The provincial government has effectively announced that the Agricultural Land Reserve – the most important land-use decision in our history – is likely to be dismantled.
From The Sun:
VICTORIA — A provincial core review tasked with finding tens of millions of dollars in savings will take aim at some of the province’s most politically sensitive programs to make sure they are working efficiently, the minister responsible said Wednesday.
“We’re going to look at some sacrosanct things, like certain agencies. We’re going to look at the Agricultural Land Reserve and the Agricultural Land Commission,” Bill Bennett, minister responsible for the core review, said Wednesday.
“I’m going to look at things that politicians have been nervous about looking at over the years and ask to better understand how they make their decisions and why they make their decisions and determine whether they’re structured to help achieve the goals of our provincial government,” he added.
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Unless we soon hear otherwise, there’s a reasonable chance that the ALR will be opened up for development. Which would fit with this:
“Delta’s industrial vacancy rate has dropped below 7% as of today,” Avison Young industrial broker Ryan Kerr told Business in Vancouver November 6.
“The South Fraser Perimeter Road is definitely spurring development in Delta south of the Fraser River, whereas typically in the past it was Annacis Island that was the strong market.” …
Deloitte Real Estate senior manager Jeff Ashton similarly sees a profound change in the client mix along the road as logistics and distribution companies arrive to join existing manufacturers.
“The area around the Tsawwassen First Nation (TFN) and Deltaport is the biggest beneficiary,” he said.
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Which ties in to this – Tsawwassen Mills
… approximately 1.8 million square feet of of retail, entertainment, restaurant, and office space (larger than Metrotown malls) on an 182 acre site on Highway 17 and 52nd Street that was formerly a part of the region’s ALR.
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The viability of that project also depends on this:
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Which is also helpful for this:
Port applauds province’s move to replace George Massey Tunnel
Port Metro Vancouver (PMV) is applauding last week’s announcement from the B.C. government that it has begun planning to replace the George Massey Tunnel (GMT).
The port said it has been encouraging the government to take action to address the long-standing concern that the GMT presents a barrier to continued growth in the Fraser River terminals, in particular to Fraser Surrey Docks.
[Port Metro Vancouver is currently reviewing a project permit application submitted by Fraser Surrey Docks (FSD) for the development of a Direct Transfer Coal Facility to handle up to 4 million metric tonnes of coal.]
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If the Province opens up the ALR to port-related industrial development, warehousing and intermodal operations, it avoids the Port having to use its jurisdictional superiority to override the ALR.
Which takes us to this – Pete McMartin’s column, where he puts it altogether.
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The real change is in what we still mistakenly call the suburbs. Here, the pace and scope of change make the furor over a bike lane down Point Grey Road seem hilariously parochial.
The enormity, cost and complexity of the South Fraser Perimeter Road — which is an industrial highway, not a road — has to be seen to be appreciated.We have just finished building the widest bridge in the world, every lane devoted entirely to car traffic.
The Port of Vancouver is bent on opening up the Fraser River to supertankers and deep-draught freighters, to be made possible once the Massey Tunnel is removed and replaced by a bridge.
Meanwhile, a dismaying abundance of rural and agricultural land is disappearing from Delta to Surrey to Port Coquitlam and being replaced by the march of thousands of overbuilt suburban tract houses, none of them with access to public transit.
No one out there pays much attention to Vancouverism, though they should. Urban planning is a contradiction in terms. Out there, there’s no sense of stalling. It’s full speed ahead, and the internal combustion engine is still king and the road to hell is paved.
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Not only is his column in today’s Sun, but it is immediately across the spread in the printed version from the story on the ALR:
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Nice editing, guys.
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I think you need a new section of your blog compiling these delicious juxtapositions found in newspaper layouts! Are they private jokes made by a copy editor with a sense of humour, or just one who is completely oblivious to the world around them? The Vancouver Sun cover with stories about the Calgary floods and LNG expansion comes to mind, as well as a recent page in The Province where a piece about the Point Grey “controversy” sat directly next to one about the poor woman who died on 12th Avenue. Either way, I can’t help but think someone’s having a laugh behind closed doors.
Looking at sacrosanct things is a good idea, as long as you come to the right answer. The ALR isn’t sacrosanct because it is sacred but because it is sensible. If they want to save money, keep the ALR and get rid of the commission which seems just to allow land to be taken out of the ALR. And make sure you include the costs of road construction and air pollution in your math.
One of the reasons that I am so keen on road pricing is the South Fraser Perimeter Road. Normally I bike to Barnston Island, but I was teaching someone to drive and was in a car down there some time in early June. We took the SFPR on the way back – I didn’t realize it was open yet – and it is basically a new mostly limited access freeway. It is going to be a major traffic generator if it does not get a toll on it. Another reason is that absurd Tsawwassen Mills proposal which I still have trouble believing will actually be built.
the ALR is not doing their job nor do they follow their mission statement. I am all for saving land for food production but that is not what they are doing. I sit on 17.39 acres of rock, clay and bolders. They tell me what I can spend my money on with out forethought of moneys required to do any kind of agricultural activity. Right now my breeding doesn’t count according to the ALR nor does our desire to keep green spaces and ponds for the the inhabitants of the area. I am totally fed up with the unfair practises of the ALR! As I sit and watch generations of farm land being used for condos and warehouses, or highways
The only issue with the article is that it devolves into a stereotype:
Surrey is actively building its downtown. There’s even 40 storey tower approved for Scott Road in North Delta (tho’ the southern parts of Delta will never allow anything taller than sprawl). Try getting that approved in Kerrisdale or Kitsilano.
There are even tower and podium projects proposed for Semiahmoo. Many single family projects in Surrey and Langley are on narrower lots than in the city of Vancouver or take the form of townhouses.
Is Burnaby still a surburb? It’s densifying at its town centre far and above what Vnacouver is building.
At first the article focusses on the City of Vnacouver having to accept more density – but then it harps on the suburbs with broad brush stereotypes, which causes the intial message to be lost.
Call me back when Burnaby and Surrey offer anything like Kits and Mount Pleasant.
I would say Burnaby already does on Hastings in the Heights, but that’s an old streetcar neighbourhood itself. I don’t see anything new like that popping up any time soon anywhere in the region.
Re: the ALR …. how utterly depressing. The approach espoused by minister Bennett is from the Standard Method to Incremental Death handbook. Phil Hochstein’s political donations will be returned in the form of vast tracts of single-family housing and malls on flat farmland. The Tsawassen First nation will be happy, but for a shorter periord than they realize.
The world will see a liquid fuel crisis develop probably before 2020 as the shale gas / oil “revolution” turns out to be nothing but hype (no one cares to discuss their extraordinary decline rates and costs), and the continuing downward slope of worldwide conventional oil depletion pulls the economy with it.
We will likely have a legacy of vast debt-ladden road networks, a northern BC LNG industry that will flutter out quickly as the tight rock formations deplete their gas supplies a lot sooner than investment bankers flogging this play care to admit, the government royalties from LNG peter out before the provincial budgets can recover, and an ALR half covered in sprawl just when we need to start producing food locally in earnest.
Commuters will wonder where the transit alternatives are when the price at the pump exceeds $2 / litre. Commercial truckers will scream for subsidies on top of the massive investments in public freeways and bridges. Local farmers pushed out by developers will be shaking their heads.
Oh yeah, that’s real sound long-term regional planning.
And your alternative solution? We all find jobs in gaming, filming and bicycle repair? We have annual health-care costs of $25billion (and rising fast); hemp-clothing, boutique solar panels, non-profits at Riverview and land-based fish farms won’t cover a fraction of that. Some people may not like the Provincial economic plans, but that’s not the criteria; viable reality is, and alternatives (when rarely offered), are just arm-chair goofy.
The whole comment above is arguing that the provincial government plan isn’t a viable reality. That it is, in fact, based on the false assumption that energy, in particular oil, will continue to be cheap. As soon as you factor in for peak oil, the existing sprawl south of the Fraser becomes completely unsustainable, not to mention expanding that, and that’s without even thinking about climate change.
Remember: farming in B.C. is actually a major cash generator. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry, and it could be even bigger if a large portion of the current ALR land weren’t sitting fallow. Getting rid of the ALR paves over all that industry, and leaves us high and dry when local food is more needed.
I’m starting to wonder if winning an impossible election is getting to their heads. This would be, amazingly, one of the worst decisions since the Liberals were elected in 2001, if it comes to pass. I sure hope people are organizing at this very moment to fight any proposal to weaken the ALR at a time when it should in fact be being strengthened.
Lets get the Facebook pages and petitions going now to let people know what they are doing. Most of my friends and I am guessing, the younger voters are clueless at the moment.
http://www.change.org/en-CA
Two recent articles in the sun would suggest that the take-over of agricultural land for industrial purposes is a necessity for the city of Vancouver to prosper. ‘Perimeter road turns Delta into hotspot’ July 30 and ‘Growing port creates posperity’, Aug. 7.
The first article states that the Perimeter road was constructed to “ease the regions notorious traffic congestion “. It is quite likely this will fail if we allow the build-up of more industry in this corridor. It appears as though this will be the case. The likelihood of a an alternative to the George Massey tunnel is several decades away. If we industrialize this corridor before any better infrastructure is in place it will remain as it is, an ad hoc gesture. The new road will do little to add to quality of life or “ease congestion”.
It is more likely that the road was constructed in order to facilitate the addition to the port suggested by the second article. The port article written by the CEO of Port Metro suggests that this is “not an attempt to infringe on the ALR” but that it protects the ALR from development pressure. I am not sure how Mr. Silvester proposes to do this when they are asking for 400 Hectares of Class 1 Agricultural land for the port expansion. Never mind the land taken up by the construction of the road itself.
Population increase and decrease in farmland is a geometric progression. We are at present a food exporting nation. If prime farmland continues to be eaten up by industrialization we will be working ourselves into a corner. Mr. Silvester does not see it as a problem and suggests that with the income generated we will be able to “import our food”. Imagine that. In 20-30 years we will be at the behest of countries with foresight for our basic needs. Not a dissimilar dilemma we have with oil at the present time.
Let’s tie these news articles together so that we can see where our governments are taking us.