Saskatchewan’s farmland ownership law doesn’t work, and probably never
did, a committee studying the legislation heard last week.
Ken Ziegler, a Saskatoon lawyer who travels frequently to Europe to try
to entice new farmers to the province, said rural Saskatchewan needs
people and capital.
“These rules, frankly, are working against both of those,” Ziegler said
in an interview.
“I think we’re suffering under a set of rules that perhaps made sense
30 years ago. You could question if they worked then.”
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Hartley Furtan, an agricultural economist at the University of
Saskatchewan, said he has evidence that they didn’t.
He told the committee that Saskatchewan lost census farms more quickly
than its neighbouring provinces in the 20 years after the province’s
Farm Security Act was passed in 1974.
He looked at the rural municipalities along Saskatchewan’s borders with
Alberta and Manitoba and calculated the percentage change in farm
numbers between 1975 and 1995.
Furtan said if the legislation was meant to slow the exodus from rural
Saskatchewan, he would have expected to find that farm loss occurred
more slowly there.
“The answer is no,” Furtan said.
“They were much, much faster. We were losing farm families, as a
percent, on those adjacent RMs twice as fast as Manitoba and Alberta.”
He said he can’t attribute the loss of farmers to the failure of the
legislation, but he can’t credit it with keeping farmers either.
Leslie Belloc-Pinder, chair of the Farm Land Security Board, whose
members examine applications from non-residents who want to buy land,
disagreed with Furtan’s premise that the law was meant to stop people
from leaving. The thought had never occurred to her, she added.
“What does occur to me is that the government of the day thought that
the land in Saskatchewan was a provincial asset,” she said. “And in
recognizing that it’s a provincial asset, it ought to be protected.
“I think that remains true to this day.”
Furtan also told the committee that relaxing ownership laws would not
likely increase land prices. Several presenters worried that land
prices would rise and prevent young Saskatchewan farmers from entering
the business. Furtan noted his research found that restricting
ownership did not depress prices.
“Why would I expect that if I removed it that it would increase them? I
don’t,” he said.
“I don’t think that you will see any impact on aggregate land values
if you change the legislation.”
