It was at the top of the Tory hit list when they took power in Saskatchewan in 1982 but the legacy of Saskatchewan’s land bank still lingers.
Within a few months of taking office, Grant Devine’s Progressive Conservatives had dismantled the decade-old Saskatchewan Land Bank Commission and announced plans to sell its 1.2 million acres to farmers.
Fourteen years later, the province still owns 946,000 acres of cultivated land, most of it former land bank holdings still rented under the original lease terms to the original tenants or their families.
Read Also
U.S. farm group supports supply management
U.S. grassroots farm advocacy group pushing new agriculture legislation that would move towards supply management like Canada has for dairy industry
For David Miner, a former commission vice-chair, it justifies what the land bank was trying to do.
“There’s no question in my mind it is proof that the basic theory behind the introduction of the program in the first place was solid,” he said in an interview from his Speers, Sask. farm.
The land bank was promoted as a way to help farmers transfer operations between generations by removing the burden of constant re-capitalization of the land, he said. Paying a reasonable rent tied to grain prices and productivity will leave the farmer farther ahead than making mortgage payments.
And in Miner’s view, the fact that so much land bank land still is being rented indicates such a program is as necessary now as it was 20 years ago.
