About Shilo Stag

Shilo Stag

Overview

The Shilo Stag is the community newspaper of Canadian Forces Base Shilo, the Canadian Army base in southwestern Manitoba, and one of the Canadian Armed Forces' long-running base newspapers. Billing itself on its website as "the heart of community and Army news," the Stag covers the soldiers, civilian staff and military families of the Shilo community — the base itself and the neighbouring settlements of Sprucewoods and Douglas, with readership extending into the nearby city of Brandon and the surrounding Westman region.

One correction to the way the paper is sometimes listed matters at the outset: the Stag is not a weekly. Its own masthead states plainly that "the Shilo Stag is produced every second Thursday," a fortnightly cycle of roughly 24 issues a year, with submissions due the Thursday before the week of publication. It is a free community paper, distributed at pickup points on and around the base rather than sold, and it operates as an official, authorised service publication rather than a commercial one: every issue carries the notice that the newspaper "is issued by authority of" the Base Commander of CFB Shilo, under the editorial policy set out in Canadian Forces Administrative Order 57-5, and that the views expressed are not necessarily those of the Department of National Defence or of the editorial staff.

History

The Stag presents its own lineage as beginning in 1947. Its masthead has carried the line "Serving Shilo, Sprucewoods & Douglas since 1947," and when the paper marked its 70th anniversary in January 2017, its retrospective traced the line back to an inaugural base newspaper published at Shilo on 18 July 1947. An issue of August 2019 carried the banner "Celebrating 72 Years Providing Army News," continuing the same count. That lineage belongs to the post-war growth of Shilo as a permanent army community: a base that had been a wartime training camp acquired married quarters, schools and a settled population of military families, and with them the need for a standing community paper of its own.

Through the decades since, the Stag has chronicled the rotations of the units that call Shilo home, including the artillery of 1 Royal Canadian Horse Artillery and the infantry of the 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. Its back issues form an unusually complete public archive: the University of Florida's digital collections hold scanned Stag issues as part of a Canadian Forces newspapers collection, preserving everything from base commanders' messages to advertisements for Brandon car dealerships. The paper's volume numbering across that long run is not a reliable guide to its age — its 70th-anniversary issue in 2017 was numbered Volume 56 — so this profile follows the paper's own anniversary account of a 1947 beginning rather than any arithmetic from its numbering.

Programming and Content

The Stag's content is the record of a garrison town. Unit news leads: exercises, deployments, promotions and parades. In late 2024, for example, its website carried the rededication of the base's Afghanistan memorial by the Base Commander, the recognition of 2 PPCLI members in the Manitoba Legislative Assembly for their work during the 2023 Jasper wildfires, and the annual Kingston Cup hockey game at the Gunner Arena — the artillery's historic inter-battery rivalry, moved that year from its usual December slot because of upcoming deployments. The Department of National Defence's own coverage of 2 PPCLI's November 2024 departure for Latvia on Operation REASSURANCE credited "Shilo Stag Media" photography, a reminder that the Stag's small newsroom also functions as the base's visual record.

Around the unit coverage sits the community material of any small-town paper: school and cadet news, chapel and family-resource notices, health promotion columns, recreation and sports results, readers' contributions and a classified and advertising section carried by businesses in Shilo, Sprucewoods and Brandon. Regular contributions from the base's health promotion staff, the military family resource centre and the RCA Museum — Shilo's artillery museum — appear alongside staff reporting, and the paper actively solicits submissions from units and community members, asking for articles as Word documents with the author's name, rank and unit, and photographs with full captions.

Audience and Reach

The Stag's audience is the Shilo defence community: serving members, their families in the base's residential area and in Sprucewoods and Douglas, civilian employees, and veterans and businesses in the surrounding area, including Brandon and, historically, pickup points as far as Minnedosa. Canadian Forces Morale and Welfare Services, the paper's publisher, gave the Stag's circulation as 3,000 copies in its own 2020 recruitment material — a figure quoted here as the publisher's own, from that date. Copies are free, and past mastheads list pickup locations including the CANEX mall on base, the Shilo Community Centre, the Brandon Armoury and grocery stores in Brandon, so that families living off base are as much a part of the readership as those in quarters.

A veterans' association media report dated 25 July 2025, listing the newspapers of Canadian bases and wings, still names "CFB Shilo — The Shilo Stag" among them, alongside papers such as The Voxair at Winnipeg and The Western Sentinel at Edmonton — evidence that, within the Canadian Forces newspaper system, the Stag remained a going concern into 2025.

Digital Presence

The Stag's website, shilostag.ca, organises its coverage under News, Sports, Community, Health and History sections, carrying staff stories and photography — much of it credited to "Shilo Stag Media" and to its staff photographer K-J Millar, whose bylines and photo credits run through the site's late-2024 coverage, including the Kingston Cup, the memorial rededication and base community events. The paper also maintains a Facebook presence under the name Shilo STAG, promoted in its print pages since the early 2010s. For researchers, the scanned back-issue archive held by the University of Florida's digital collections provides searchable access to decades of issues, making the Stag one of the best-preserved records of everyday life on a Canadian army base.

Ownership and Organisation

The Stag is published by Canadian Forces Morale and Welfare Services (CFMWS), the organisation that delivers morale and welfare programs to the Canadian Armed Forces community; News Media Canada's Manitoba stewardship listing likewise records CFMWS as the owner of the Shilo Stag, classed as a community newspaper at CFB Shilo. Editorial authority, however, runs through the base: the paper is issued by authority of the Base Commander, its editorial policy is CFAO 57-5, and its staff work to the base's public affairs framework rather than to a commercial publisher.

The newsroom is small. CFMWS recruitment postings in 2020 described a two-person Stag newsroom based in an office in the base's CANEX mall, with a managing editor overseeing reporting, photography and production; Jules Xavier held the managing editor's role in that period and his photo credits appear in issues into the early 2020s. By 2024, staff work was appearing under the credit "Shilo Stag Media," with K-J Millar named as the paper's journalist-photographer on Department of National Defence coverage of base events.

Contact and Availability

The Shilo Stag's mailing address is Box 5000, Station Main, CFB Shilo, Manitoba R0K 2A0. Its published email address is stag@mymts.net, its telephone number is 204-765-3000 extension 3013, and its fax number is 204-765-3814. The paper is produced every second Thursday; the deadline for submissions is the Thursday prior to the week of publication, and submissions can be emailed, dropped off at the Stag office in the CANEX mall, or sent by inter-base mail. Copies are free at pickup points on the base and in the surrounding communities, and current stories are published on the paper's website, shilostag.ca.