On Friday I received an email that included a link to a graph on the Ministry of Agriculture’s web page showing the dollar value of all the Crown lands that the Ministry has sold in recent years. I was going to post that revealing little graph here today but it mysteriously disappeared over the weekend and is no longer available online.
But I found the data anyway by digging through a bunch of old annual reports for the Ministry of Agriculture.
Let’s start with the baseline. How much Crown land did we have in the southern half of the province when the Sask Party took office and starting selling it off?
Well, according to the 2006 annual report for the Ministry of Agriculture (the year before the Sask Party came to power) the ministry was at the time administering “approximately 7.3 million acres of Crown land that is leased to farmers and ranchers or operated as community pastures.”
The annual report goes on to say that 3.4 M acres of that Crown land, “representing one-third of all wildlife habitat in the agricultural region, is reserved from sale and has specialized development restrictions under The Wildlife Habitat Protection Act. These natural areas make a significant contribution to maintaining existing wildlife populations and biodiversity across the agricultural region of Saskatchewan.”
Within a year of taking office, the Brad Wall/Bill Boyd government began selling Crown land at a discount, offering financing alternatives to cash sale. They stated their intention to sell approximately 1.6 million acres of Crown land. By 2014 they were eyeing up the Wildlife Habitat Protection Act lands to see how they might justify selling some of them off.
Here are the dollar figures and acreages from all Ministry of Agriculture Crown land sales from 2008 to today. (All data come from Ministry of Agriculture Annual Reports, but after 2012 they stopped reporting acres. However, I have estimated the acreages sold by extrapolating from the reported acreages for the earlier years, which work out to an average price of $300 per acre.)
From 2008-2009 annual report: $7 M in Crown land sales, selling approximately 23,000 acres
From 2009-10 annual report: “More than 161,000 acres of Crown Land, valued at $48 million were sold in 2009-10.”
2010-2011: 83,631 acres of Crown Land, valued at $25.4 million were sold.
2011-2012: $30.2 M (67,294 acres were sold); and the report says that since 2008, the ministry had sold 304,885 acres worth more than $91,000,000.
2012-2013: $28 M (93,000 acres sold)
2013-2014: $26 M (87,000 acres sold)
2014-2015-- $15.4 M, (50,000 acres sold)
2015-2016: $29.2 M, (100,000 acres sold).
2016-2017: $145.9 M, (nearly 500,000 acres sold).
That adds up to approximately 1.1 million acres of Crown lands in the south of the province that they have sold since taking office in 2007--15% of the Crown lands in the prairie ecoregion, one of the most endangered and least protected landscapes on the continent.
How much of that 1.1 M acres contained native grassland, wetlands, aspen parkland is anyone’s guess because no one inside or outside of government is keeping track, but much of it was formerly protected under WHPA and, as we have seen recently, there are Crown lands with native grassland and bush that were never in WHPA but are now being auctioned off in the next few weeks.
Our Crown lands—already so scarce in the south because 85% of the land has been privatized—are the last shadows of the prairies we were entrusted to share and protect together under treaty, the closest thing we have to land held in common for the benefit of all treaty people.
If we stand by and let this government sell them off, we will be abandoning any possible renewal of the spirit in which the treaties were signed, and inviting a new form of colonization taking us even further from any legitimate social contract with the land and its first peoples.
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