Global Occupiers get off our property

Initially I thought the Global Occupiers on Wall Street were mostly a nuisance until I saw them join the ranks of some bona fide farmers in front of the Canadian Wheat Board Building at a recent ‘not so big’ rally supporting the pro-monopoly in Winnipeg. I thought it was joke, to tell you the truth.
Initially our daughter Lynn in Vancouver, managing a small law firm near the Water Front in downtown Vancouver, had some empathy for those demonstrating in New York City because of the atrocities of the big banks, trading high-rollers, and the like, until they moved into her beloved city and right near her office. Her concern is it makes it difficult and in some cases almost impossible to run her errands, go for lunch, or whatever else the West Coast weather affords her to do.
Lynn says setting and maintaining fires, pitching and living in tents on public property, blocking sidewalks and streets, and a host of other activities those people do, most of which are illegal and would get her arrested, these Global Occupiers can do so without fail or interruption.
Yuck, she tells us in a recent telephone conversation, I want my city back as do others like Tom Brodbeck who writes in the Winnipeg Sun about the same thing happening in Memorial Park. Initially, these occupiers seemed innocent enough when setting up in U.S. cities, but these people have totally taken over those parts of cities around the world.
And until people started dying in those occupied areas, disease setting in and spreading, and disruptions to the affairs of local people, many ‘powers that be’ and  local government officials seemed to somehow lack the guts, the intestinal fortitude to take the appropriate actions to return things back to normal.
It is a sign of the times you may say, but not so,  say I, because we can stand up, encourage our politicians, to help the law enforcers to do so. Do we want these so-called movements to escalate into the violence and whatever else occurred in other countries around the world, if not then let’s stop them before they get to that point.
One other point before I end this column, and while not associated directly with the Occupiers theme, it causes me almost as much concern.
According to Doug Chorney, the president of Keystone Agricultural Producers, even his association didn’t know anything about it until only a few days before these regulations came into affect. I’m talking about those regs that make it illegal to apply fertilizer on farming land after Nov 9 and not before April 10 in the spring. In most years, this may not matter because often the weather dictates when farmers stop and start those activities.
However, some years Mother Nature makes exceptions like this year where field work could continue, and as one farmer told me sometimes they plant wheat in early April requiring them to add fertilizer as they plant.
This came without warning. Maybe just maybe government ad agencies had placed it somewhere in some fine print, but I didn’t see it. Again, this government adds regulations that make no sense, has had no consultation with those affected, and is utterly stupid in my opinion.
However, just as in Bill 46 provincially that banned any further hog expansion across the province last June, the official opposition party, the almost defunct PC’s, didn’t raise any concern, or even alert the farmers to this yet another stifling regulation.
Farmers can’t expand hog farms, it’s illegal to apply fertilizer after or before certain dates, yet the City of Winnipeg has pumped partially treated raw sewage, over 2 billion litres of it, [that is this one time, who knows how many other times]  in the last five weeks directly into the Red River, and life goes on, in the City of Winnipeg. They can feel good because the NDP government with the help of the conservatives has fixed the problem by putting the blame totally on farmers.   •