Now that’s resiliency – save our prison farm activists finally outlast Harper Conservatives

Jeff Green | Feb 28, 2018

The Save our Prison Farms activists, a collection of farmers, prison rights activists, and community activists of various sorts from Kingston and the surrounding region, began fighting what looked like a doomed battle when the Federal Conservative government, under Stephen Harper, indicated they were bound and determined to close the prison farms in Kingston and other locations across the country.

It was 2009, and the Conservatives were entrenched in power and unafraid of a bunch of rag tag protesters parading around Kingston with placards, blocking the entrance-way to prisons, and packing meeting halls.

The protesters were doubly angry. They were angry that the farms were being shut down, and they were angry that the government was saying agriculture was a dead industry that had become irrelevant in terms of employment.

A year later the farms were gone, but the protests never stopped. The purchase of 23 cows from the Colllins bay herd seemed at the time like a pipe dream, but the people who donated $300 each to buy the animals were happy to invest, and the farmers who took the animals on were bound and determined to maintain the unique genetics of the Collins Bay animals.

Now, in the words of Jeff Peters, the most stubborn of the Save Our Prison Farm activists (he went to jail 3 times) “the cows are ready to go back to prison”.

Except, instead of 23, there are now 33 animals, ready to be reunited at Collins Bay.

When the Harper government was replaced 2 1/2 years ago, the hope was that the effort would soon be over, but even though the new government made sympathetic noises from the start, and local MP Mark Gerretson had supported the prison farms while he was Mayor of Kingston and made them part of his election campaign, But it wasn’t until this week’s budget that it was confirmed. The money is finally in the budget, the farms will be re-opened, the activists have waited and waited and it is time for the cows to come home.

Mark Gerretson said on Tuesday that the credit for all of this must go to the activists, and for once a politician has done a good job of deflecting credit instead of deflecting blame.

The community effort to bring back the farms was uniformly solid, well planned and unyielding. And it will remain that way. The funding is in place, but the details need to be worked out. And the Save Our Prison Farm folks are determined to make sure the new program is a good one.