Announcement of our Food & Water First Campaign

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Published on Tuesday, 19 February 2013 15:56

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What's next for NDACT?

Round 2 of 2

So what is next?

First:

Diplay your Food and Water First  signs in spring.

The FOOD AND WATER FIRST campaign is in full swing and needs your help. We are close to being ready to ask every organization and business that earns its living from agricultural production to print the same FOOD AND WATER FIRST signs as NDACT does, put their own website address on the bottom and have their members plant them this May.

Those websites will have a “FOOD AND WATER” button on them and that button will open a page that shows the pledge everyone will make and each organization will put a single fact up, a new one every week, about what economic impact agriculture has on their business.

We will link this to Facebook and twitter and a “FOOD AND WATER” website. The goal is to show everyone how fundamentally important agriculture is to the economic well-being of the province, and that that well-being depends on the protection of the very land from which all this prosperity is generated. Politicians and bureaucrats will KNOW that we, the people, are not going away but that we will see this through until we get meaningful changes in the ARA and the PPS.

So how important has every single person’s participation been? Can one really make a difference? You bet!! First, touring around with politicians and ministerial staff, the second comment in the conversation always was on how they have seen “Stop the Mega Quarry “ signs everywhere they travelled in the Province, no matter where they travelled, from Windsor to Ottawa, St. Catherines’ to Sudbury and, of course all over Toronto. So please pick up your FOOD AND WATER FIRST signs on your way out and display them this spring. They send a huge signal that change is needed, and that solutions have been proposed, it is time to dust off the ARA review and put changes into play before the next election. And those signs serve another purpose in rural Ontario, which is solidly blue. These signs will demand from our Conservative representatives that they help us in the quest for the preservation of Prime Farmland and Source Water Regions, those signs will signal that we are united in this and that we need a policy statement from their leader that he is committed to supporting the economic preservation of the provinces livelihood, committed to the protection of Prime Farmland!!!

Second:

Respond to our Call to Actions - flooding our representatives with emails gets their attention

Second, when our group met with Jim Bradley, Ontario’s Environment Minister, he had assembled senior staff from all over the city and gave us twice the amount of time normally made available to delegations. Donna T, Harvey Kolodny and Dave VANDER Zaag did a very convincing job, highlighting agriculture, Culture and Tourism to him and his staff. When we were all done, I got up, shook his hand and thanked him for the attention to, and knowledge off, our file and concerns. He winked at me and said” Well done young man, you did alright, what made me really pay attention to your message were the 700 emails we got in the last couple of days asking me to pay attention!!!”””

So, the lesson here is simple, the “Calls to action” from the NDACT website work, please, keep checking the website, and engage, we need you again, every one of you and the contacts that you have, to see this through to the end.

This is not an everlasting battle, just round 2 of 2!!!!

Carl Cosack, NDACT Chair

Taken from his speech delivered Sat. Feb. 16, 2013

To see photos of the evening, click here.

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