Canadian Couple Charged $5k For Finding 400-Year-Old Skeleton 601
First time accepted submitter Rebecka Schumann writes "Ontario couple Ken Campbell and Nicole Sauve said a recent fence installation led them to discover what is being labeled a historical find. Sauve, who said the duo originally believed the skeleton to be from bones of an animal, called the Ontario Provincial Police to investigate; Forensic Anthropologist Michael Spence confirmed the bones were that of an aboriginal woman who died at age 24 between the late 1500s to the early 1600s. In spite of reporting their find and Spence's evaluation, Suave and Campbell were told they were required to hire an archeologist to assess their property at their own expense under Ontario's Funeral, Burial and Cremation Services Act. The act, which requires evaluation for all properties found to house human remains, has the Canadian couple stuck with a big bill."
FUCK that (Score:0, Interesting)
And, here I thought things were getting so bad in the US and that Canada seems so fair and so safe.... This is an incredibly unfair law. So, what happens if the property owner refuses to hire an archaeologist ? It's their own damn property. Unbelievable.
Re:TFA says that they can apply for relief (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm all for archaeology and historical preservation, but it's absurd to stick the land owner with the cost.
It could be handled that way, but with responsibility comes authority in a sane property rights regime. That is, the owners should be able to sell the archaeological finds to the highest bidder to recoup the dig costs or dispose of them if the costs cannot be recouped (that is, nobody finds the dig to be of value).
That would be the way to maximize the recovery of artifacts and have them make their way to museums. Sure, in the short term private collectors might have them, but that's not a lasting problem, especially compared to the age of most interesting artifacts.
It sounds like in Canada the owners have the responsibility but not the authority. That's just a way to socialize costs in an acute fashion and to reinforce the idea of weak property rights.
Re:Don't Do The Dig ... (Score:5, Interesting)
My first construction job was in Texas in an area where the was a lot of limestone and caves. If the construction hit a cave, they would have to stop work and hire an archaeologist to investigate for Native American artifacts, and then excavate if they found any
As a result, they would quietly fill any 'gaps' they found with concrete (sometimes truckloads) just to avoid finding any inconvenient remains
All in all, the effect of the law ran exactly opposite to the intent of the law
Re:Idiot lawmakers (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep, because of muckraking reporting that neglects to mention that the couple can file for relief which will almost certainly be granted.
Re:So the correct action is... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think they are changing their tactics. They are poisoning the rhino horns in such a manner as not to harm the rhino, but to sicken* or kill the people who eventually ingest the horn products. It will only require poisoning a few of them and a few resulting deaths making the news to reduce the demand for horn.
* Its a shame they couldn't find something to render the users impotent. And spread the news that even toughing the horns makes your junk shrivel.
I'm no expert on Canadian law... (Score:5, Interesting)
Then politicians (usually on the conservative side, or the "moderate middle") decide that the government can't be "burdened" with what amounts to a trifle of spending every year (seriously, it's like the equivalent of maybe a buck in your pocket in government budget terms). A reasonable majority of average citizens can't wrap their heads around the average government budget in perspective to their own so they cheer it on, vote it through. Mostly they don't even remember or understand why their parents or grandparents passed such a law in the first place, but not unlike the politicians, feel that they need to "make their mark". So, they turn the cost over to individuals. But the law stays on the books because a lobby or two makes a really sharp point about how the end result is that individuals would end up digging up corpses of their ancestors to install swimming pools and not, you know, properly care for those remains afterward. (aka trash bin coffins)
Then years later, a story gets posted on Slashdot, and the readers are outraged that the government, with it's "highly repressive laws" would dare to impose such a cost on individual property owners without understanding the full history of said law. That their parents or they themselves may have actually been in favor of causing in the first place but they "forgot" because it was "boring".
They got off lightly compared to others (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/04/19/bc-diggingbill.html [www.cbc.ca]
One family on Vancouver Island got charged $35,000 for archeologists to check for arrowheads. I've heard of archeologists in BC (same firm as the $35k one) who registered a site near where I live onto the archeology registry without the owner's knowledge, because they thought they found arrowheads. Later on, when the local First Nations archeologist looked at them, she said "They're just rocks", and tossed them.
The adage for ranchers when it comes to endangered species used to be (and still may be) "shoot, shovel, and shut up". Same with artifacts in Canada, if you're smart.
Re:property rights and responsiblities (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:typical, spoiled child attitude. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Don't Do The Dig ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The one side says "Damn, that's a big expense and hassle, let's just keep it buried."
The other side says "Hey, that stuff belongs to all of us. *You* need to pay to dig it up to share with everybody."
The fact is, both sides are selfish and lacking respect for others - but the fault doesn't lie with either. The fault lies in a law that places a burden on people for simply finding artifacts like these. If your family's sacred gaps are lost out there in the countryside - you shouldn't expect the guy who bought that land and stumbled across it while digging a hole to foot the bill to extract or preserve it. If society wants it preserved, then the government should foot the bill and let society pay for its preservation. If it's just you that wants it preserved, well you should probably get out your pocketbook. As it is now, we do have developers and putting up tremendous amounts of money to investigate them without seeing any benefit from their efforts besides a ton of negative press.
Re:property rights and responsiblities (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Don't Do The Dig ... (Score:5, Interesting)
And once news gets around of this incident, the same thing will start happening in Canada.
What makes you think it isn't already here? I've heard of things going the other way. If you don't grease the palm of the inspector, an arrowhead might fall out of his pocket, and "Oh, look! We must be on sacred ground. Looks like you'll have to stop digging until we get the permits re-examined and squared away."
Re:Don't Do The Dig ... (Score:2, Interesting)
I happen to believe that the entity enforcing the law should be paying for it, not you.
But that does not absolve you for destroying it to get away without having to deal with it. Ethically, I find that wrong.
Re:Don't Do The Dig ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Costs should be borne by the beneficiaries. If it's the public which is going to benefit from an archeological find, then it's the public which should bear the cost, not the construction company. It is not just inappropriate, but also immoral and dysfunctional to require a non-beneficiary to bear the costs of a situation they did not create.
Once you start making someone other than the beneficiary bear the cost, you get into all sorts of trouble. Whether it be bailouts for bankers who took too many risks, or people living perennially on welfare. The moment cost is decoupled from benefit, you can lose all sense of scale between cost and benefit. The beneficiaries don't bear the cost so it becomes a game of seeing how much they can get away with, and those bearing the cost start to get upset at taxation without representation and threaten to revolt.
Having the beneficiary bear the cost also makes the cost-benefit analysis crystal clear. If each discovered archeological site costs $5 million to process, but only yields $1 million worth of cultural preservation, then clearly the processing method needs to be refined to lower its cost. If it's the public footing the bill, then the government agency paying for it has an incentive to streamline the processing and their costs. If the construction companies are footing the bill, then there's no incentive for the government agency to do any streamlining.
Despite the recent news, tornadoes and especially injuries and deaths from tornadoes are actually pretty rare. If tornadoes kill 75 people per year [noaa.gov] on average, and you require all ~50 million residences in the tornado-prone areas to build $5000 shelters, and the average home lasts 50 years, you're mandating a cost of ($5000 per home * 50 million homes / (50 years * 75 people/year) ) = $67 million per life saved.
Given that the lifetime productivity of an average person is only $2-$3 million, a tornado shelter requirement would result in a net decrease in the standard of living. i.e. About 22-33 lifetimes' worth of productivity is being spent to save one life, instead of being used on other things which could save a lot more lives.
If you've actually been a landlord, you would also know that it's equally true that renters have a long history of totally ignoring the integrity and safety of the landlord's property. I've seen everything from tenants painting over a mold problem caused by a leak they didn't want to bother to fix or report, to cutting structural beams and "repairing" them in an unsound manner, to adding plumbing and electrical wiring which didn't comply with code without telling the landlord, to just plain leaving a mess when they leave which costs the landlord far more than the security deposit to dispose of in a way which complies with local environmental regulations.
Yes there are bad
Re:Don't Do The Dig ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, I live in Brazil. Here, the legislators are a caste on their own. When they say "quack like a duck", corporations quack. But even at the US, they create laws based on self interest, it's only that your legislator's self interest tells them to obey the corportations.
Anyway, I pay a lot more for my pension than private workers pay for they retirement here. And probably none of us will get it back in 30 years.