Maple Leaf Mailbag rock'N roadshow

Brooks. I’d heard that Brooks was the fastest growing multicultural town in Alberta. 12,000 people give or take, so a great place for us to go.. Many are new immigrants from West Africa and the Middle East. More on that in a sec. The first thing you notice about Brooks is the smell. It’s the smell of death. It’s in the air, your clothes, your hair and your food. Brooks is essentially an abattoir. Lakeside Meat Packers is the biggest employer in town. We heard that many of its workers come through Canada’s foreign workers program, although no-one in town wants to talk about it. We met some great people at the Global Frienship centre … who said we should go to Lakeside to learn more about this program. For some reason we weren’t welcome, so we headed back into town to talk to some of the big Sudanese community here. A great group of guys told us all about hip hop, life in a new country, making the adjustment from a country torn apart by civil war to one with civil liberties, and how much they missed their families. Big up to the boys there, they promised to make the MLMB “the standard” when they can afford to buy computers.

Brooks. What are we looking for here? We know there is a story here but what is it? We look around. The landscape is plagued with strip malls and fast food restaurants. The ubiquitous pick-up truck owns the road. I have a feeling people don't live here for the scenic surroundings. This is a workingman's town. The servitude is being done at one location: Lakeside Packers meat processing plant. Workers come from all over the world to labour in the slaughter house. We met some former employees of Lakeside at a local hip-hop shop. We not only made some new friends, I also picked up some new gear. We thought it would be nice to head over and speak to management at Lakeside about the diverse cultures and the variety of languages all convening here, on the Alberta plain. We were unable to get the interview however; the management must have been too busy celebrating the cultural differences of their workers. They did send out someone to greet us though. We were given a warm Alberta welcome by a Lakeside security guard. It's time to get on the road. It's the smell.

I'm pretty sure we're not doing anything wrong. Rolling our caravan through the grounds of Lakeside Packers at a slow speed, camera rolling out the window, we attract some attention. Next thing we know there's a pick-up truck riding our bumper. Out onto the highway, he pulls up alongside. He's taking pictures of us with his phone! Then he pulls up in front of the van and slows to a crawl. Well we might as well pull over. The interview is brief, but we stand our ground. We weren't doing anything wrong. Or were we? Brooks is a welcoming place, but there's been some labour unrest here recently, and the locals are wary. A lot of media have blown through town leaving a bad vibe among the population. A lot of newcomers from all over the world. The media came again, wanting the story of racism on the Prairie, and so they went out and found it in the careless statements of late-night drifters. If you're curious about what's going on here and you happen to be filming everything you're doing, don't say you weren't warned.