Can't find the necessary industrial land? Why not just create your own.
Port Metro Vancouver has been banging the drum about the lack of industrial land in the region for quite some time now, so when it's new Land Use Plan designated the water surrounding the Roberts Bank causeway as a study area, it's not surprising that alarm bells went off.
There's little doubt that an operation the size of Deltaport, to say nothing of the possibility of a second container terminal, requires upland support. They knew that back in the 1960s when the province expropriated more than 4,000 acres of farmland that became known as the Roberts Bank back-up lands.
Much of that acreage was eventually returned to its former owners or included in the historic treaty with the Tsawwassen First Nation, leaving the port without the land base that had been envisioned a half-century ago.
It wasn't a significant issue at first, but has become one in recent years, to the point where there's been a call for the province to create an industrial land reserve. A real estate firm has also taken out options on hundreds of acres of west Delta farmland with an eye to industrializing them.
Now comes the change to the port's Land Use Plan, which is sufficiently vague so as not to cause widespread outcry, but could conceivably outline a massive peninsula into the Strait of Georgia. It's just a study area at this point and the port says additional consultation and planning would be necessary before anything happens, if it does at all, but it's troubling nonetheless.
Surely there's got to be a better way of meeting the port's land needs than filling in the foreshore, particularly in an area of such environmental significance. Our incursions into the water have already damaged the ecological balance of that marine environment so it's incumbent on everyone involved to ensure the situation isn't exacerbated.
I recognize that ports, by their very nature, have to be on the coast but the support network doesn't need to be offshore as well. And perhaps that's what this exercise is all about.
Widening the causeway to essentially create a massive promontory is so environmentally abhorrent that it's seems almost impossible to fathom. There's no way they'd allow it. There simply has to be a better alternative.
It's such a bad idea, in fact, that it makes the notion of containers sprouting on some of the country's best farmland a lot more palatable.
