Mckillop farmer-cottager conflict shows rural-urban division
The long-standing notion that everyone in Saskatchewan cities is just one foot off the farm is changing.
It’s more than the changing face of cities with the arrival of new Canadians who have been driving the province’s population boom of the last decade.
What may be more intriguing is how Saskatchewan city people — many of them now generations removed from the farm if they ever had any connection to the farm at all — don’t always share rural interests, and may increasingly be coming into conflict in places where urban people coexist with rural ones.
Consider what’s happening in the Rural Municipality of Mckillop, north of Regina, where local farmers and largely urban Long Lake cottage owners are now in an acrimonious disagreement over fundamental democratic representation.
Some 400 ratepayers (mostly cottage owners attached to the 20 hamlets along Long Lake that border the RM) have petitioned for a financial and management audit of the RM council and administrator — a petition that was rejected by the RM administrator in what petitioners deem a breach of duty under The Saskatchewan Municipal Act.
A ratepayers association newsletter last month complained council had hired a Regina lawyer for undisclosed reasons, after the ratepayers association “submitted all files to the RCMP in January 2018” as part of a breach of trust complaint against the RM administrator. The ratepayers association has also asked council to examine whether Reeve Howard Arndt has breached the ethics codes and are demanding answers to conflict of interest charges.
At issue is the petition demanding redistribution of the divisions within the RM that currently see four councillors elected from the farming portion and only two councillors elected from the lake shore area, which has a greater number of ratepayers in an RM where agriculture only accounted for 36.7 per cent of Mckillop’s 2017 total municipal tax level.
Court of Queen’s Bench has now been asked to rule on the petition, which could make it the subject of a referendum vote in the October municipal elections for half of the RM councillors.
“They (farmers on RM council) think they are going to lose power,” said Garry Dixon, board chair for the RM hamlet of North Colesdale Park and former Mckillop councillor, whose division had 940 people compared with 66 in the division of a neighbouring rural councillor.
“They think they are going to lose their way of life.”
Bob Schmidt, a farmer in the RM since 2000 who says he relates more to lakeshore residents where his sheep farming operation is located, said “it’s about fairness” and “representation by population” — a problem brewing since 1960s, when rural Mckillop council first began resisting cottagers showing up on the shoreline.
But Arndt, a retired civil servant in Regina who has long owned a quarter section in the RM and lives in the RM yearround, sees it differently.
He describes the cottage owners who truly want division change as “a very, very small group”, and says that cottage owners aren’t paying all the taxes as some suggest and “the issue of why the petition was rejected is very complex.” Arndt insisted the RM hasn’t resisted accountability or disclosure and argues that a financial audit could be extremely costly to the small RM.
However, his core argument is that — unlike other Western provinces — Saskatchewan’s Rural Municipal Act affords property owners the right to vote in RMS where they own property but don’t have full-time residency.
“The struggle is: how do you achieve balance ( between the farmers and cottage owners)?” Arndt asked, noting council has also been petitioned by Mckillop farmers to study alternatives — something that could lead to another referendum vote of cottagers forming their own village municipality.
“It’s not just Mckillop,” said Dixon, noting the provincial ombudsman’s office received 1,000 complaints in 2016 — the first year it was tasked with handling rural municipality complaints.
There’s a big issue of rural and urban people finding new ways to co-exist.