Back Off! Get Your Own Sandwich!

So I’m sitting here, printing off a bunch of reports for work that are taking an enormous amount of time (color copies) and one of the pages is a picture of this:

The report that I’m printing relates to a project that is a proposal and study determining if an extension of Hwy 407 to the Municipality of Clarington (east of Oshawa) is feasible. It’s quite an undertaking as the project is about 60km of highway and when built there will now be two connections to Hwy 35/115 which aide people commuting to Peterborough, Cottage Country as well as the many cities in between Toronto and Clarington.

As a preparatory course of action, the Ministry of Transportation is going to start expropriating peoples land left, right, and centre in preparation for the future construction. Meaning the guvment is buying people out of their land not at unfair prices but at appraised prices in which the land’s use is determined; land in which houses can be build on will get you the highest value where as land bought just so a road can be built through it will get you market value. Most people are eager to get rid of their land seeing as a highway will be going through it or near enough that it will become a nuisance to live there but some are holding on to their land with every fiber of their being.

The problem with holding onto land bought in Canada is that it’s not really your land. You may have purchased the lot, started a business that thrived and passed it down the generations but all land purchases in Canada come with a “buyer beware” clause – the guvment has every right to take your land because it is there land. You pay taxes to the government so that they can have the monies they need to run the country and it’s encompassing provinces smoothly and efficiently (say we’re living in a dream world where this always happens for arguments sake).

So if a highway needs to be built to take on the build-up of cars and transports on the road (that need is determined through months of studies and the executions of many, many models that calculate the expected build up of populations), you needs to leave! If a hospital is sorely needed and needs to be placed in the centre of a budding Municipality, you needs to leave.

I think my biggest beef with people that tell the guvment to back off is that most of these people are white people. Truly Canadian of course (I’ve never bought that excuse that we are ALL immigrants, children of immigrants are usually acclimated to the country they are raised in not in the household they are raised in) but there’s something somewhat ironic about white people telling the guvment to back off their land when not 200 years ago white people were telling the earliest habitants of that land – “you needs to leave!”