The 103-acre parcel is part of a syndicate also owned by Dale Braun, who owns a 75 per cent stake in the land.

WHY IT MATTERS: When oil companies don’t pay landowners, taxpayers pick up the tab through Alberta’s land rights tribunal.

Dorin said there seem to be two sets of laws in Alberta. One is for everyday people that own land. The other laws are for oil companies, and they can’t seem to follow the rules, he said.

“If I’m a landowner and I don’t pay my bills, I lose my land, I lose my house. It’s that simple. But look behind me, we’ve got an active pumpjack and have more pumpjacks on our land and they haven’t paid their bills,” he said.

MAGA Energy hasn’t paid rent since 2022

Wells were initially drilled on the land in 1951. Make Alberta Great Again (MAGA) Energy, based in Calgary, took over the lease about a decade ago in 2016. The land is currently being rented out for farming.

MAGA has not paid rent on the land in three years, and there have been no consequences. In 2023, MAGA Energy’s main refinery closed, which cut off a major revenue stream.

“Today things are going to change,” said Dorin. “There are landowners in Alberta, all over the province, in the same situation.”

MAGA is not the first oil and gas company to fail to pay landowners.

There are many concerned groups involved in the landowner rights issue, such as the newly formed Coalition for Responsible Energy, the Alberta Wilderness Association, the Seniors Climate Action Network, the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment and the Council of Canadians.

Dorin said the land rights tribunal has 6,000 applications filed a year, and landowners are owed $40 million, up from $30 million last year.

Unpaid leases shift financial burden to Alberta taxpayers

When companies like MAGA refuse to pay their bills, many landowners go to the Land and Property Rights tribunal to get compensation. This money is taken out of taxpayer funds.

“Those wells, the taxpayer is paying for those jacks on that site right now, and as you can see, they’re still operating,” he said.

“This creates a situation where companies feel they don’t have to pay, because someone is going to have to pick up that bill on their behalf,” said Dorin.

Dorin said the province loses money when oil companies don’t pay their bills, and that money could be used for public services.

One of the tanks on his land lets out poisonous gas emissions. The emissions have occasionally enveloped a nearby freeway. There is also a flare on the land that has flared continuously since 2019, even though it is supposed to be for emergencies. The compressor is broken and hasn’t been fixed.

When an oil company defaults, the Alberta Energy Regulator is supposed to act.

“They’re supposed to make sure the company doesn’t get more licences,” he said.

MAGA Energy has skirted this issue and is still acquiring new wells.

Dorin said the Investigative Journalism Foundation discovered MAGA has acquired 191 well licences in 2024 and 2025, despite the fact they have unpaid bills all over the province.

Landowner terminates lease, erects physical barrier

“I believe in the rule of law. I’ve reported it to the company. I’ve reported it to the regulator. I’ve spent hundreds of hours and tens of thousands on this and gotten nowhere,” he said.

“I filed a formal report to the Alberta Energy Regulator to shut all these wells down,” he said.

The Alberta Energy Regulator has refused to reply to the complaints, Dorin explained.

In January, he sent a letter to MAGA with a demand for the company to pay their three years of rent.

He received no reply, so he terminated the lease, since the oil company has not complied.

“Terminating that lease means they don’t have the right to be here anymore. I’m going to make it official right now,” he said, and tore up the lease in front of the audience.

Dorin said he wants MAGA Energy to pay their bills, shut down the wells, clean up and get off the land. He wants the regulator to step in and do their job.

Dorin has not hired lawyers yet and hopes he doesn’t have to go that route.

Braun and Dorin set out a wooden barrier on their land, preventing the oil company employees from entering. MAGA Energy isn’t allowed on the land unless its employees are there to decommission wells. MAGA usually has staff on site at least once a day.

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The demonstration was organized by the NFU Youth Caucus and Farm Workers’ Working Group. The goal was to demand protection of food sovereignty and help farmers, especially young ones, gain more access to farmland.

Why it matters: Investor ownership represents a major barrier for Canadians to enter a shrinking agriculture industry.

NFU Youth president Jessie MacInnis said young farmers in particular have been feeling the strain of a lack of access to affordable farmland.

“As young people, this is a really critical issue,” MacInnis said. “There are already so many barriers for young people to get into agriculture, and the fact that land prices have risen so much due to the speculative nature of farmland now… that’s a barrier that’s hard for all of us to overcome.”

The demonstration was part of the NFU’s “Lobby Day” ahead of its annual convention, running Nov. 23-25 in Ottawa.

“We’re here today, as one of our lobby asks, to ask the federal government to have discussions with provincial lawmakers to talk about ways that we can actually ban all farmland investment,” she said.

“Essentially, we just want to keep the farmland in the hands of farmers and keep it accessible for young people.”

Ontario farmer Rav Singh said she has had trouble finding land since she began farming two years ago.

“I cannot afford to buy my own land because, again, land prices are increasing.

“We are the next generation of farmers and we are facing a lot of land speculation, the cost of land is rising, which means it is harder for us to start our farms and operate and have job security,” Singh said.

“It’s really important for me to support causes like this, because I would like to continue growing food for as long as I can.”

Singh did not come from a farming background, and lived in the city her whole life before she began farming.

“Up until recently, a lot of people who were farmers were intergenerational farmers. But now, it’s a new wave of people coming in.”

Singh said she thought the wave of young people getting into farming was a way of taking action to build a better future amid concerns about climate change.

Regional board member and Fraser Valley, B.C. organic vegetable farmer Ari Westhaver
said the Agricultural Land Reserve, a provincial designation in B.C. which designates agriculture as the primary use of 4.6 million hectares of land has not done enough to prevent the loss of farmland.

“It’s not preventing investors from buying up farmland,” Westhaver said. “So, while physically it protects farmland from being lost, it does not prevent loss of farmland from farmers into the hands of investors.

“The reason I’m here today as a young farmer is that we’re currently in the midst of a transition crisis, we’re seeing a generational shift where 40 per cent of farmers in … Canada are planning to retire in the next few years, but nobody has a transition plan,” he said.

“The only plan that they have, as deeply indebted farmers is to sell their land for a profit, and the reason they’re able to do so is farmland has been kind of divorced from its productive value, and it’s now something people speculate on.”

The NFU published an open letter ahead of the demonstration outlining its concerns.

“Farmers have the right to determine how their food is produced and need equitable access to productive resources,” the letter read. “Young farmers are up for the challenge. But land speculators and multinational investors are snatching up Canada’s farmland, and with it, our future.”

— Jonah Grignon reports for Glacier FarmMedia from Ottawa.

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The West African country has a history of sometimes deadly conflict between local communities and foreign companies that have cleared huge tracts of land for palm oil and sugarcane plantations in recent years.

Locals have complained of environmental damage, losing their livelihoods and not being fairly compensated for their land. Under the current system, landowners get an annual rent of $2.50 per acre, which was determined by the state.

The Customary Land Rights Act and the Land Commission Act, both enacted on Monday, empower local landowners to negotiate the value of their land with investors and prevent it being leased out without their express consent.

Campaigners and locals praised the move, while one palm oil company executive said it would spell the end of investment.

“To our knowledge there is not a legal regime anywhere, in either hemisphere that grants such robust rights to communities facing harm,” said Eleanor Thompson of Namati, an international legal advocacy group.

A director of SOCFIN, the biggest agribusiness company in Sierra Leone, called it a “dream of NGOs.”

“Certainly it will block any investment… It makes things very expensive and we are all prone to enormous blackmail by various communities,” Gerben Haringsma added.

The Luxembourg-based company has invested more than $150 million in palm oil farming in Sierra Leone. It has also frequently clashed with local landowners.

Lands Minister Turad Senessie said the new laws would encourage investment by ensuring peace and order.

“This is a win-win situation for both business and Sierra Leoneans including rural landowners,” he told Reuters.

One of the laws will also end a colonial-era provision that bars descendants of freed slaves from owning land outside the capital, Freetown.

— Reporting for Reuters by Umaru Fofana.

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Proposed amendments to the Grade Crossings Regulations, announced June 18 by Transport Minister Omar Alghabra, this week cleared their 30-day public comment period.

The amendments are expected to tweak rules which were put in place in 2014 to improve safety at grade crossings — and which required railways, public road authorities and owners of private crossings to comply with requirements for existing crossings by no later than Nov. 28 this year.

Given that fast-approaching deadline, Prairie farm groups in December last year called on Ottawa to grant extensions — and to see to it that farmers wouldn’t be left footing the bills for upgrades on their properties.

The COVID-19 pandemic, Alghabra said in June, “has resulted in widespread financial hardship, including for local governments and private owners of grade crossings.”

Transport Canada’s proposed amendments, he said, instead “will focus efforts on reducing the risks of preventable accidents at grade crossings while being mindful of the economic realities.”

The need for extensions and exemptions has come up in the past few years, partly on “the challenges in obtaining safety-related information” on specific grade crossings, Transport Canada said in a regulatory impact analysis in tbe Canada Gazette for the new amendments.

And from the outset of the 2014 regulations’ intended seven-year compliance period, Transport Canada said, the bulk of the work to bring grade crossings up to requirements was expected to happen toward the end of a “five-year municipal planning cycle” — in other words, in the summers of 2020 and 2021.

Then the pandemic “led to the loss of the entire 2020 construction season,” on top of which affected municipalities now face “budget constraints, declining revenues and public health priorities, and lack the financial resources to invest in required upgrades.”

Thus, with the deadline coming up this fall, about 85 per cent of existing public crossings are “currently not compliant with the upgrade requirements.”

New deadlines

Alghabra’s amendments set new compliance deadlines “based on the various levels of risks posed by grade crossings.”

Specifically, the amendments grant a one-year extension for “existing public grade crossings which present a higher risk” — and a three-year extension for all other public and all private grade crossings.

That puts the new deadlines at Nov. 28, 2022 and 2024 respectively.

But for landowners and others who have “very low-risk” grade crossings where rail lines cut across their land — such as “field-to-field crossings with minimal train traffic” — Alghabra’s amendments grant “exclusion” altogether from the Grade Crossings Regulations’ construction and maintenance requirements.

In some cases, railways have had agreements with farmers and other landowners that would have left those landowners on the hook for up to 100 per cent of the costs for the required upgrades, Transport Canada said.

Over the last year, the department said, both Canadian National and Canadian Pacific railways (CN, CP) had started to write to affected landowners informing them of upcoming bills for work on their crossings — some of which “can reach as much as $200,000 in cases where warning signals are involved.”

These bills from the railways “have attracted considerable media attention, and some of the stakeholders have indicated that they were not properly informed of the upcoming November 2021 compliance deadline.”

The railways, Transport Canada said, replied that they were up against delays, both in determining the required upgrades at those crossings and identifying and informing the private crossing owners.

As of last month, just 22 per cent of private crossings are considered fully compliant.

However, Transport Canada said it now has “significantly more data than it did when the Regulations were initially developed,” so the department “was able to establish an objective set of criteria that would capture grade crossings that present a very low risk.”

With that, the department estimates, 3,420 grade crossings that were subject to the upgrade requirements could be exempted, including 3,022 private and 398 public crossings, at a total cost savings of about $10.85 million to the railways, road authorities and landowners involved.

That’s out of between 4,000 and 10,000 federally regulated private grade crossings estimated across Canada — about 70 per cent of which are in Quebec, British Columbia and Ontario.

Alghabra’s amendments would “alleviate concerns from private landowners facing large expenditures for upgrading crossings that are subject to minimal traffic levels,” the department said.

It’s also expected the amendments would “reduce pressure” on the Canadian Transportation Agency to mediate any “existing and potential disputes between railway companies and landowners” over who pays how much for the upgrades.

All that said, Transport Canada cautioned that if any stakeholders make changes that raise a grade crossing’s risk level — for example, increasing train speed or average daily traffic on a given rail line — they’ll need to make sure those upgrades are made within the new time frames, or, after those time frames expire, before they go through with the risk-level changes in question.

In the meantime, Transport Canada said last month it will reach out to farmer associations, municipalities and road authorities to “clearly communicate the proposed amendments” and encourage “co-operation and sharing of information” with the railways. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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The 5-2 ruling means that the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER), which had appealed the earlier court decisions, can order the cleanup of inactive wells even when their owners have filed for bankruptcy protection.

“Bankruptcy is not a license to ignore rules,” the court said in a written decision.

Alberta had 3,127 “orphan wells” — wells requiring cleanup that had no financially responsible owner — as of late January, according to the Orphan Well Association, which is funded by levies paid by Canadian oil producers.

The ruling reduces the cleanup burden on the association, which is overseen by the regulator, but may raise the perceived risk of investing in the Canadian oil industry.

Investors may now avoid companies with higher risk of abandonment liability, such as Cardinal Energy, Bonavista Energy and Obsidian Energy, analysts at Raymond James said in a note.

The Canadian oil industry has been dogged in recent years by pipeline constraints that have reduced prices and a reputation for environmentally damaging production methods, factors that have driven some investors away.

In 2016, an Alberta judge ruled that proceeds from asset sales of insolvent producer Redwater Energy should go first to secured creditors, rather than toward cleanup. The decision was upheld by the provincial’s appeal court.

At the time of Redwater’s bankruptcy, it owned 84 wells, most of which were inactive, and owed $5.1 million to its bank, ATB Financial.

The receiver and trustee in the Redwater proceedings, Grant Thornton, could not be immediately reached for comment.

The AER, in a statement Thursday, said it’s “now working to understand the full implications of the… decision and what it means for the AER and Albertans” and expects its review to take “several weeks.”

The regulator said it can now “align our plans with the court ruling as we continue to build a new liability management framework,” adding it’s “steadfast in our belief that the public should not be on the hook for the closure and reclamation costs of insolvent licencees.”

Alberta farmers who host well sites on their land have been among those waiting for the Supreme Court ruling.

Daryl Bennett, a farmer and director of the Alberta Surface Rights Federation, told Alberta Farmer in April that if the Supreme Court were to uphold lower court rulings in the Redwater case, a flood of abandoned wells would follow.

— Reporting for Reuters by Dale Smith in Ottawa and Rod Nickel in Winnipeg. Includes files from Glacier FarmMedia Network staff.

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Landowners must warn visitors of hazards and ensure the property is safe. If there’s an injury or death, negligence needs to be shown and if the farmer was somehow negligent in communicating a situation on the farm, that can cause a problem.

The act also says landowners are not allowed to charge hunters to use the land for hunting (even a gift of some meat is a type of payment), but can receive some compensation by renting accommodations.

For more of the committee’s findings, see the May 13 and June 17 editions of the Grass Routes newsletter.

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“Pasture rental rates can be difficult to figure out because there are many factors to consider such as local availability of land and pasture, localized demand, quality of the pasture, condition of the existing fences and water, and bargaining,” said Dean Dyck, a farm business management specialist with the Alberta Ag-Info Centre in Stettler.

“Preliminary indications for 2015 grazing season are that demand for pasture will continue to be strong, even though the recent Statistics Canada cattle inventory shows a decline of beef cows of three per cent and replacement heifers of 2.7 per cent in Alberta,” said Dyck. “Grass cattle numbers are also down due in part to the large price slides seen in the past few years. An expected increase in pasture rent this year can be attributed to the higher prices for calves, the lack of grassers, and the decline in available pasture in the province.”

Usually variations in rent are small, and have ranged between $18 and $26 per animal unit month since 2005, said Dyck.

A fair rental rate should be a balance between who will be supervising the cattle, how much can the landlord charge, how much the tenant can afford to pay, and the carrying capacity of the pasture, he said.

“The landowner’s goal should be to recover land taxes, the cost of any fence repairs, and a return on land investment,” said Dyck. “Conversely, the tenant should calculate what they could afford to pay based on projected costs and returns. For example, if the rented pasture will be used to graze steers, the tenant should consider the price for feeder cattle in the spring, what the expected selling price will be in the fall, and what some of the costs of pasturing will be, including mineral and salt, medication, and interest on investment in cattle.”

Labour and possible travel costs should be estimated if the home place is far from the cattle, and the quality of pasture and location of the water supply should also be factored in.

“Even though owners and renters want a definitive answer when asking about pasture rental rates, the best answer may be ‘It depends,’” said Dyck. “It should start with a survey of the local market rates, calculating expected return for both parties, negotiating a fair rate, and end with a written agreement.”

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