Should we worry about public land sales?

Image: : Kai Jacobson.

Last month it looked like Americans were going to lose hundreds of thousands of hectares of publicly owned land. In the end the proposal, part of a federal budget bill, was removed, but not before we started wondering if the same thing could happen in British Columbia. So we asked a couple experts.

“I don’t think Canadians should be worried,” says David Connell, a professor of land planning at the University of Northern British Columbia, who literally wrote the book on planning policy in the British Columbia. “The U.S [government] is really dismantling the environmental movement. That’s not happening in Canada.”

Andrew Gage, a staff lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law Society, is more cautious in his assessment. He says there is nothing in our laws protecting Crown Lands from a large-scale sell off. However, like Connell, he takes comfort in the fact that public lands are not a political punching bag on this side of the border.

“I think there is a cultural difference, not necessarily a legal difference,” he says. “British Columbians and Canadians would be shocked if provincial governments turned around and tried to sell Crown Land [at the scale proposed in the U.S.].”

He notes it is rare for the provincial government to deny land sales for industrial and commercial developments, though it is more likely to grant tenures and leases, rather than sell them outright. But attitudes to industrial developments and the permitting approval process are changing in B.C. and across the country. 

Within days of each other last month the federal government passed Bill C-5 and the provincial government passed Bill 15. Both bills allow the government to expedite the approval process for favoured major infrastructure projects. Both bills “are different than proactively selling land on a large scale,” like they proposed in the U.S., Gage says. But he, like a lot of environmental and First Nation organizations, still has issues with them.

“The idea that the government should be able to turn around and give a special route to approval for favoured projects goes contrary to the idea that the rule of law applies equally to all of us,” he says. “If the government thinks there’s a problem with the regulatory process they should change it.”

Plus, major industrial developments can have significant impacts on recreation and conservation, he says. The recreation community should pay close attention to the favoured projects put forward at a provincial and federal level, he says.

This is not new legislation, either. Bill 15 largely recycles and updates the Significant Projects Streamlining Act, a law passed in 2003 designed to speed up the approval of some infrastructure projects. It was never used, Gage says, because of vocal opposition from First Nation, conservation and recreation interests. 

He thinks these communities need to speak up again and tell MLAs and MPs that the new laws need to be used appropriately and sparingly. Large public demonstrations and vocal opposition helped remove the land sale off the U.S. budget bill. It’s the best defence against the possibility of large scale land sales in Canada too.