Re: battles with the province

Mar 04, 2015

Excellent editorial (Highway Robbery in Glenburnie, Feb. 26) on the coming battle with the Province over development rules. The gist of it: The bureaucrats will be saying: If you don't have large-scale development to satisfy our appetite for vast paperwork and fees, then we won't let you build anything at all. Those who have been around longer than I have talk about the disappearance of small-scale meat-processing and other farm- and food-related enterprises, victims of the same arrogance and big-corporation fixation among our Provincial overlords. I for one would like to see more of this kind of analysis in the paper, maybe even as something like a regular feature.

Here's my contribution, under the general heading of Provincial arrogance. We had a fence-viewing in September, resulting in a decision that the party with the "breachy" cattle would be responsible for fence-maintenance in the future. Everyone knew what the award meant, and everyone agreed that the Township had acted properly. In December, on appeal by the cattle-owner (yak-owner in this case), a provincial appointee called a "Deputy Referee" (in real life a retired Housing Ministry bureaucrat) ruled on a technicality (wrongly, according to the Township solicitor) that the Township had not acted properly so he threw out the award and recommended there be another fence-viewing! Besides, he said, even though the parties knew what the awards meant, he, the Deputy Referee wasn't sure of their "real meaning", so another fence-viewing would be just the thing to clear that up.

I complained to the actual "Referee" (another retired Ministry bureaucrat), and I was obliged to formally address this in writing to the Referee, but a ministry official told me he could not give me his address, because to save costs he works at home and privacy rules prevent them from disclosing the address. I sent my complaint anyway by e-mail to a Ministry office, but I never heard back. I didn't seem worth the $3,500 it would have cost to work through the system, or the $10,000 or so it would have cost in legal fees for an application for Judcial Review.

The names of the Referee and his two Deputies are not published anywhere, so you only get to know who they are if you have the misfortune to deal with them, and even then you don't get to know their address or any contact information, more like a Mafia button-man than a public official, to be sure. Worse still, none of their decisions are published, so each decision is arbitrary and a complete surprise. So much for the rule of law.

John Whitelaw