Farmers plan to rally at legislature to fight for changes to laws preserving B.C. farmland
Credit to Author: Susan Lazaruk| Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2019 21:18:46 +0000
Hundreds of the province’s farmers are expected to rally at the B.C. legislature on Monday, B.C. Agriculture Day, to urge the government to repeal laws they say hurt small farmers and farm families.
Delta South MLA Ian Paton, a farmer and the Liberal agriculture critic, will address the crowd after making a two-minute statement calling for Bills 52 and 15 to be repealed and tabling a petition with 26,000 names inside the house.
“It’s crazy some of these rules they’re bringing in,” said Paton on Friday.
The laws passed by the government are intended to preserve farmland designated under the Agricultural Land Reserve, established in 1973 to preserve farms and ranches in B.C.
Bill 52 passed a year ago prevents farmers from having a secondary non-farm use dwelling for immediate family and limits the size of residences over fears of “megamansions” of up to 12,000 square feet on ALR.
And Bill 15 reverts governance of the ALR to a more centralized commission as opposed to six regional panels.
It also requires exclusions for ALR be submitted to the Agricultural Land Commission by local governments, First Nations or the province instead of by landowners “as part of thoughtful land-use planning process,” according to a government release.
The Changes to Bill 52 Facebook page, with more than 2,500 members, many of whom are landowners, is fighting to change the law.
Paton said Bill 15 will make it more difficult for farmers to make changes to their farm. For instance, it bans farmers from having value-added operations so they can sell directly to the public as farm-to-table enterprises.
And Bill 52 makes it difficult for families to have multi-generational homes on their farmland or for small farms to offer housing to their farm hands, he said.
“If you want the next generation of young people to take over the family farm, you can’t be telling them they have to live in an apartment and commute to the farm,” he said.
And he said preventing a family from building another home for adult children so the parents can age in place on a family farm, for instance, adds to the housing crunch because “they’re saying you can’t have two houses on five acres.”
Cathy Fichter, who is travelling to the protest from the Langley farm she lives on with her husband and her daughter’s family, said she found out the hard way how Bill 52 affects families.
She and her husband were told they couldn’t build a home for themselves on the land they planned to share with her daughter and her family because they, as did many others, missed the original deadline to apply before the bill became law.
The government after a public outcry did extend the deadline, to Feb. 22, 2020, which allowed the Fichters to build a home — not a house but a modular unit — but Fichter said that doesn’t go far enough.
“We got what we wanted but there are hundreds that are experiencing the same problems as we did,” she said.
She said farm families shouldn’t be denied the chance in the future to build a second home on their property after Feb. 22, 2020.
Agriculture Minister Lana Popham didn’t respond to a request for an interview but sent a statement that said the government is “protecting farmland” without addressing opponents’ concerns.
The province is holding public consultations and is inviting opinions on how farmers and ranchers can expand and diversify their businesses, how to help new or young farmers get established on the land and how to ensure “flexibility for residential options, while prioritizing agriculture in the ALR,” according to a release.
On the West Coast Environmental Law website, lawyer Andrew Gage writes that the Agricultural Land Commission’s “regional panels were more susceptible to regional political pressures to remove land than a provincewide ALC had been.”
And he said, “Some have speculated that the 2014 amendments to the Agricultural Land Commission Act, creating a weaker Zone 2 in much of the province, was intended to accommodate oil and gas development in the northeast of the province.”