Prairie Dog Emergency: CEBA Loan & Business Crisis

Prairie Dog is facing an existential crisis and desperately needs your help.

Like many Canadian businesses, the worker co-operative that operates Prairie Dog and Planet S took out a Canadian Emergency Business Account (CEBA) loan during the Covid-19 pandemic. This loan was essential to Prairie Dog’s survival. Without CEBA, we would have shut down two years ago.

The deadline for partial loan forgiveness is JANUARY 18. We’ve worked hard to prepare for this deadline, but unfortunately, Prairie Dog — like many businesses and organizations — has still not recovered from Covid. Almost all of our revenue comes from local advertising but sales have NOT returned to pre-pandemic levels. The poor economy, high interest rates and cost-of-living crisis have harmed our customers and strangled our recovery.

Predatory competition (including censorship) by Facebook has also hurt us — badly.

Our options are limited. There are no grants to offset this scale of advertising collapse. Further loans from Prairie Dog’s worker-owners are out — our co-op’s core staff have already accumulated massive personal debts keeping Prairie Dog going for 30 years. We just can’t cover losses anymore.

We must raise an absolute minimum $40,000 before Prairie Dog’s CEBA loan comes due Jan. 18. As we’re also carrying unsustainable accumulated debt from 2023 sales shortfalls, we’re setting our initial emergency fundraising target at $60,000.

Prairie Dog has been an important part of this community for 30 years. In that time we've published independent and fact-based news and opinion presented artfully and with irreverence (and, famously, the occasional typo).

If Prairie Dog made your life better, please help us. If you loved Best of Regina, please help us. If Prairie Dog helped you feel less alone in an increasingly conservative province, please donate generously.

We don’t know what the future holds for Regina’s Only Alternative, but we do know that without immediate and generous financial support from this community the paper will die.

Please — help a wounded ’Dog out.