The new rules are Orwellian.
That’s what Delta South MLA Ian Paton reiterated about the provincial New Democrat government’s Agricultural Land Reserve legislation.
Paton took part in a forum in Surrey on Sunday to speak with members of the B.C. Farmland Owners’ Association, a forum which also featured several other speakers including Liberal leader Andrew Wilkinson. They are critical of changes introduced in the proposed Bill 15, as well as changes that have recently been implemented in Bill 52 which restricts the size of new homes on farms to 5,400-square-feet.
“They’ve made these insane changes to the Agricultural Land Commission. I’m totally not in favour of mega-monster homes that you see in Richmond and parts of Langley, but we proposed an amendment so a house would take up less farmland but they could be taller, rather than a big, gaudy house taking up a lot of agricultural land. The South Asian farming families are still really, really ticked off about that,” he told the Optimist following the meeting.
The changes in Bill 15 include individual property owners no longer being able to make applications for exclusions from the ALR to the Agricultural Land Commission. If the bill is passed, the ALC will only consider applications by local governments, First Nations governments or the province.
The government’s changes also include scrapping regional ALC panels that had been established by the previous Liberal government, as well as the separate ALR zone in the northern parts of the province where farmers could apply to have additional businesses operate on their properties.
“What they’ve basically done is fundamentally taken away the rights of landowners to be able to make applications…our big concern is that they just keep going for this socialism. It’s too much of this George Orwell, 1984, or Big Brother going after you,” added Paton.
He noted farmland in the Fraser Valley is valuable, having the best soil, but there’s many acres elsewhere in the province that are not suitable for farming and should be able to have value-added and farm-related businesses.
As far as the ALR under threat, Paton said there were 39 applications for exclusions in 2017 and more than half were rejected. The total number excluded in the province was 50 hectres, he said.
Agriculture Minister Lana Popham earlier this month had a different take on the changes, saying they’re meant to give the ALC the tools and the governance model required to strengthen its independence and ability to act in the best interest of farmland within the ALR.
