Let's join together to change the city's decision in December 2019 to expropriate and forcibly purchase Marsha Rempel's land for an industrial park. 

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Marsha Rempel wants to save her 150-year-old farm — the only home she's ever known — and is fighting the City of Welland's decision to expropriate the lands for industry.

 

Rempel, 57, is the fifth generation to live on her family's crop farm, which she says is endearingly known as the place with "the big red barn" that prompts tourists to park and pull out a camera.

 

"It's been home my whole life," she said of the farm in Ontario's Niagara Region. "It's like it's part of your lineage. It's part of your heritage. It's roots. They don't understand the roots aspects of this."

 

Rempel said she remembers her grandfather farming oats, red clover and corn on the land, back when it was known as Watters Farm. The farm now rotates between soybeans and winter wheat.

 

"I'm just afraid that they're going to take this farm, they're going to ruin that field and it's going to become surplus land," she said, pointing to land in Pickering, Ont., east of Toronto, that was seized by the federal government in the 1970s for construction of an airport that never happened.

 

"Why isn't food considered more sacred than industry?" Rempel asked. 

[Experts from Article written by Reported Christine Rankin of CBC]

"The issue is that they are going to take away (force a sale) land from one private citizen and sell it to another, who will then build whatever industrial building they want. I don't agree with this. If they needed the land for public use such as public infrastructure (airport, hydro dam, highway, etc) that is when you use expropriation. If a developer wanted to build a warehouse there they should approach the farm owner and make a deal, otherwise the city should stay out of it. This is a case where government is overstepping its bounds." Comment by Andrew Taylor

 

"I hope she doesn't end up exhausted financially and physically from fighting the good fight week after week and month after month. That's how they do it - they wear you down." Comment by Jim Thomas

 

 

LET'S NOT LET OUR LOCAL FARMERS DOWN!

NIAGARA HAS SOME OF THE BEST AGRICULTURAL LAND IN THE NATION.

Let's set a precedent so that big industry can't take our farmland away from farmers!!!!