Questioning plans for Crown lands
By Letter to the Editor on December 29, 2018.
Canadians ought to be very concerned regarding “land grabbing” within this country of ours by such people as Blackstone Group, the world’s largest investment firm and the largest land-lord in the U.S., which buys up land everywhere. Blackstone chairman, CEO and co-founder Stephen Schwarzman “the most powerful banker on the planet,” oversees $344 billion. Canada’s Brian Mulroney, former Progressive Conservative prime minister, has been on the board of the Blackstone Group since 2007, when he was appointed along with such luminaries as retired Deloitte & Touche CEO William Parrett and Lord Nathanial Rothschild, heir to the banking dynasty. In an important article for the “Watershed Sentinel” in 2013, Susan MacVitte revealed that Ontario, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland & Labrador have no restrictions on foreign ownership of land. An unnamed investor with a U.S. management company recently acquired almost four per cent of Nova Scotia’s land mass. Similarly, the National Farmers Union (NFU) in October 2017 expressed alarm at “the rate at which Prince Edward Island land is being transferred to large corporate interests. Investors, local and international, with big money and seeing low return on their investment in the financial sector, are turning to securing their future wealth by investing in land, which they presume will increase in value. Government appears not to be properly enforcing the PEI Lands Protection Act so that limits on acreage ownership are closely monitored to avoid exploitation of loop-holes in the Act.” As the NFU puts it, it’s basically only governments that have “the capacity to trace the money, to uncover the source of the investments, and to publicize these.” Saskatchewan has the toughest restrictions where land is seen as a natural resource that should not be controlled by outsiders. However, interest in Canadian land has spurred would-be buyers to establish Canadian residency. Because of climate change, groups like BlackRock Inc., who has shares in Monsanto, Syngenta, Tyson Foods, Deere and Co., and ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) think that farmland or land of any kind is Canada’s “hottest asset.” Usually, the goal of such big farmland investments is to set up large-scale industrial farming operations, which prevent small-scale farmers from accessing good land. But the real reason for groups like Blackstone to announce that it was coming to Canada as reported in the Globe and Mail in April of 2014 is: “Around the world a lot of ‘land grabbing’ is actually all about gaining control of water, which is far more scare than land; without water, you cannot farm, animals cannot survive, people cannot live, and a lot of land grabbers are from water-scarce countries.” Do we actually know why UCP Leader Jason Kenney is planning the selling of Crown Land in Alberta? Supposedly at this point, it comes down to paying off Alberta debt but what are the loopholes in such a venture? Is our precious resource really protected for the use of Canadians? All we have to do is look to Nestlé. Nestlé Canada currently has permits that allow it to extract up to 4.7 million litres of water a day from sources in Ontario and then sell it back to Canadians at $1.50. With Brian Mulroney on the Blackstone board, the company’s investment opportunities in Canada have widened significantly. Will we really know what will happen to Alberta land under Jason Kenney? Anne S. Morris Medicine Hat 9-8
