| Layer | Authority | Primary Tool of Interference |
| 1 | Municipalities | Tree-cutting bylaws, permit requirements, bylaw enforcement |
| 2 | Conservation Authorities | Regulated area permits over drainage, field access, and land management |
| 3 | Niagara Escarpment Commission | Development permits under the Niagara Escarpment Plan |
| 4 | Federal Crown (Alto / High-Speed Rail) | Expropriation without negotiation under Bill C-15 |
| 5 | Province / IESO (BESS) | Battery energy storage siting on prime agricultural land |
Section 1 — The Catalyst: The Leytham Case
It started with trees. Sixty-four of them, on a working farm in Hamilton, Ontario, a place called Cherry Bank Farm, where Wendell and Faye Leytham have been running a market-gardening, livestock, poultry, maple syrup operation on land that has been agriculture since the early 1800’s.
In the summer of 2024, the Leythams began harvesting trees on part of their farm for the purpose of expanding their hayfield operation. It was a practical, operational normal farm practice decision. It is the kind of decision farmers have been making in Ontario for 300 years.
The City of Hamilton had other ideas. Its tree-cutting bylaw, a bylaw designed for urban canopy protection in residential neighbourhoods, was turned against a working farm. The initial fine issued to the Leythams was $160,000. That number was later reduced to $50,000 when Hamilton offered a plea deal. The Leythams refused to accept it. They are fighting this and rightfully so.
Trial Day 1 began on May 11, 2026. On Day 1, something important happened. A bylaw officer admitted under oath that there were complainants in this case, people whose identities had never been disclosed to the Leythams. Not in the by-law officers will-say notes. This is not a procedural technicality. This goes to the heart of how our justice system is supposed to work.
A Charter application was filed challenging the Crown’s failure to disclose — arguing violations of Section 7 (the right to life, liberty, and security of the person), Section 11(d) (the right to a fair trial), and the Stinchcombe principle, which requires full and timely Crown disclosure as a constitutional obligation in any criminal or quasi-criminal proceeding.
Trial Day 3 is November 10, 2026. What happens that day will matter, not just to the Leythams, but to every farmer in Ontario who has ever made a land-use decision on their own property. The offence occurred on July 29, 2024, charges were laid on December 05, 2024, and the third day of trial is November 10, 2026 … and the trial will not finish on that date.
| “If this can happen to the Leythams — for doing exactly what farmers have always done — what else is happening to farmers across this province?” |
The answer, as I have come to understand it, is much more. The Leytham case is not an anomaly. It is a window. And when you look through it, what you see is a province-wide pattern of government interference with Normal Farm Practice, layered, incremental, and accelerating. That is what this series is about.
Section 2 — Layer One: Municipalities — Interference by Permit
Tree cutting is the entry point. But make no mistake, it is only the beginning of what municipalities are doing to farm operations across Ontario.
Across this province, municipalities are passing bylaws that treat farms like development sites. Permit requirements. Conditions. Delays. Outright denials. The pressure is relentless, and it is being applied to operations that have been farming the same land for generations. The people writing these bylaws are, in many cases, urban or suburban planners with no understanding of what a working farm requires to function. And yet, their permits and their timelines and their conditions are being imposed on farmers who cannot wait for bureaucratic approval to plant a crop, fix a drainage problem, or expand a field.
The law is already clear on this. The Farming and Food Production Protection Act (FFPPA) exists precisely to protect Normal Farm Practice from this kind of local interference. Section 14 of the FFPPA voids any municipal bylaw that conflicts with Normal Farm Practice, to the extent of that conflict. That is not a suggestion. It is the law.
| ⚠ The Law the Municipalities Are Ignoring Section 14 of the FFPPA provides that any municipal bylaw that restricts a Normal Farm Practice is of no force or effect to the extent of the conflict. If your municipality is requiring permits for field clearing, drainage work, or tree removal on your farm, that bylaw may be unlawful under provincial legislation. This will be examined in full in a future article in this series. |
But knowing the law and enforcing it are two different things. Municipalities continue to expand their reach, tree permits today, drainage approvals tomorrow, access restrictions next year. And many farmers, faced with the prospect of a $160,000 fine, simply comply. They get the permit. They pay the fee. They accept the delay. Each individual concession looks small. Together, they represent a slow surrender of the right to farm.
Incremental interference is still interference. And it adds up.
Section 3 — Layer Two: Conservation Authorities — The Invisible Permit Layer
Most farmers know their municipality. They deal with the township or the city when they must. But Conservation Authorities (CAs) operate differently. They are watershed-based. Their jurisdiction is defined by geography, floodplains, wetlands, regulated areas, and that geography does not follow the boundaries of your title deed.
Across Ontario, Conservation Authorities hold permit authority over activities that happen near, or are deemed to affect, wetlands, floodplains, and other regulated areas. For farmers, this can mean that drainage works, field access improvements, tile drain maintenance, and routine land management decisions require CA approval before you can proceed. Not because you are doing anything unreasonable. Not because you are threatening the environment. But because your property sits within a regulated area as defined by provincial regulation under the Conservation Authorities Act.
The core problem is this: the CA’s mandate is environmental, not agricultural. The CA’s job is to protect the watershed. That is a legitimate public interest, but it is not the same interest as food production, and it is not always compatible with it. When a farmer needs to improve drainage to get equipment into a field in the spring, they cannot wait six months for a permit. When tile drainage or municipal drains fail, a field floods, and the damage is immediate and the repair needs to happen now.
Farmers caught between the FFPPA‘s right-to-farm protections and a CA’s permit requirements face a legal maze that costs time, money, and, too often, the crop itself. This is another layer of government authority operating largely outside public view, and largely outside the understanding of the farmers it affects.
A future article in this series will examine Conservation Authority jurisdiction in detail: where the legal lines are, what the FFPPA says about CA interference with Normal Farm Practice, and what farmers can do when the two conflict.
Section 4 — Layer Three: The Niagara Escarpment Commission — Regulation Without End
If you farm near the Niagara Escarpment, you already know the name. The Niagara Escarpment Commission (NEC) administers the Niagara Escarpment Plan (NEP) under the Niagara Escarpment Planning and Development Act (NEPDA). The Escarpment stretches approximately 725 kilometres across the province, and within its plan area, a development permit is required for a wide range of activities, including activities that, on any other farm in Ontario, would simply be called farming.
The NEC’s stated mandate is to maintain the Escarpment as a “continuous natural environment.” That sounds reasonable at a government press conference. It sounds very different when it is being applied to land that your family has farmed for decades, land that was granted under Crown Patent, land that you own, land that you pay taxes on, land that is supposed to be yours to use productively.
Farmers within or adjacent to the Escarpment plan area operate under a permanent layer of regulatory uncertainty. Succession planning becomes complicated when the next generation cannot be sure what they will be permitted to do with the land they inherit. Land use decisions, including decisions about what to plant, where to build infrastructure, and how to manage natural features, can require NEC approval in addition to whatever the municipality requires.
| Coming in This Series A dedicated article will examine the NEC’s jurisdiction, its impact on farm operations within the Escarpment area, the interaction between the NEP, the NEPDA, and the FFPPA, and what legal tools landowners have available. If you farm in the Niagara Escarpment area and have questions now, contact the OLA. |
The NEC is not going away. But its reach, and the limits of that reach, need to be understood — clearly, practically, and in the context of the rights of landowners who were farming this land long before the Commission existed.
Section 5 — Layer Four: Alto High-Speed Rail — Expropriation No Negotiation
Now we move from the provincial to the federal, and from permit delays to something far more serious: the permanent taking of farmland.
The federal Crown corporation Alto is building a high-speed rail line from Toronto to Quebec City, approximately 1,000 kilometres of new rail infrastructure cutting across the most productive agricultural corridor in Ontario. The project is projected to cost between $60 billion and $90 billion. Its broader economic footprint, land acquisition, infrastructure disruption, permanent loss of agricultural land and access, represents what experts have described as a potential $200-billion-scale impact on farming families and rural communities along the route.
Bill C-15, the High-Speed Rail Network Act (HSRNA), received Royal Assent on March 26, 2026. It is important that every farmer in Ontario understand what this legislation permits. Because what it permits is extraordinary:
- Alto may expropriate land without first attempting to negotiate a purchase agreement with the landowner.
- Public hearings — the traditional mechanism by which landowners contest expropriation — have been eliminated from the process.
- Landowner objections are limited to written submissions and administrative review. There are no in-person hearings.
- Landowners within the study corridor may have notices registered on title restricting the sale of their property and prohibiting new works, before any expropriation has even been formally initiated.
The Ontario Federation of Agriculture has warned publicly that the Alto project may impact field access, drainage infrastructure, and overall farm operations, even for properties that are only partially acquired. You do not have to lose your entire farm to lose your ability to farm it.
| ⚠ This Is Not a Future Risk For farmers in the Alto corridor, this is present tense. Alto is narrowing its right-of-way now. Notices are being sent out. The window to understand your rights, seek legal advice, and engage with this process is closing. Do not wait for a letter to show up on your door before you take this seriously. |
Future articles in this series will examine the Alto corridor in detail: which communities and farm operations are in the path, what rights landowners retain under the HSRNA, what the expropriation compensation framework looks like, and where the OLA is directing its efforts. This is one of the most significant threats to Ontario farmland in a generation. We are treating it that way.
Section 6 — Layer Five: BESS — Energy Infrastructure on Prime Farmland
The final layer I want to introduce in this first article is Battery Energy Storage Systems — BESS. And I want to be direct about what this is, because it is often framed as an energy policy conversation when it is a land-use conversation.
Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) has issued requests for proposals for grid-scale battery storage facilities across the province. These facilities require significant land. And that land, because it needs to be relatively flat, accessible, and close to transmission infrastructure, is very often agricultural land. Sometimes it is the best agricultural land we have.
A recent and concrete example: a French renewable energy company, Neoen, proposed a 400 MW BESS facility near Port Elgin in Bruce County, on approximately 20 acres of Class 1 farmland, the highest-quality agricultural land classification in the provincial system. The National Farmers Union Ontario raised the alarm, pointing to the Province’s own Provincial Planning Statement, which recognizes that non-agricultural development in prime agricultural areas should only occur when there is a demonstrated need for it and when reasonable alternative locations have been properly evaluated. Whether that standard is being met in BESS siting decisions across Ontario is a serious and open question.
Making matters more complicated, municipal councils are being asked, and in some cases pressured, to pass Municipal Support Resolutions (MSRs) for BESS projects. These resolutions are a prerequisite for provincial approval. Courts have already been asked to weigh in on this process. In West Carleton Community Alliance v. City of Ottawa, 2026 ONSC 3824, a challenge was mounted to exactly this kind of municipal decision-making in the context of energy development approvals.
This is not abstract. Once prime farmland is covered with battery infrastructure, the concrete pads, the containerized battery units, the fencing, the access roads, it does not come back. Not in five years. Not in fifty. It is gone. And the decision to put it there is being made without farmers at the table, without adequate public process, and with provincial pressure on municipalities to approve first and ask questions later.
This is not energy policy. This is a permanent land-use decision. And it demands the same scrutiny we apply to everything else in this series.
Section 7 — The Pattern
The Leytham case did not start as a story about railroads, battery systems, or conservation authorities. It started as a story about 64 trees on a Hamilton farm. A farm that has been agriculture since the early 1800’s. A family that did what generational farmers do, made a practical decision about their land, in the interest of their operation, and found themselves facing a $160,000 fine and a criminal-style prosecution under a bylaw designed for urban neighbourhoods.
But what the Leythams’ experience reveals, when you hold it up against everything else that is happening across this province, is not an isolated mistake by one municipality. It is a pattern.
A pattern of governments at every level, municipal, provincial, and federal, expanding their authority over agricultural land, one permit, one bylaw, one Act, one Order-in-Council at a time. Each layer, considered in isolation, may look like reasonable regulation. A tree-cutting bylaw to protect urban canopy. Conservation permits to protect a wetland. An Escarpment plan to protect a natural feature. A rail corridor to serve the public interest. An energy storage facility to keep the lights on.
Taken together, they represent something else entirely. They represent a systematic erosion of the rights of farmers and landowners to use, manage, and pass on the land they own, land that feeds this province and this country.
| The Charter does not stop at the farm gate. And neither do we. |
The OLA is watching. We are documenting. We are engaging legally, politically, and publicly, and we will not stop. In the articles that follow this one, we will go deeper, one layer at a time. The Leytham case. The FFPPA and what it requires municipalities to do. Conservation Authorities and where their jurisdiction ends. The Niagara Escarpment Commission. Alto and what Bill C-15 really means for landowners in the corridor. And BESS, the quiet conversion of farmland into energy infrastructure, one Municipal Support Resolution at a time.
Every one of these issues is worth a full article. Every one of them will get one. Because the farmers facing them deserve more than a passing mention. They deserve the full picture.
And that full picture starts here.
“If you do not know what your rights are — you have no rights.”
— Jeff Bogaerts, President – Ontario Landowners Association
Smiths Falls, Ontario | November 2026
| Editor’s Note: This is the first article in a multi-part OLA series examining the layers of government interference with Normal Farm Practice across Ontario. Future articles will examine each topic in depth: municipal tree-cutting bylaws and the FFPPA; Conservation Authority permit creep and where it conflicts with farm operations; the Niagara Escarpment Commission and its impact on landowners within the Escarpment plan area; Alto high-speed rail, Bill C-15, and the rights of landowners in the corridor; and BESS siting decisions on prime agricultural land. Members with questions or who wish to share their own experiences with any of these issues are encouraged to contact the OLA directly. |