Canadian farmers and rural landowners are fighting to save a huge block of farmland in Ontario from being sold and industrialized.
According to Kevin Thomason, Co-Chairman of Save Our Farms, “We have unfolding here every farmer’s worst nightmare— someone showing up trying to take the farm from them. In March, this land aggregation firm, Canacre, showed up claiming they were working for the region of Waterloo. They told the farmers they had ten days to accept, and if they didn’t they would face expropriation.”
When landowners tried to get answers, they said they were met with silence.
“Asked our local municipality, ‘What’s up?’ They said, ‘Oh sorry, we can’t talk to you. We’re under an NDA.’ When we went and talked to our regional representatives, ‘Sorry, we can’t talk to you. We’re under a non-disclosure agreement.’ And then, when we went to the Province, we were told it wasn’t a provincial undertaking, it was the region. That was the story for five months. It’s come out recently that the Province is actually behind it all, and now we see this mega-industrial proposal coming forward,” he explained.
The farmers are now six months in and say that they have yet to have a public meeting or even get answers to their most basic questions.
They warn if this could happen to them it could happen to anyone across the province.
