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From the Editor

Ode to the farmer

by Judi McLeod
Saturday, March 12, 2005

Our Queen's Park government continues to ignore hard-pressed farmers. Impervious to farmers' pleas about government overregulation, elected politicians pay more mind to urban matters, where their votes come from.

although they always claim otherwise, big government deny certain minorities. But how the mainline media treats the farmers' plight is nothing less than shameful.

When trade unionists, anti-war mobs, teachers and poverty activists take to the streets, sympathetic coverage of the lib-left mainline media is all but guaranteed.

When farmers come out of their fields to protest in downtown Toronto, they are criticized for heading our way and blamed for a number of offences, all of which are tied to inconveniencing the hallmarked urban routine.

The National Post published a March 10 editorial entitled, "Good farmers gone bad".

James McMaster, director of the Glengarry Landowners association, took on the Post in a letter to the editor that did the farmers proud.

McMaster may not sport the businessman's silk tie, or stop to pick up a café latte on the way to his newspaper office, but his elegance, originating from the farmer's simplicity, is there all the same.

"Your editorial castigating farmers and rural residents for their assembly at Queen's Park reinforces the notion that a Toronto-centric bias is the major contributor to the obstacles and difficulties that confront Ontario's rural communities," MacMaster wrote in his letter. "Your petty assertions, that as a result of the protest, a busy executive might lose a deal, or that a shopkeeper might be forced to open late, probably don't register at all on the complaint scale of a farmer who has been forced out of business by governments that are more concerned with vote-rich urban centres."

a sometimes-snide mainline media had hinted that the farmers jeopardized public safety by coming with their tractors and farm vehicles to Queen's Park. an outrage when one considers that their friends in radical protest groups cost taxpayers thousands of dollars when they tried to break the doors of the Legislature down. Police officers and horses were injured when the Toronto-based OCaP (Ontario Coalition against Poverty) rushed Queen's Park on June 15, 2000.

But when it comes to the mainline media, some animals are superior to others.

"To suggest that the protests in any way compromise public safety falls far short of the truth," wrote MacMaster. "Public safety is paramount in our protests, and plans are always put in place for safety lanes and emergency response. a phone call to any of the OPP or Metro officers who worked with us to arrange the protests would have confirmed this."

Local mainline media also seemed to go out of their way to trivialize the farmers protest by misrepresenting the numbers of farmers and rural landowners that turned out.

…"You erred seriously by claiming that only 400 farmers attended the protest. More than 1,300 people arrived at the protest in 27 chartered buses, and the farm convoys totaled more than 300 vehicles, many of them with multiple occupants," MacMaster said.

"But your assertions that `certainly we understand the farmers' frustrations says it all. Frustration is being 20 minutes late for work. Driving to downtown Toronto because you are losing your farm is desperation."

The mainline media's short shrift doled out to our farmers is made all the worse in consideration of how they are never there when the government is flexing its muscles on hardworking farmers outside of the public spotlight.

There was no media present and little media attention in the aftermath of the supper hour visit to the West Grey Township home of farmer Bob Fowler, within scant weeks of Remembrance Day 2004. Five Conservation Officers and a local police officer, equipped with gun belts and holstered sidearm delivered a five-page search warrant to Fowler, a World War II veteran, terrifying his 80-year-old wife, who was in uncertain health.

Fowler, who was visited some seven months after the alleged event, was rumoured to have shot a Canada goose.

There was no suspicion raised by the mainline media that the Canadian war vet also happened to be an outspoken member of a landowner group and secretary of the Ontario Property and Environmental Rights alliance (OPERa).

For the past 15 years, landowner organizations have publicly maintained that provincial and federal government agencies, behind the façade of ecological preservation, routinely inhibit the use, title value and collateral of privately owned rural property by means of regulation without compensation.

Everywhere across the land, the farmer is falling victim to big government. Governments like the one in Ontario that are caving in to the demands of well-funded environmental activists.

Farmers out west are falling like proverbial dominoes because three farm animals, infected with Mad Cow disease, were discovered.

Farmers propped up by bank loans are losing three-generation family farms to the same banks that proffered the loans.

Yet, our farmers are blessed with the same human trait missing in governments and many newspaper editors. That trait is called common sense.

Ever ponder why so many farmers come with a strong dose of commonsense? You can't deal every day with Mother Nature without having to acquire it.

Farmers faced the tough times of life ever since the days when families were gathering around the radio to listen to baseball games for their main entertainment. Popcorn was popped off the heat of the same Franklin stoves that kept them warm in harsh winters. and just to think that in these meager circumstances, most considered themselves blessed. Farmers were making do with what they had when city slickers were panicking and jumping off buildings when the money ran out.

The Dust Bowl exodus of the 1930s was recorded as the largest migration in american history.

When the farmers packed everything they owned and headed to California in trucks and cars, they were derided as "Okies: and "arkies" on their arrival, no matter where they had come from.

But generations of farmers survived all, and that's why they'll survive the governments of their day. Who are a Premier Dalton McGuinty and his in politically correct lockstep Minister of National Resources David Ramsay, when compared to the salt of the earth?

When city-spun protesters tried to beat down the front door of Queen's Park with wooden beams and got away with it, they should have taken a page from the book of members of Ontario's landowner associations.

When the farmers and landowners decided to come to Queen's Park, they didn't try to knock down wooden doors. They knocked on the hearts of the masses.

It may not be tomorrow, but the day will come when our farmers will win back their hard-won rural rights.

God speed that day.

Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com


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