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While the rest of Canada works hard to meet protected areas targets of 17 per cent, the Wall government is hiding as it delists land from WHPA. A couple of years ago they cooked up something they call the Crown Lands Ecological Assessment Tool (CLEAT) to create a veneer of science to justify the sale of 1.8 million acres of WHPA lands. Based on their entirely political decision of where to draw the line below which lands can be sold, they have been tendering out and now auctioning off natural lands that WHPA always protected from the market forces driving cultivation of prairie and the draining of wetlands — implying all the while that government ecologists who developed CLEAT support the decision.

This is patently false and the province’s few remaining scientists will tell you so. Delisting the WHPA land had nothing to do with ecological science and everything to do with political ideology and the short-term thinking that is forcing ministries to help balance the books by selling off assets and cutting staff hours.

Sixteen of the parcels in this auction have been deemed to have “moderate ecological value,” and therefore will have conservation easements when they are sold. Decades of farmers illegally draining land without a single prosecution have shown that governments have neither the desire nor the staff to monitor and prosecute farmers for actions taken on private land.

In an agricultural climate where market realities and government policy make it hard for farmers to retain any sloughs, bush, or scraps of grass on their privately owned land, it makes sense to conserve as much Crown land as possible in southern Saskatchewan. For generations, agricultural policy has favoured and subsidized the grain industry and transport, providing perverse incentives for people to convert native prairie and drain wetlands to plant cash crops and next to nothing to encourage landowners to keep habitat for birds and other animals intact.