The city of Ottawa didn’t want to steal land from 60 of its citizens. It wanted to force a re-designation of land and have a few of its citizens suck up a property value loss for the benefit of everyone else.

The new designation of "significant wetlands" would not prevent these 60 landowners from maintaining the current use of their land, even if it were farmland. They would just be prevented from developing that land at a later date.

City councillor Janet Stavinga and Ministry of Natural Resources officials contacted by Farmers Forum don’t believe compensation should be paid after re-designation. MNR area manager in Kemptville, Gary McLaren, insisted that the re-designation would not decrease property values.

That’s not what a land assessor who sits on an Ottawa task force on property assessment told us. Glenn Lucas said that the average land value now is $2,500 an acre. But that price would surely drop to $500 an acre or less. The Fraser Institute, a British Columbia-based economic think-tank, agrees. The institute’s economist on environmental policy, Jeremy Brown, laughed when told McLaren insisted property values would not decline. Land value could fall to under $500 an acre, Brown said. "They’re (the city) not expropriating the land but they are limiting what you can do with it. The landowners should be compensated."

The landowners in question were told some of the lands are "wetlands" because 50 per cent of the vegetation could survive a wet environment. Like some farmers who shoot, shovel and shut up when faced with an endangered species, some of these landowners decided to uproot, shovel and shut up the city’s environmentalists. After razing their land of vegetation the landowners have been roaring with laughter amongst themselves ever since.

It should be clear that whenever you limit the use of someone’s property you devalue it. The Fraser Institute’s Brown suggested the city of Ottawa should fess up and admit that property value is an issue. The city, says Brown, should behave like the province when it puts a landfill site next to your property. When you sell at a devalued price, the province tops up what you take to the bank so you get what would have been a fair market value.

There’s another question not answered. How do we know these targeted 600 acres in Ottawa’s rural southwest around Stittsville are so important that they must be re-designated as "wetlands". Sure, wetlands act like kidneys, cleansing water before returning to an underground lake so that our taps and toilets can draw from it. But must we re-designate all 600 acres that are on Stavinga’s list for re-designation. Why not 50 acres? Or none at all and work around it?

Stavinga offered Farmers Forum no argument and sent us to an MNR official, who passed us over to a second MNR official, who brought out the 1992 provincial policy statement that was to settle the matter once and for all. It didn’t. The policy statement, supplies conclusions and statements but no arguments that come even close to supporting a limitation on the land use of these 600 acres.

This doesn’t mean a good argument doesn’t exist. But if Ottawa’s green brigade wants to re-designate land, it had better be prepared to supply a reasonable argument when faced with devaluing people’s property. Or else they are, at the very least, negligent in their duties to serve the people.

When they get their act together and, if they come up with a reasonable argument, they might consider going first to the city to check if Ottawa is ready to open its purse strings for a few landowners in the name of the common good.