Systemic Canadian Serfdom
Even if you own land you have to pay rent to the government in the form of property taxes. The exploitive property system we are under ensures poverty for the majority.
We need to reclaim our lives back, but it’s impossible living on the grid.
The way I see it, living in the slave system leaves little space for people to communicate ideas that are not within the usury system framework. People need to slow down, quit any jobs that take excessive amounts of time away from living and talk to each other.
With such vast opportunities and possibilities, we could start squatter’s towns, and start a real counter-culture. I know I’m not the only one disgusted at paying rent.
Serfdom via Land Restriction in BC: How The Government Owns You
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread506152/pg1
Canada, the second largest country in the entire world. Numerous provinces, 30 million inhabitants. A wealth of every type of terrain from semi-tropical rain forest, to desert, to prairie and tundra. Also, 95% uninhabited. But why? Surely in a country so utterly expansive, it would be easy to find land there to settle! Not so, and I will explain why. In this article, I will be focusing on Rural rather than Metropolitan real estate, for reasons that will become clear.
Part 1: An Overview of British Columbia
BC is a lush province. Wild, untamed, filled with the bounty of nature. A land of opportunity for those willing to move here and settle. At least, that’s what the Tourism advertisements would have you believe. In reality, BC has the lowest minimum wages in Canada, the lowest standards of living, and the highest real estate prices.
A search of the MLS listings will reveal the shocking reality that the cheapest land
parcel currently for sale in rural BC is $50,000 for less than 1 acre. Above that, the prices can vary from $100k for 2 acres to as much as $1.4m for a single half-acre lot on Vancouver Island. This might be understandable if this was, for example, France with its 700 years worth of overlapping title deeds. In fact, an online search of Real Estate will demonstrate that for the price of a decently sized rural land parcel or a 4-bedroom family home in a Vancouver suburb, one might obtain a Castle with several dozen acres in France.
How can this be? BC has a total population of just over 4 million people, half of that contained in the sprawling coastal city of Vancouver. The total Landmass of BC is more than that of Oregon, California, & Washington combined. To put this into perspective, the population of those 3 states is 47 million people. As you can see, that is a drastic amount of free land!
So, with the perspective set, how can land be so ludicrously expensive in BC when the province is literally empty?
A Conspiracy to keep the land for the corporations
The short answer is, the vast majority of the province was simply never allowed to enter into private ownership. Unlike the US which experienced a massive land rush throughout the opening of the various Frontiers, BC was cut off from the rest of Canada by land until the opening of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the early 1900’s. The Trans Canada Highway did not gain a stable and safe connection to BC until the opening of Rogers Pass in the late 1980’s. Most of the Interior remains tenuously connected to the major arteries.
Thanks to this, much of it was never homesteaded. With BC’s heavy snowfall, who would want to trek into the wilderness aside from the lure of gold? Much better to stay by the established towns. Thus, when the Homesteading act was repealed in the 1970’s, a staggering 95% of the province remained under the control of the Crown (the provincial government).
Since then, less than 400 sales of crown land to private individuals have occurred, and for staggeringly ludicrous sums of money when you consider the relative isolation of existing crown parcels. To understand why, we need to look at BC’s two primary industries: Mining and Lumber. The crown does not wish to sell any land to individuals to develop, because at this time it holds a veritable monopoly on the leasing of Mining and Lumber rights to corporations. Any large reduction in crown land holdings will reduce the amount of resources that it can barter with corporations in return for favors, and barter it has.
Despite the isolation of the vast majority of BC’s interior, one need only take a flight across it to see the damage wrought by the lumber barons throughout the past century. There is not a single spot between Vancouver and the Rocky Mountains that has not had a slender logging road driven into it so that the mountainsides can be stripped bare. By conservative estimates, a staggering 67% of the mature lumber in British Columbia has been logged in the past 100 years.
As a result, the Crown is loathe to remove its grip on the land it holds lest it lose precious resources that it can sell the rights to, plain and simple. There are no parcels of more than 1800 acres for sale in British Columbia, and no large parcels for less than $1million. The Crown does not even consider applications for purchase or granting of large land parcels unless you are a corporate interest. I know, I have tried.
Part 2: This keeps the people as serfs
Now, if you enjoy living in a city this might be fine for you. After all, not everyone wants to go the way of Daniel Boon and live in the wilderness. However, other factors make this lack of affordable or even existent Rural land an almost criminal offense by the government against its citizens.
British Columbia has the lowest wages in the entire country. Our base wage is $6.50 an hour Canadian, raised to $8/hr after your training period completes. For most people in the province, this is an untenable situation, as the province also has the highest real estate prices in the country. A split level, 3 bedroom home will cost anywhere between $500,000 and $700,000 to purchase, with the average rental costs for a house being around $1800-2500 a month. Rooms and single-bedroom residences can be anywhere from $500-1200 a month.
When coupled with one of the most restrictive taxation brackets in the country, this ensures that people from a poor or working class background are almost guaranteed to be always on the edge of poverty. Thanks to a lack of Rural land, it is a situation that is impossible to break out of. Unless you have great amounts of money, you are forced to live in a population center and forced to rent your residence for an exorbitant sum. You simply do not have a choice short of moving several thousand kilometers to another province.
As you can see, the factors work together to keep the population in a sort of pseudo-serfdom in the province. The illusion of freedom is maintained, but you are subtly guided through life by being placed into a situation that is impossible to escape from if you are at the bottom of the ladder. Unlike other places in the world, British Columbia has no “squatter’s rights” in regards to its rural land holdings. Any abandoned buildings or crown land in the Province will simply sit empty until they fall into ruin or are sold/utilized by the government. Any citizens attempting to utilize said assets will be evicted and in most cases heavily fined and possibly incarcerated. There is no 2nd option.
Part 3: Why you should simply go and settle the land
This is the most controversial part of the essay, and I beg forgiveness from the mods if it goes against the sites rules and from you if you do not agree with my opinion.
To summarize from above, this province features a disgusting amount of free and un-owned land. Land that has sat fallow and untapped since the earth formed. The only purpose this land serves is to act as a easily liquidated asset for the Provincial Government in the event that it needs to purchase corporate interest in its actions. This land is unobtainable by any means for the most part, and by most peoples means for the rest.
This is wrong and should not be stood for. We are faced with a poverty crisis in the world right now. Cities have been shown to be unsustainable in the long run. Urban decay is taking hold in most metropolises. One need only look to the tent cities in much of the US and the collapse of Detroit/Michigan, for any resident of Vancouver it is not that hard to extrapolate that to the situation in BC.
The only claim laid to much of the land in this province is by a bullying and corrupt institution that has conspired to keep its citizens in near-serfdom. There is no need to go homeless in this country, and no need to go bankrupt to obtain a single acre of rural land. Anyone finding themselves sick of the grind, sick of the poison of society, and sick of paying their dues to a government that does not care for them should simply go and settle the land that is their right.
I am not advocating simple theft of land from private owners that have already cleared and nurtured it. I am advocating taking your own section of land in a place that will likely never be put to any good use other than for the interests of some nefarious corporation. There is no reason to restrict the sale of land in this province and drive the prices up into the stratosphere, other than to benefit the corporate and political elite that reap the rewards of the sales. Go ahead, go build a house for $3000 (Cob is very well suited in the coastal areas of the province) and live off the land if you have the means and the desire. If enough people do it, they can’t stop us.
Context Article: Government has every right to tear down log cabin couple built by hand, lawyer says
Senseless Horrors like D-Day are Celebrated as Necessary
Rule 1 in stump country; Carry a large bayonet. It may save your life, and makes taking a dump a lot easier when jammed into the fascist ground to hold ones self upright.
LOL, I didn’t understand any of that Bruce1
http://squattheplanet.com
On some board I lost the link to, some fags are saying that if squatting was legal, every doofus with little money would be claiming lakeside lots and ruining it for everybody else… hmmm sorta like the oil-drekoids from Alberta, buying up southern BC? Sorta like that? Fuck off Alberta, we don’t need your greasy money.
Anyhow, I’ve located a house off-grid, deep in the woods that appears to have been abandoned since 1976 or so. There are about 100 rat droppings per sq foot of floor, table and counter space, but that is not insurmountable- gonna take a lot of bleach. A week or so in a tent while I clean it up, then I claim my free land and house.
Check this thing out. The apocalypse is gonna be fun with do-anything tractors! http://www.openfarmtech.org/index.php/LifeTrac#Versatility
Looks like valuable data. Are you really moving? Good luck with it. Keep the dark forces at bay, birds are your best friend. The litmus paper of the quality of ones surroundings. They provide both music and comedy.
Yeah will have to move eventually… want to live on the mesa!
http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/off_the_grid_life_on_the_mesa/
Baby just left the nest today!
mesa eh lol
I always got a kick out of Bonanza and the ‘ponderosa’
Eats cars lol. Been there. Every young man should taste that life, I am over it now.
Freedom from want is where its at, for me.
All fun till minus 16 temps hit, guns give me a headache.
Yeah Canada does have it’s challenges that’s for sure! Weighing the benefits of living in town vs living off grid… the pesticides noise and convenience of town vs clean air, peace, bugs and some hardship especially when getting started. Usurous property exploitation via rent could be the deciding factor.
Just say no,,,
To prescription drugs.
Who in their right mind accepts..
Pharmageddon!
SPammers!
Depends on what you want! How about freedom from work?
If anyone has not read Bob Black’s The Abolition of Work, it is a classic and must-read. I got to read it years ago back in the days of hard copy, it was reproduced in plenty of ‘zines.
http://www.zpub.com/notes/black-work.html
Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx’s wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy.
Hell yes Bob! Lafargue had it right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refusal_of_work#Paul_Lafargue_and_The_Right_To_Be_Lazy
The Right to Be Lazy is an essay by Cuban-born French revolutionary Marxist Paul Lafargue, written from his prison cell in 1883. It polemicizes heavily against contemporary liberal, conservative and even socialist ideas of work. Lafargues criticizes these ideas from a Marxist perspective as dogmatic and ultimately false by portraying the degeneration and enslavement of human existence when being subsumed under the primacy of the “right to work”, and argues that laziness, combined with human creativity, is an important source of human progress.
The Right to be Lazy
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/index.htm
power failure killed my PC won’t be in touch, much.
Great stuff anarchore.
The right to be lazy lol
I’ll take it.
My grandfather handed me a giant candy dish of freedom.
Pig state hogs snorted it down like drunks slamming booze.
We need to jam a stick down their throat to encourage them to puke it back up.
Stress capital of the world.
Too bad I don’t live in Vic still, I’d have you fixed up in no time. Swap out the power supply and you should be god to go, unless lightening hit and fried your motherboard or something.
A book from 1920, from a guy who already had enough of society:
For brick and mortar breed filth and crime,
With a pulse of evil that throbs and beats;
And men are withered before their prime
By the curse paved in with the lanes and streets.
And lungs are poisoned and shoulders bowed,
In the smothering reek of mill and mine;
And death stalks in on the struggling crowd—
But he shuns the shadow of oak and pine.
—Nessmuk
http://www.zianet.com/jgray/nessmuk/woodcraft/chapter01.html
I’ll always blame ’sunday shopping’
Perhaps you don’t get the connotations of that.
It’s threat was as plain as the sunrise in the late 60’s
Nice poem. Ya its the power supply.
Probably not, but I’ll posit my own.
We’ll know the fix is really in if they ban Saturday Shopping(for der “Shabbat”)!
You’re on Crown land. the cnt Elizabeth was saying how she was glad to be home so get off the crowns land she only owns 50 trillion dollars worth, tax free and get yourself a minimum wage job at Hortons or one other crown companies you lazy servant of the crown- generate taxes for her, the cunt is not rich enough, nor is her banker rotschilds. not until you throw the cnt out and her greasy ash-NAZI banker relative are you going to get a fair shake in Canada- think of 1776. Yeah, canada has plenty of land for everyone, even the russians will give you a free plot land for a summer home if you want one, and that was when they were communists. settle the land and get something to defend it with against the crown jackboots, about the only thing obama said that was true is that the ’state has a monopoly on violence’. what is wrong with every american and canadian getting some free land? that is what land is for the sharing and using of nature of which humans are a part of. the crown bleed tears over having to give the indigenous a bit of their land back eh. that was a hard fought battle against the royal pricks. you canadians have to get over this crown mentality and get rid of the RCMP pigs and fascist, much like we in the USA have to get rid of our slave masters at the FB-eye. Free land for all but the rich and their sycophants in the legal, and government sectors.
When the autopsy is performed on the fascist, freedom is found in the stomach contents indicating the last meal consumed.
The snipers motto; Honk for Harper, so I can kill you.
Conservatives, toxic to all life.
You’re right ZGR, in Canada they still call the government land Crown Land. I guess most Canadians don’t acknowledge that old British power despite the obvious indications. Harper had to ask the Queen before prorogueing Parliament.
Instead of celebrate on ‘Canada Day’ we need to mourn - for the millions killed who were here first: the First Nations, same crap as in Palestine: “A people without a land for a land without a people.”
Where is your attention, Canadians?
In 1945 my Dad was in northern mid Ontario… surprise surprise, very close to Huntsville. For 6 cents a square foot he bought a huge swathe of private forest land with an extended shoreline on a pristine lake. In fact, my parents honey mooned there and I was born almost exactly 9 months later. Dad had been building the cabin the old fashioned way, the milling, the horses etc.
The best parts of my life and most of my memories are in that place. Dad sold it in the 1980’s when an American oil company (Sun Oil) let him go a few weeks before a good pension kicked in. My old Mom at 92 still lives on the cottage land.
In my late 20’s I stayed there alone for about 3 months. It was heaven. One reason I believe we are shoved into cities especially here in bc is … not only is it capitalism at its worst… is to keep people from experiencing the soul enriching and altering that can only be the result of long periods in tune with nature. It was not farm or gardening country without a lot of work, being on the Canadian Shield, but the water was pure and abundant.
I have seen maps of the US and how they want it set up in the future and there are expansive areas that no one will be able to live in. The carbon/environmental tyranny thing. All humans pretty well will be forced to live in people stacked cities ~ anathema for a free spirit.
This article above just shows Canada has been more obedient for a longer period of time to the Sanhedrin and their agenda.
SO!! she asks brightly.. did you two fine gentlemen light fireworks and celebrate on July 1? My first bittersweet Canada Day…
Canada Day I wore black! They know that permaculture makes more sense than trucking food in from thousands of km away. They don’t want us to have food security, or economic/financial security of any kind. Just an endless stream of bills which we frantically run through hoops to pay.
Do I hear tyranny knocking?
I’ve named my pet Robins Stasi and Nazi. Its fun to loudly call them as if calling a little child and have them chirp happily back at me.
Heinrich Himmler our building Furher probably does not like it but I do not care.
Oh STASI!
NAZI!
peep peep
Tweet. But what do you call the crows?
Crows are the sneezing powder of the Robin’s world sometimes mere useful idiots, sometimes the mortal enemy. Their flippery makes them unsuitable as friends.
CAW! CAW!
Mother Robin cringes, shivers, gazes at the horizon, a strained expression soaks her face.
Crows, ptoooey
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey
The Authoritarians, by Dr Bob Altemeyer
downloadable pdf