The Three ‘E’s of taking your Property

An article by this name was recently published on the American Policy Centre’s website https://americanpolicy.org/2020/07/13/the-three-es-of-taking-your-property/. It was written by Kathleen Marquardt, Vice President of APC. She writes from the perspective of what is happening in the States but the discussion can easily be transferred to Canada. For example, she talks about the Wildlands Project for establishing thousands of core reserves and interconnecting corridors from Alaska and the Northwest Territories to Chile and Argentina.

Marquardt identifies five steps that are normally used in the strategy:

1. Iden­ti­fy exist­ing pro­tect­ed areas such as fed­er­al and state wilder­ness areas, parks, nation­al mon­u­ments, refuges and oth­er des­ig­nat­ed sites. They should be from 100,000 to 25 mil­lion acres in size. These are already wilder­ness or close to it. Such tracts would serve as “core reserves” com­plete­ly off-lim­its to human activ­i­ty.
2. Iden­ti­fy oth­er mul­ti­ple-use gov­ern­ment land that can be polit­i­cal­ly forced into wilder­ness sta­tus. Road­less areas are high­est pri­or­i­ty, but exist­ing roads can be closed if road­less areas are not avail­able.
3. Cre­ate wilder­ness cor­ri­dors along streams, rivers and moun­tain ranges that inter­con­nect the core reserves.
4. Pur­chase, con­demn or reg­u­late pri­vate prop­er­ty to fill in the gaps where pub­lic land did not exist. Usufruct reg­u­la­tion is pre­ferred because the gov­ern­ment would not have to pay for the land.
5. Cre­ate buffer areas around land not in core reserves or inter­con­nect­ing wilder­ness to man­age them sus­tain­ably so they pro­tect the core wilder­ness areas.

Note the term used in item 4. “usufruct regulation”.  Usufruct is defined as “the right to enjoy the use and advantages of another’s property short of the destruction or waste of its substance.”

Isn’t this what we are seeing when our official plans place punitive restrictions on development of private property such as we see in Renfrew County with the mapping of deer wintering yards? It is also obvious in the various maps in rural Ottawa which zone large sections of private property as flood plains. Attempt to do anything on an area designated as a flood plain and you risk getting a letter from your conservation authority threatening you with a $10,000 fine and time in jail. This includes things like removing garbage from the area.

You can find the whole article here https://americanpolicy.org/2020/07/13/the-three-es-of-taking-your-property/.