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:
- 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.
- 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.
- Create wilderness corridors along streams, rivers and mountain ranges that interconnect the core reserves.
- 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.
- 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/.