Community pastures | Cattlemen’s association won’t back new community pasture lobby effort
Some federal pasture patrons came away frustrated from the recent Saskatchewan Cattlemen’s Association annual meeting.
Only one of three resolutions they put on the floor during the meeting was passed, and the chair of the new Community Pasture Patron’s Association of Saskatchewan says the challenge ahead is to bring attention to all the issues surrounding the pastures.
“There are questions that we haven’t even started to discuss yet,” Ian McCreary said in an interview.
The new association, formed the day before the SCA’s annual meeting, received support for its immediate goal of delaying the transfer of the first 10 pastures for another year.
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However, it wasn’t as successful with its main resolution , which had been presented at SCA district meetings last fall and passed in three districts.
The association wants the SCA to lobby the province to retain ownership of the pastures once Ottawa hands them over and to help develop a lands management structure that ensures the pastures continue to serve local producers and communities. It also said the pastures should operate on a cost covered basis.
Joanne Brochu, a pasture patron who drafted the resolution and helped organize the patrons association, said she had done her due diligence.
“It was overwhelmingly easy to recognize that the dissolution of the pasture system could be very detrimental to our livestock industry if we do not get involved, if we do not have representation by patrons and all stakeholders at the table,” she told the SCA meeting Jan. 23 in Saskatoon.
“We need to get to that table, and SCA is our provincially recognized group to represent us at that table.”
She said the future pasture system must be similar to the current one.
However, SCA chair Mark Elford said the province has already said it won’t operate the pastures, and a resolution calling for that to change “flies in the face of what the minister and cabinet has said they are not going to do.”
He amended the resolution to say the province should transfer ownership and management to the patrons, along with the opportunity to lease.
The amended resolution passed.
A third resolution asking the SCA to recognize, support and work with the new association was also lost.
McCreary said it’s clear there is a “challenge of understanding” among cattle producers regarding the pastures.
“There were those there who said they were worried about signing onto our mandate because they didn’t know what our mandate was,” he said.
“There’s a tremendous amount of misunderstanding out there yet. I think there’s still some that think, ‘gee whiz, if they just sold them, then I’d be the one that got them.’ ”
Instead, the government’s decision to keep the land in complete blocks and price the land at market value has made it impossible for many patrons to buy the pastures, he said.
McCreary said if the federal government won’t agree to delay the transfer of the first 10 pastures until 2015, perhaps the province could step in with a bridging program until more issues are sorted out.
The new association includes 27 pastures that were represented at a Jan. 23 organizational meeting. Seventeen other representatives agreed to go back to their patron groups with information.
Each patron in the member pastures will pay a $100 membership to help the executive lobby on their behalf.
