Presented on June 15, 2026 at the Common Ground Food Forum: Land grabs, land-trusts and land tenure panel at the Lakehead University Orillia Campus

The geography of land grabbing in eastern Canada today is the product of long-term historical struggles over land tenure across five different settler-colonial regimes since the 1500s. This paper will explain how these long-historical struggles brought us to the current order where land is increasingly concentrated around large-scale commercial farms and investment firms. The central theoretical framework presented in this paper is the concept of The Long Grab, which argues that the specific conditions of settler colonial development in Canada created sets of unresolved political-economic tensions that advance and undermine aspects of capitalist agrarian development. These tensions—including unceded First Nations sovereignty, imperial competition with France and the United States, free land grants, land theft by timber barons, commercial monopolization, and financialization—all stack and contradict settler-capitalist development in ways that make land grabbing possible in some places but not others. This paper draws on analysis of settler-capitalist development in the Kitchi Sipi (Ottawa) Valley from Christy Kelly-Bisson’s upcoming book entitled The Long Grab to explain why farmland grabbing is primarily driven by large-scale corporate farms instead of farmland investment firms.