The Law That Made It Illegal to Sell Land to a Hutterite

There was a law in this province that did not say a Hutterite may not buy land. It said no person shall sell land to a colony. Those are not the same sentence. The law did not restrain me. It restrained the man across the fence, and if he sold to us anyway the sale was absolutely null and void. In this one I go through the whole of it. The wartime Act of 1942, whose full title I read out because nobody writes titles like that any more. What Ottawa did about it, which has never been done since. How the province answered that within two years. The committees that formed in the winter of 1947 and one sentence out of what they put in writing. Then the Communal Property Act itself — forty miles, the acreage cap, cabinet approval, the board, the hearings and the year the hearings were abolished. And the morning in 1969 when the Supreme Court of Canada looked at a statute that named my people on its face and every judge agreed there was no problem with it. I also have to tell you about a number I promised you last time and cannot give you, and why I think the reason is more interesting than the number. And at the end, where it all actually came out, which is not where anybody on either side expected. My wife is the head cook on this colony and has her own channel. SOURCES Douglas E. Sanders, "The Hutterites: A Case Study in Minority Rights," (1964) 42 Canadian Bar Review 2 — the statutes, the amendments, the board, the hearing counts, and the petition language quoted from the record. https://cbr.cba.org/index.php/cbr/article/view/2563 Walter v. Attorney General of Alberta, [1969] S.C.R. 383. Alberta Hansard, 12 March 1973 — the repeal, and the committee's reasons for not holding public hearings about it. https://docs.assembly.ab.ca/LADDAR_files/docs/hansards/han/legislature_17/session_2/19730312_1430_01_han.pdf Alberta Bill 112, 1951 — the amendment replacing the flat acreage cap with zoning. https://docs.assembly.ab.ca/LADDAR_files/docs/bills/bill/legislature_11/session_4/19510222_bill-112.pdf TIME, "Alberta: Homes for Hutterites," 10 February 1947 — the veterans' committees, and the forty-one acres per person figure. Simon M. Evans, "Alberta Hutterite Colonies," Communal Societies 30:2, 2010. https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1388&context=communalsocieties Victor Peters, Manitoba Historical Society Transactions, 1960-61 — the Manitoba gentlemen's agreement, in the words used at the time. https://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/transactions/3/hutterites.shtml Fort Macleod Gazette, 2021 — the Willow Creek council meetings and the aquifer evidence. NOTE ON HONESTY Four things in this video are weaker than the rest and I say so on camera. The year of the federal disallowance. Two accounts I have read give two different years and I could not get to the order itself to settle it, so I do not give you a date. The three hundred people who marched on the Legislature against the repeal. I have that from one account and nowhere else. The land price figure. The only number that circulates is one farmer in Glacier County, Montana, in 2005, describing his own losing bid to a newspaper. It is not Canadian, it is not a market study, and I say so plainly rather than borrowing it. And the man who took the case to the Supreme Court. One source describes him as a non-Hutterite landowner who was prevented from selling, which fits the wording of the Act, but I have only the one source for it. This channel is narrated by a composite character. The voice and image are AI-generated. Everything factual about Hutterite life and law in it is sourced above or flagged as unverified.