While a new generation of greenies proselytize the religion of "sustainability" to farmers who have successfully cropped land for over a hundred years, those "knuckle-dragging, mouth breathing*" landowners are - as usual - expected to take the hit for Ontario's Endangered Species Act;
The reason for the May 8 demonstration is that control of my land's management is being ripped from my hands by our government. My ancestors left conditions like this (Scotland 200 years ago) to carve a new future, here in Canada. I still awe at the stones that they moved with brute strength fuelled by passion for freedom and ownership, to clear fields, build homes and to produce food and wealth through hard labour and dedicated industry. That spirit resides in my heart and it is what our soldiers have fought and died for in past and present wars.The issue here is not about environmentalism. It is about freedom and justice. Anne-Marie Flanagan (MNR) said "If a certain area is deemed as a habitat, a farmer could, for example, create a habitat on a different section of the property." So to put that in urbanese, if there is a public interest in your living room, but you really want to retain usage of your living room, we're flexible. We'll take your kitchen or bedroom instead.
As for Minister David Ramsay and "not . . . make it difficult for them to use their land," I have a lifetime of experience with restrictions imposed by the MNR, and they have made it impossible to grow crops on nearly 200 acres of our land or use it for any other productive purpose. The consequential property devaluation of a 6,000-foot St. Lawrence River water-frontage has destroyed my family's hard-earned financial equity. His much-touted $18 million stewardship fund (the term compensation is always assiduously avoided) wouldn't cover the opportunity cost between lots 10 through 20 on the first concession of Lancaster Township. Furthermore, I'm sure I heard that the associated bureaucracy will cost at least 10 times that amount (that information is more difficult to find).
If you think that it's a good idea to give land up to MNR management, consider the 30-meter buffer strip of our Point Mouillee waterfront, which was surveyed and confiscated in 1980. It is long gone because we were not allowed to protect it with stone - and still can't. If farmland erodes, it is evidence of a farmer's irresponsibility, but if the MNR/RRCA decided that land should erode, it's OK; after all, it's not really their waterfront, is it? When you get something at no cost, what does it matter?
If the public wants our land, conservation agencies can buy it or rent it, based on its true and intrinsic value, which is a function of unobstructed land-use opportunity. We have always been, and are still quite willing to cooperate to achieve sensible environmental goals. Landowners simply refuse to carry the billion-dollar cost of society's environmental whims while the extent of an urban citizen's consideration of the environment involves buying a hybrid car rather than an SUV!
Robbing us of the land's utility and value is undeniably wrong. Our land is our RSP, pension, or whatever other people do to secure and grow their savings, and its fiduciary value is equity that we've been conscientiously investing in for generations. We thought for a while that if we co-operated and gave conservation agencies what they wanted, they would champion our efforts and leave us alone. It doesn't work that way. Allowing land to be taken without significant resistance only inspires them to take it all. Pay attention everyone. You may not feel that this affects you, but carefully consider Hosea's warning of "the whirlwind."
The full text at the link.
This is no isolated conflict of interests - ask rural municpalities and farmers in Saskatchewan about the Department of Fisheries and Oceans never ending efforts to assume stewardship of "fish habitat" in dry creek beds, gravel pits and flooded stubble.
Are any of those endangered species on Native Land. Where are the roadblocks, protests, demands for more, from regular farmers. Why can Cdn farmers lose their land, but natives can't.
Canadians should demand property rights like the Chinese are getting.
Randy Hilliar has been the only voice of the stressed out landowners in hinterland Onterrible..the marketing board maderins all know their bread is buttered with tax money and they no longer represent the better interests of producers...only the buyers and the gummint....the Mcsquishy reds have regulated and taxed the small landowner/operator/producer off the family farm.
Of course if you're a drooling international corporate farming cartel waiting in the wings for Dolton's damage to small owners play into your corporate land optimization scheme, Dolton's the man to force the sales of the small family farm to the big players.
There was a time in the distant past when the Liberals were the friend of the farmer...but obviously they are now his tormentor.
And this will repurcuss in November....better touch up your pals in the corpoate farming combines for a job Dolton because your current one ends in Novemeber.
Take a hint from the natives and blockade a rail line, etc. Hey, it works for them.
Constitution. Property rights.
What was it that elite, white, racist, slave owner, Thomas Jefferson said?
"When the government fears the electorate, there is liberty, but when the citizens fear the government, there is tyranny."
(something to that effect)
This "kunckle dragging" farmer sounds quite a bit more enlightened than the "latte sucking" commie sycophants.
AS Rush says, Mary t. may have swerved into the truth.
The difference is simplistic and fundamental, the Indian is sovereign in his land, and you are not sovereign on yours. The Queen of England and her proxies are. Legally and figuratively.
By contrast US citizens have entrenched constitutionaly irrevocable rights to property because the citizen is sovereign.
Maybe a lawyer out there could answer this. When buying property in Canada do you get a deed with that or are you granted title with rights?
This is one of the areas of Law where Hugh Hewitt does pro bono work. If it is a ministry guideline or EPA in the states it is called a regulatory taking and in the US they now must pay compensation.
Kinsella is lying about Hillier again and taking his quotes out of context. Bourrie has caught him again at ottawawatch.blogspot.com.
I have Met Randy Hillier on a couple of occasions and my impression was that of a man with passionate convitions to civil justice and civil liberty....most importantly the right of a land owner to do what he needs to do with his land to make a living from it.
Men like Hillier swim against the stream of creaping collectivist statism which proposes to have everything owned by either the government or their select cronies.
Randy is a guy who "just doesn't get" this accepted kleptocrat wisdom which tells our modern lefty legislators and bureaucrats that they have some divine right to be a defacto co-ower of a Canadian citizen's private property.
He was born 250 years too late.... I've no doubt he'd be chasing the King's minions off his land at musket point. ;-)
Shameful treatment of landholders by MNR? This should not be a surprise, since Canada's much-vaunted Charter of Rights and Freedoms purposely omitted property rights in order to provide governments with exactly this kind of ham-fisted expropriatory power. It was no coincidence that the framers of the US constitution had property rights at the front of their agenda, and after nearly 250 years of chipping away at those rights by the proponents of big government, they still haven't managed to eliminate them. Meanwhile, here in Canada, we never had property rights enshrined in the constitution. That's a pity, since the cornerstone of democratic freedom is property rights, and government's main task should be the enforcement and protection of those rights, not the capricious trampling of them.
For an eye-opening history of the links between property rights, prosperity and economic freedom, your readers may want to check out Tom Bethell's excellent book, "The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages."
This is just the voice of a faux-rural conservative yelling back at the radio - "Randy Hillier speaks for me."
Harry the green global agenda is about expropriation of private property to government..that is the entire focus of agenda 21, the earth charter, and all the other ecological political orthodoxies that spring from the Marxian concept of central panning of the ecology.
There and be no individual proeprty owners in the new green order...all land is allocated and under restricted access and use.
Get used to it...under all the lofty idealism and moralist platitudes of green politics lies a feudalist social order that takes all land as its own to be managed by a central cartel.
Under green feudalism farmers will be serfs who work the land but never own it.
New slogan:
"Feed the masses with melamine"
The professional enviromentalists are just communists who aren't honest enought to admit it.
So how do we win against these guys? Property rights are kind of like no limit Texas Holdem. Blinds and antes eat away at you, and if you always fold they will whittle you out of the game. At some point, hopefully before that happens you have to choose two cards and go all in, while your hand still has some value. Seems like we need to get everyone together who believes in property rights and start campaigning. I'm not the brightest bulb on the ole porch, but I'm open to suggestions. Just a thought from a Saskatchewan knuckledragger.
One of the reasons why so many farmers are itching to plow up their woodlots and marshes is that idiots in the government (that would be the federal conservatives) are subsidizing gasohol and artificially driving up the price of grains. What you're seeing is an natural progression which occurs once you let governmentopians start running your lives and your economy for you. In the end, all of the cascading government interventions amount to a de facto nationalization of nearly every industry that comes under the boots of the taxers, regulators and subsidizers. Which applies to nearly every industry, so that practically every economic activity in the country is in the process of being nationalized. Having a piece of paper in your hands that claims you are the owner of a business means nothing when the profits, the permits, the capital and the labor working in your business are entirely under the thumb of the government.
So it's one thing to cluck-cluck about the nasty old Hugo Chavez who is at least honest about stealing his citizens' property "for their own good". But are any of you clued in enough to figure out that the same thing is happening in your own country, with the sneaking connivance of your own party, right under your noses?
I don't know Ugh I'd say its paying five thousand dollars an acre for land, or around 200 dollars an acre for rent,plus the other expenses.Never mind what they pay for quota. Every square inch counts. The farms are getting bigger here as well and so is the equipment. The days of my grandfather with his little Massey his three furrow plow, and ten foot cultivator are long gone. The thirty foot wide stuff of today needs room, and if anything I'm betting many farmers with the big stuff and odd little pieces of land in their fields are letting them go wild rather than try and work them.
I'd have to say in my work Fisheries and Oceans here in this part of Ontario are a way bigger pain than the MNR. I actually talked to one Fisheries bureaucrat that thought farmers should have to plant grass for 15 meters each side of a ditch if it passes through their property. Right now in some engineers reports on municipal drains they want 3 meters seeded down after the work is completed on the drain(due to Fisheries and Oceans), and their reports are legally binding if push comes to shove.So if they get the right bureaucrat you won't be running that cultivator up to the edge of the ditch, not a good idea but hey its "their" land. Thats just one hoop they expect everyone to jump through and many jump cursing under their breath(so nothing will change).
Hiller needs to do some more "rampaging" with a way bigger crowd of rural people.
I just got back from the Smith Falls, Merickville, Winchester, Ontario area.
I saw lots and lots of signs in the fields.
-------------------------
THIS LAND IS OUR LAND
STOP
GOVERNMENT BACK OFF
--------------------------
Pathetic. The fanatical enviros and political lawyers protest even when their mouths are full. Full of food the farmers produced.
I always wondered how countries such as the USSR, Poland, ect fell into such a bad state. Now I know.
Back in 1988 or 89, I remember seeing a so-called David Suzuki documentary on our beloved CBC.
Suzuki was in SW Sask during the driest spell of the last 50 years. Davy was going on about how commercial farming was destroying the land. The CBC camera man zoomed in as he siffted dry soil through his fingers. The land will blow away he exclaimed.
In a year or so the rains returned and the farmers again had bountiful crops. I wonder how many times DZ was not able to fill his face at meal time ??
A few years later we were driving through SK. The whole time while traversing the province the wind was howling out of the NW. It was May, planting time. The wind was blowing at 100 kph or more.
Everything was moving. Cardboard. Tumbleweed. Paper. Plywood. Everything but soil. Not one square foot of soil was moving. Not even dusting. The farmers had their fields protected with a practice called 'Zero Till". Stubble from the previous crop was standing as shelter. Some were seeding with very narrow openers, leaving the land protected even after planting.
The 'Food-Producers' were saving Suzuki's ass once again.
I wondered if The Nature Of Things would have a series on this success story. The Sask and other farmers were producing food for a hungry world and protecting their soil at the same time.
But would Suzuki report on success ?? Not a chance. He only hypes calamity in order to call for govmit help. Interference. Make-work for the fanatics, latte crowd. A-fish-in-every-ditch-crowd. A-nest-by-every-fence-post-crowd. The hungry world be damned.
They had a simular incedent in april of 2001 when they cut off water to the klamath basin farmers over a pair of worthless trash fish i mean the problem with the ESA is getting out of hand and the klamath basin farmers held their own little demonstartion a sort of bucket bergade which included a very very large bucket ITS TIME TO DUMP THESE STUPID ESA STUFF
I live in a small town in northern BC, a community fortunate enough to be able to afford to install good drainage ditches, which save many homeowners’ basements and belongings in “monsoon season”.
Then, the fish discovered that the drainage ditches, dry a lot of the year, make good spawning beds.
Now, DFO will not allow us to dredge the ditches (bushes, sediment) to maintain their effectiveness (as drainage ditches) – they are now fish-bearing streams.
What on earth would Darwin say?
john adams " the moment the ideais admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and there is no force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. property must be sacred or liberty cannot exist."