Your Freedom is Just Beyond the Red Tape

Naturally, I posed @sagescrub's second Freedom Challenge question to Mr. Canadian Renegade who just looked back at me with a cocked eyebrow and wry smile. I knew exactly what he was going to say, but my years of public education (programming) made me cringe.

Were we really going to answer this question with an answer as cliché as government? What about money? I asked, Or better yet, lack there of. There it was again! My brain is so trained to solve problems with money, it's high time I dust off the old creative gears and get thinking long and hard about the path I want to walk to freedom. Had I really learned nothing from @idyllwild's story about the Free Tea Bus?

Photo by Mrs. Canadian Renegade

Ok fellow Steemians, in the last Freedom Challenge I decided to use my powers of deductive reasoning to help me define what freedom means to my family so bare with me as I take that same approach today.

So, What is holding us back from feeling more free? Where to begin? Maybe where I left off which was what freedom boiled down to for my family: independence. So what exactly does independence look like to us?

Picture a hill side house, surrounded by lush green trees, a rooster crowing in the distance, livestock merrily roaming the pasture, and rag-a-muffin children running in the orchard. When we pull our chairs up to the dinner table we can feel good knowing the food on the table is from the garden, and the sweat off our brow was not all for naught. The clock ticks in the background and, while we will always be met with chores in the morning, we run on our own watch because we know when we tend to the land it will reward us in return. The work has not become easier but the rewards are greater and we feel a sense of pride in our efforts and peace in our life.

Photo by Mrs. Canadian Renegade

But as the dream sequence fades away, we start to uncover just exactly what getting there will take from us. Matthew and I have a slight aversion to debt, but we are also realistic and that understood that reaching our goals would require taking on some financial burden. Insert heavy sigh. We had grown tired of spinning our wheels in the mud; squirreling away money for years without getting any further ahead.

We agreed that we would take our time choosing the perfect property, but only if the price was right. We would build a modest house first and lean on friends with trade skills to keep our debt load small. We knew this wouldn't be an easy task and that it could very well come with compromise. Fast forward to October 2016, we made it! Task one complete: property purchased. Now to build a house! Simple, right? Wrong!

If you can imagine a cartoon where the character unravels a scroll and the paper just keeps rolling further, and further away, that's what we are facing just to get our home onto the property.

 
Because when you're standing in the county office asking which permits you need and they hand you a pile of papers and respond with, I think you'll need these you wonder who's actually reading these documents. Are they just being filed away for the sake filing? If the county isn't even sure which permits you'll need then what's the point of asking for permission?

Step one for development application: determine whether or not your property contains noxious weeds, protected plants and animals, or has an unsuitable proximity to protected wetlands.

To do so please refer to the County's Environmentally Significant Areas, then their Wetland Inventory, then the Alberta Conservation Information Management System, but don't forget to check the Alberta Weed Act for provincially regulated weeds, and the Alberta Wildlife Species General Status Listings and federal Species at Risk Act for specific species information. Do you feel dizzy yet? I know I do!

The Alberta Wildlife Species General Status Listings alone is 24 pages long. Even if we hired the boy scouts of Alberta for an entire summer, I doubt we would have been able to identify all of the plants and animals that grace our 50 acres with their presence. We could hire someone, but how much would that add to our financial load?

Thankfully, I am not the only one in my family who understands the value of social capital. After hearing of our hurdles my dad reached out to a colleague, who works as an environmentalist, for help. As luck would have it, this gentleman had family in the same area as our property and he was able to complete an evaluation of the land on our behalf. But even with that monstrous task out of the way we still need submit permit applications for the driveway, well, and buildings. Oh, and did I mention that the county has a minimum building size requirement which forces us into higher priced home? Thanks guys.

Photo by Ian Espinosa on Unsplash

So here we sit in our tiny house with an abundance of vacant land, just waiting to be molded into a homestead. All I have to do is close my eyes and I am transported to this earthy retreat where the air is sweet and nature is plentiful but when I open my eyes again we're drowning in paperwork.

I think I can safely say, these endless permits imposed on us by the government is what's currently holding us back from feeling more free.

So how do we overcome this struggle? Well, we still need to figure that out. Stay tuned, we'll be sure to keep you posted.

By: Mrs. Canadian Renegade

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