A Crime Against Everyone

 

The Enclosure Movement was a push in the 18th and 19th centuries to take land that had formerly been owned in common by all members of a village, or at least available to the public for grazing animals and growing food, and change it to privately owned land, usually with walls, fences or hedges around it.

The public noose of scrutiny continues to tighten around Doug Ford's neck as people refuse to be the dupes he and his cabal obviously take us for. His insistence that the housing crisis is the the sole reason for stealing much-needed Greenbelt lands rings increasingly hollow, especially in light of what it ultimately represents: criminal behaviour, insider trading that warrants an exhaustive investigation, including scrutiny of the developers themselves who are being so richly rewarded. The fact that the RCMP is now pondering whether to start a probe (what there is to ponder is beyond me) only increases the stench of corruption that envelopes the entire cabal.

It occurs to me that there is another dimension to all of this that recalls the Enclosure Movement of Great Britain. Because of human greed, land that had benefited the many became restricted to the moneyed class. Like that era, the removal of Greenbelt lands is an offence against the collective. All of us will suffer so that the few can be richly rewarded.

Although for the most part the Greenbelt is privately owned, the fact that it is vital to all of us, especially in these fraught times of climate crisis, deepens the perversion of these sell-outs. Much needed farmland, wetlands, etc. being sacrificed on the altar of obscene profits mean we will all suffer. We will have less food that can be grown; we will have less absorptive capacity for increasing amounts of rainfall supercharged by climate change. We will have less greenspace which, as David Suzuki has phrased it, is part of our much needed natural capital. And of the trees that will be destroyed in the development of McMansions, not affordable housing, I will not speak.

All of this makes me very sad, not so much for myself but for current and future generations, all of whom, long after I am gone, will be paying a heavy price for the greed and the enrichment of the few; their names are now part of the public record, prolific prevaricators who insist that there is nothing to see here, all the timing of purchases being mere 'coincidences'.

Greed is obviously not a new phenomenon, so I shall end this post with a quote from my favourite American author, John Steinbeck, who, in The Grapes of Wrath, wrote the following in relation to fruit being destroyed amidst mass poverty and starvation:

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation.
There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize.
There is a failure here that topples all our success. The
fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and
the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die
because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And
coroners must fill in the certificates-died of malnutrition-
because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

Apply that to our rapidly deteriorating world, and I think you will get his drift.