“The thrust of these three acts is to give landowners more rights, and that’s the total opposite of what’s being said,” said Minister of Infrastructure Ray Danyluk, defending legislation that Keith Wilson took aim at in an information meeting in St. Paul on March 7.
The government passed three acts in 2009, which have since become the focus of opposition parties and landowner groups. The three acts, Land Stewardship Act (Bill 36), Electric Statutes Amendment Act (Bill 50), and Land Assembly Project Area Act (Bill 19) were a response to development in the province, which is expected to ramp up again, Danyluk said.
“We can’t just have development happening, without being cognizant of land rights and of peoples’ rights,” he said. “Land rights are the most critical and important point to farmers and landowners.”
If the government did not create the acts, the province would face planning challenges in the near future, he said.
A lot of the opposition to the acts is partisan politics, Danyluk claimed. The meetings hosted by Wilson are Wildrose Alliance meetings, he said. “That’s their meetings. It started out of Wildrose, it is Wildrose meetings,” he said.
Colleen Boddez, president of Landowners Against Bills Society, has attended nearly all of Wilson’s meetings across the province over the last year and insisted the meetings are non-partisan, in a phone interview. She added that she is non-partisan but at this point in time she is not-PC, “because they’re certainly not listening to us.”
She said she posts articles on her website, landownersagainstbills.com, from any political affiliation if it supports landowner rights. The website also hosts all of the documents Wilson uses in his presentation, as well as newspaper articles covering Wilson’s presentations or the legislation. Attendance and political affiliations varies from meeting to meeting, she said.
Bills 19 and 36 should be repealed, and a “real” needs assessment should be conducted for the proposed critical transmission infrastructure related to Bill 50, said Boddez.
“When we had the Regional Planning Commissions, the focus of the authority was on population, so rural areas never really were able to contribute to the regional plan,” said Danyluk, explaining the government’s reasons for creating regional plans under Bill 36.
The capital region plan, involving 25 municipalities around Edmonton, fell under Danyluk’s portfolio as Municipal Affairs minister. The municipalities had a hard time co-operating four to five years ago, he said, and Premier Ed Stelmach asked the minister to get the municipalities together, Danyluk recalled.
“Now you don’t even hear them on the news because they have a way of looking at regional planning, and that’s exactly what they’re doing and it is working great.” The Calgary partnership is doing the same thing and is working great, he said.
“When you come to rural Alberta, that’s more difficult because you don’t have a cluster group of municipalities that need to work together.”
Before 1995, under Regional Planning Commissions, all the power went to rural urban municipalities and no power went to the rural municipalities, he said. The inequity of the commissions was a reason they were abolished, he added. After 1995, rural and urban municipalities had the ability to do what they decided on the lands, he said.
“To say that the loss of the Regional Planning Commissions lost autonomy is absolutely wrong because it gave autonomy to rural Albertans.”
Bill 36 ensures there is a plan for watersheds and enables regional planning, he said. The most important part of planning for municipalities is water and that’s why the regional plans were created around watersheds, he said.
Bill 36 accomplishes economic, environmental, and social objectives and will not eliminate land use bylaws municipalities currently use, he said. The act enables plans to create conservation areas because if the province does not, Ottawa will, he added.
The province’s experiences with the Calgary ring road and Edmonton’s Anthony Henday led government to add consultation to Bill 19, he said.
The act allows government to designate land for a public purpose as a land assembly project area for an utility or transportation corridor or for the conservation or management of water.
“Now we’re required to notify and consult,” Danyluk said. “Bill 19 gives more power to people than they ever had before,” he said, adding that previously restricted development area regulations gave the province the authority to take land for future development without consultation.
“It doesn’t freeze the land,” he said. “Bill 19 forces the government to notify, and once they notify and consult from the beginning, they have to buy the land if the landowner wants to sell it … We have to do that within two years, and if they want to keep the land, that’s their business.”
The added right in the Bill 19 is that the government must buy the land if the landowner wants to sell it, he said.
The act also maintains the right to go through expropriation, he said. Compensation would be provided based on the value of land, he said. Compensation would not be provided for speculative price increases for crops, he said.
“The one thing that is not being paid, is to suggest that in 10 years that the price of canola is going to be 60 or 80 dollars a bushel instead of 10,” he said. “There were no rights before of that happening.”
