Funds needed for legal defence of farmers rights

Hello,

My name is Elsie Born, I am an executive member of the Salt Spring Island Poultry Club.

I am writing you today to ask for your financial assistance in raising money for the Alia Elaraj & CJ McNichol family for a legal defence.

Over the past 19 months, this family has been dealing with constant harassment and enforcement by CRD Bylaw Officers as a result of their neighbours calling in and complaining and submitting at least 56 of their own audio recording of Alia and CJ's roosters.

This whole attempt at bullying this farm family has been and egregious waste of our tax payer dollars. Having the CRD respond to, and take these farmers to court over a few birds is an overreach of their jurisdiction. The amount of money they have spent on ferries, hotels, and lawyers would never be recouped in fines, leaving the CRD in the red undoubtedly. The CRD is using this case to justify an increase to their Bylaw Enforcement and it's apparent that they are using bad faith complaints as a method to expand their enforcement.

Finally this has culminated in court action being taken against the family.

Should they lose in the upcoming court case, this will set a terrifying precedent for farmers outside of Agricultural Land Reserves.

Currently 30% of all registered farms on Salt Spring Island are not on ALR land.

Should the CRD win this court case, not only is the family subject to 10,000 worth of fines, BUT all of the farms outside of ALR, as well as your back yard flocks will be in danger should they ever have a neighbour who complains and reports them. This does not just pertain to Salt Spring island, as the CRD pointed out in a recent phone call, but on all of the Gulf Islands as well.

Alia and Cj are extremely valuable members of our poultry community, raising quality birds, especially specialty hens for colourful egg laying purposes. Alia even won the High aggregate for eggs this year at the Salt Spring Island Fall Fair.

Alia and Cj's property is zoned rural, and according to the Island Trust, does allow agriculture, but not agriculture intensive.

As Defined by the Islands Trust

"Agriculture" - means to use the land, buildings or structures for a farm operation

"Agriculture, Intensive" -means agriculture that involves the confinement of more that 4550 kg of poultry or livestock or the operation of a fur farm or the manure based cultivation of mushrooms'

Alia, CJ, & family are certainly not agriculture, intensive, with their farming operations consisting of 20 specialty heritage hens, 3 roosters, and 6 specialty geese.

Alia and Cj have also done extensive noise mitigation strategies with their birds. including but not limited to, moving their coop, rebuilding, and renovating their coop with extra insulation, relocating roosters to different areas of the property, and crow collars.

It has not made one drop of difference to CRD Bylaw, or the neighbours.

It has become very apparent after the Local Community Commission ( a division of the CRD) meeting on February 8th that we were in deeper water than we had ever thought.

The Victoria CRD lawyer forbade our elected officials from discussing with us in details the case against the Elaraj & McNichol family.

We came with open hands asking for guidance and help from our elected officials and were instructed that they could not help us until after court preceding were concluded.

It is now we come to you, the public, our farming community. Please help us with whatever you can, a dollar or two is very appreciated, there are a lot of us out there and every cent helps.

These funds will be put towards a lawyer's retaining fee, travel costs to Victoria, and printing of documents and materials.

thank you for your time in reading this and should you have any questions, you can find me, Elsie, Alia, and CJ on the Salt Spring Island Poultry Facebook Page.

We must not let the CRD interfere on our right to food security, and food production on appropriately zoned land.

We should be making it easier for people to farm, and most certainly not harder.

With Much Love & Gratitude

Elsie Born