Justice Issues Everywhere

On Saturday I wrote about the beauty and solitude of the farm north of Kingston where I spent two months this past summer. Although I was only 100 kilometres north of the busiest highway in Canada there was a sense of wilderness that many seek out in Algonquin Park and northward.

It happened that the investigative program W-Five did a piece on that area the same evening, and I came upon it in progress. http://www.ctv.ca/wfive Uranium companies have been staking the area and with a hundred dollar permit they can actually enter private property without permission and peg out a claim. It is an absurd Ontario law that allows this on land which has, in some cases, been owned by families for generations.

While some people in the area support the possibility of a mine, or mines, many more are opposed. There are signs saying NO URANIUM MINE everywhere. These people are there because they love the land, and in the case of the Native community, this is their ancestral land. There have been protests at a proposed mine site which resulted in the arrests of Native leaders and other concerned citizens. One Native leader was fined and jailed even though there was no violence or property damage. The man who lives at the highway end of the road on which I was living was among those arrested and charged for trespassing. The Morrisons, above, discovered that their land had been staked when Frank found a marker on his property.

This area is within the Bay of Quinte Conference of the United Church, of which we are a part here in Bowmanville. The Conference has attempted to stay abreast of the issues and inform its members. As I mentioned once before, the lack of physical confrontation has meant that this story has gone unreported by the media, for the most part. The Christian Peacemakers group has spent considerable time in the area and prayer vigils are held outside the mine site every Sunday afternoon.

This all serves as a reminder that issues of justice are as real in rural areas as in cities and towns. They just don't get the same attention.