St. Norbert: The veggies black market after the storm.

The city of Manitoba (Canada) is a well known town in the west coast of the country, is house of one the largest food markets in the entire area, a Market that has kept its doors open even after the restrictions that the Canadian Goverment put to the workers. It's no safe to keep going on during the current global pandemic, their main concern was not the pandemic, but their money income that was seriously hit for the storms that are hitting the coast side of Canada.

Despite the stated, Manitoba's city has had lots of problems in the last two weeks because of a large storm constantly hitting the outer sites of the town. On August 4th (just a few days after the storm started), the main city road was shut down because of a landslide, this trapped the farmers from going to the city and the market could not recieve any kind of supplies for the next three days. Farmers were also forced to stop the food production in some of their farms because of the heavy rain in the area, it kept raining for the whole week-end all day long. The main economy income of the city is starting to decline because of the current weather.

Last Friday (August 14th) the goverment started sending workers to help with the repair of the farms and streets of the city, these workers were requested by the Mayor of the city after his talk with St. Norbert's treasurer, Phil Veldhuis. The ammount of people in the city that is dependent from the farms is almost three quarters of the total popullation. The canadian goverment has been sending lots of help to cities nearby that were also damaged by the current storms in the area, the risk of more farms closing down will bring larger problems in the future nearby.

While being considered as a "Black Market", the St. Norbert market is well know in the country for being the largest supplier to the west coast, a city dedicated to the farmer sector. While the canadian goverment did indeed put restrictions all over the country to stop the outside workers from doing their labors to stop the spreading of the COVID-19, they also realized how important was for a large group of people that the city of Manitoba kept their farms going on during the pandemic, whithout the St. Norbert's market, all the west coast would have serious problems with the food supply.

Today, August 16th, the Mayor of the city had a public speech where he stated: “Our economic side of that was very manageable… There is some hardship there, of course, there’s accounts that you’ll never collect,”. But bigger was his concern for restaurants and hotels that had to close. “Those people had to close and our heart goes out to them because there’s nothing those people did wrong — that affected us negatively, not just with the loss of business but it’s also the loss of relationships.”

Plans are already in the making for the next few weeks, Canadian Goverment announced that they will start sending food carriers and trucks to help with the transport of the market resupply, more workers will arrive to the city in the next few days to keep up with the farm repairing, the help that is going to be sent is expected to arrive next wednesday (August 19th). As for the farmers, their work will be stopped and it's expected to return to schedule in the next few weeks. Sadly the other workers in town may have to wait for a bit longer, since their money income is dependent of their own bussines. They are hopping for the current pandemic to finish soon, and also for the storm to go away.