The Land Stewardship Act and the Land Project Assembly Act received royal assent in 2009 and have since increasingly earned the attention and distain of landowners groups and area farmers. Premier Ed Stelmach ordered a review of two contentious pieces of legislation in January, a decision that should be respected from the outgoing Progressive Conservative Party leader. The government has since issued its proposed amendments for debate in the legislature.
The review and amendments are a good start to open the discussion on the effect of these acts, but whether the amendments go far enough to correct critical errors in the act remains to be seen.
The premier's ordering of a review should be applauded. Unfortunately, members of government and its departments continue to skew the matter – and fail to admit to the serious, critical flaws in the legislation that led to the review in the first place. A government press release issued last week listed the proposed amendments to the act put forward by government in a new bill, Bill 10. In the press release, the government holds on to the tired old line that the proposed amendments to the Land Stewardship Act are merely to “clarify” the intent of the act, and come in response to “misinterpretation” by critics.
This defense by government is unfortunate and does not reflect the fact that the government is amending its own enactment less than two years after it passed. The crude defense forgets that without public pressure, in particular Keith Wilson's campaign against the act, the government would not have had any reason to go to all the trouble of amending it. Legislative bodies don't go around amending acts that are merely “misinterpreted” by partisan critics. That is a nonsense argument that government should ban from the debate. If the acts were merely misinterpreted, government could defend what it sees as fine laws - because it would be just that, fine, and without need for legal “clarity.”
The amendments significantly change the legislation and directly address many of the concerns brought about by municipalities, hunters, trappers, landowners, farmers, and even agricultural lawyer Wilson. The government is not “clarifying” the act – it is changing it, perhaps for the better.
When Minister of Sustainable Resource Development Mel Knight came to Bonnyville to address what he must have known before walking into the Beaver River Fish and Game would be a hostile audience, he apologized for the mistakes in the act - something that must have took courage. Knight said the amendments would correct those mistakes. If Knight can admit to mistakes in the act, there is no reason the rest of government cannot admit it too.
If a child does something wrong, the parent expects the child to admit it and apologize. In this case the parent is the taxpayer, and it is owed a long-overdue admittance of wrong-doing and a sincere, from-the-heart apology from all government members who defend erroneous legislation.
Stelmach made the right choice to review the legislation, but all that wasted time and energy in the legislature, paid for by ratepayers, could have been avoided by getting it right the first time around. Now government MLAs just need to ‘fess up to the errors of the original legislation.
