The fight to save Canada’s prison farms has enjoyed much more media coverage in the Kingston area – home to several Correctional Services facilities – than in Southwestern Ontario.
Coverage reached its height on Aug. 8 when 87-year-old and 15-year-old women were among nine protesters arrested for blocking access to livestock trucks into the Frontenac Institution near Napanee. For a day at least, activists prevented the removal of the prison’s dairy herd.
Two days later, however, the Save Our Prison Farms campaign made its one major appearance in the Southwestern Ontario media. That’s when approximately 300 purebred Holsteins from the deeply-pedigreed herd were sold at auction at the Ontario Livestock Exchange (OLE) stockyards outside Kitchener-Waterloo.
“A group of six protestors drove down . . . from Kingston,” reported the K-W Record newspaper. A local Kingston television station, meanwhile, carried a report featuring Frontenac Institution blockade ringleader Jeff Peters, who had been one of those arrested. Peters, a beef farmer, was attending hearings at the Kingston courthouse but, nonetheless, was able to use modern communications technology to bid on the OLE auction.
The six protesters, by contrast, weren’t nearly as successful. Even though they claimed they had no plans to disrupt proceedings, there were eight officers from the Waterloo Regional Police on hand. Protesters, hoping to watch as the animals were sold, also balked at a hastily-arranged $1,000 “refundable bond on all new (OLE) buyers”. The Record reported stockyard general manager Larry Witzel “put (the deposit) in place to ensure only serious buyers could get in on the crowded bid,” but longtime buyers and sellers agreed it was something they had never experienced before. And those who hadn’t paid the deposit weren’t even allowed into the auction ring as spectators.
Established OLE customers, however, were allowed in without paying a deposit. As a result, retired Lakeside-area farmer Allan Slater – a member of the local National Farmers Union, which had been spearheading the Kingston-area protest – found himself the proud new owner of a heifer calf. This he promptly transferred to a mother-daughter activist team from the town of Sydenham, and they promptly christened the calf “Hope.”
Due largely to the bidding of Peters and Slater, the group ended up heading back up Highway 401 in possession of four milking cows, an 18-month-old heifer, and the newly renamed Hope. They are being housed on Peters’ farm.
The prison farms are being dismantled, in a process that was actually begun about two years ago when the federal government initiated public consultation into the proposed shutdown. Supporters have already, on multiple occasions, made their arguments about the value of the life skills earned by Correctional Services inmates who work on the farms. They have warned of the potential additional expenses for feeding the prison population; of the loss of a highly-rated dairy herd which is well-known in Eastern Ontario for producing high-quality milk and highly-classifying offspring.
Justification, for the most part, has come in the form of vague statements that the skills learned on the farms are not applicable to the modern workforce. And they’re too expensive to run.
But Peters, in the local Kingston television report, insists there’s still – in keeping with the calf’s name – reason to believe there’s a future for the farms.
Initially, the largely urban-based protest group proposed setting up a Michael Schmidt-style, unpasteurized “cow share” milk sales project, in contravention of Ontario Milk Act regulations. Eventually, however, cooler agriculture-knowledgeable heads prevailed, and they settled on housing the animals on various area supporting dairy farms. And that’s where the fleetingly Slater-owned “Hope” re-entered the story.
The calf was taken to a city park, where her cute eyes, ears and nose contributed to the raising of about $31,000 for the group. They took that money to a small, Kingston-area sales barn which was, last week, auctioning about 25 remaining milking cows – animals which had been too pregnant or otherwise unable to be loaded on the Aug. 9 truck to Waterloo. Most were sold to campaign supporters.
Now, a significant portion of the Frontenac Institution herd is in Save Our Prison Farms hands. And protesters have Hope, in more ways than one.