By Tom Black
For people who are new to this site, let me say welcome and also tell you why the Ontario Landowners Association was formed. This group was formed primarily to help people, especially those targeted by their own governments, be it Federal, Provincial or Municipal. For the most part, we were dealing with infringement on the property rights of Canadian citizens, often the elderly, who have worked hard and paid taxes on their property to support this country and who should have been treated with honour and respect. The constitution of this country, originally the British North America Act, handed down from England, with its roots in the Magna Carta, considers property rights to be an inalienable right, granted to us by God and not negotiable by any man or government. Thus it reads in the preamble of the 1982 constitution often referred to as Trudeau’s constitution, when it says “This country is built on the supremacy of God and the Rule of Law”.
Having property rights means different things to different people. For the OLA, property rights means that I am responsible for looking after my piece of this earth, to the very best of my ability to preserve it for future generations in better shape than I inherited it in, all the while, using it to create wealth for my family and the country. If I cut a tree on my property and sell it, I make money to buy something that someone else has produced. The man who bought it has wood to create lumber to sell to a cabinet maker who in turn may build a kitchen table that a young couple may buy to start their new life. Every step along the journey of this tree that was cut requires trucks, fuel and people to complete and deliver the final product to the store where it is then sold to its final owners. Every step adds to the wealth and well being of the country. All this is accomplished on private property without interference from government agencies that only serve to create roadblocks and red tape plus more government agents and departments to police.
For people from the left side of the political spectrum, property rights means that those owners want to destroy the world as we know it. They think that every owner can’t wait to get out there with the chain saws and bull dozers to wipe out every green tree and every living species of mammal, reptile and bird. That done, they predict these Neanderthals will collect as many old tires, barrels of used oil, old cars, dead animal carcasses, spent batteries and other chemically contaminated garbage that they can get their hands on and buy them or pile them up to create mountains that then contaminate the neighbourhood.
If we look at the evidence, we find that the very governments that profess to be all knowing, are the very ones who are guilty of these crimes. Individual landowners have always been the ones that when educated to the danger of harming nature and the environment, have always tried to do their very best to make sure that their property was not at risk of doing this damage. The proof of this is the mountains of garbage as big as ski hills, that our political leaders have established as a solution to deal with the will of private property owners to keep their property free from this contamination.
The country is peppered with old country dump sites that were the first attempts by governments at the time to accommodate the will of the private property owner to be good stewards of their private property. If anyone has failed this green agenda as it is called, it is not the private property owner because they have been and still are, the very definition of green. It is society as a whole that is to blame. Honest, common sense science properly documented and taught to citizens with real and practical solutions rather than the evil finger pointing that these green zealots engage in, would go a lot farther towards preserving this garden of Eden that we have been handed to look after. I know there are people in all societies that will fail to do what is right in the eyes of man and God, but the numbers are few compared to the good and rather than create laws and enforcement that makes all good people, criminals, let us educate with real facts, not artificial theories and place an expectation on citizens to do the right thing to make this a beautiful and bountiful place for nature and man.