman says having the Canadian/US border closed for the majority of last year was a definite hit. He says it would be detrimental if the border were to be closed for a second year. Putting a dollar-figure on the loss is difficult to determine. It’s still too soon to tell what governmental relief and assistance will be available to them for 2021; what’s being extended and what new programs will be available for the Peace Garden to tap into.

“But we expect as an essential industry under ‘Ag’ that we’ll still be able to hire all of our Canadian employees that we want to hire, including last year, we got a lot of assistance for summer jobs from the Manitoba Green Team.”

“One the visitor side of things it would be very difficult to go another year without seeing Canadian visitors and being able to share with them what we’re progressing with, because there is still so much going on and so much progress being made that, unfortunately, people aren’t able to see right now.”

As vaccinations continue for the corona virus, so comes the hope that we’ll be able to go back to what life was like one year ago in January of 2020, for both countries.