Activist Post
July 24, 2012
People are hungry, economies everywhere are tanking. The answer to that
problem used to be "do what you can on your own." In America, it was the
now iconic Victory Gardens. In Montreal, Canada there is a move to
defeat such self-reliance.For some strange reason, helping yourself is the very last thing the governments in both the U.S. and Canada will "allow" you to do; not even on your own land. Stranger still, it is the lower-rung, local governments that show up in news stories extinguishing property rights in the name of almighty municipal code.
Josée Landry and partner Michel Beauchamp decided to start an urban garden for both economic and health reasons, and they even have documented its progress via their family blog since its beginning. They proudly gave their new passion a name - Rosa - in memory of civil rights icon, Rosa Parks, who refused to take her place as ordered by the tyrannical bureaucracy of the day.
Now it seems that they find themselves forced to take a stand for another basic civil right: food freedom. Instead of allowing this garden to flourish and nourish, local officials in Canada now want to make any new front yard gardens completely illegal by autumn, along with uprooting Rosa.
The crackdown on home gardening has been marching across the first world at a rapid pace of late. In the U.S. we have seen a woman threatened with jail for 93 days for front yard tomatoes and a Tulsa, OK woman sued after coming home to find her yard full of herbal remedies and vegetation ripped up and taken. Oftentimes, it's a power play, and only when enough negative attention is garnered, do the code enforcers back down, usually citing their targets for some other minor infraction.
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