When asked if young, aspiring farmers ever inquired about buying his farm, Marcus Collinson just laughs.
“No young farmers are buying farms,” he said, adding it’s why he sold his four properties southwest of London, Ont., to an investor in May and June 2020.
The Toronto-based company that bought them is Bonnefield, Canada’s first and largest farm real estate investment corporation. It holds more than $1.4 billion in assets across seven provinces, representing 140,000 acres (nearly 56,656 hectares) of farmland, according to its website.
According to Ontario land registry records, Bonnefield shows up as the owner in 464 premises identification numbers (PIDs), from northern to southern Ontario. Each PID is linked to a specific parcel of land rather than a business or a person.
Cna we please severely limit what investment companies can do?
Investment companies should not be able to buy hospitals, farms, houses, schools, sports teams, infrastructure, parks, forests, transit and transportation companies, pensions, saving funds, none of it.
A structure where an investment company can help a person to buy a farm and build something up while paying off that investment company within a reasonable time for a reasonable cost sounds fine, but we already have banks and it’s hard not to make those squeeze us.
So fuck off with investment companies, let them burn to the ground. They should be prohibited altogether
Short answer no, this country is run by banks, and oil. It will never do anything that is not in the interest of those two sectors.