“What happens when you start centralizing decision-making is sometimes you centralize too much,” said Danielle Smith, leader of the Wildrose Alliance, in a phone interview with the Journal. “What happened with centralization of health boards is probably similar to what happened with the centralization of decision-making through regional planning.”
Seven areas under the Land Stewardship Act, and the nine planning areas under the pre-1995 Regional Planning Commissions, are just “way too big,” she said. The Wildrose Alliance would propose smaller planning areas. Smith said about 100 planning areas, accounting for a few municipalities each, could cover the province.
The regional planning model the Wildrose would create would be quite different from the Regional Planning Commissions, she said.
“If you get to a point where you’re trying to plan for too large an area, you actually lose a lot of that local understanding,” she said. “You have to have people who actually have a feel for the land and know the area, and you can’t have that if these planning areas are too big.”
While the province could facilitate that discussion, the make up of planning areas would have to make sense to the local people, and would have to be determined locally, she said. Locally elected boards would choose a representative to represent that area on a regional board to co-ordinate planning, she said.
The processes in place with Alberta Environment to test water and air would stay intact, she said, and land reclamation would remain a provincial responsibility.
“I think the further you get away from the people that area impacted by the decisions, the worse your decisions are going to be,” Smith said.
A problem with the current management of provincial public lands right now is that the province is not being very clear with people who want to use the lands for grazing, mineral development, or forest management agreements in identifying sensitive areas that shouldn’t be developed, she said. The province has not yet identified in a coherent and consistent way to identify which lands should remain off-limits for development.
While Smith accepts that the government needs a plan for provincial land, “The problem is that they now think they should extend that purview to be managing lands and land use that has traditionally been managed locally by locally elected councils.”
“You end up with more conflicts when you’ve got distant bureaucracies and central planners coming in trying to dictate to local people,” she said.
Bill 36 can be used to punish municipalities by withdrawing transfer payments if it does not comply with the “edict from on high,” she said, added that government can deny access to the courts.
Call for a national discussion
Smith hopes to see property rights become a federal issue, but said she would not pretend problems in Alberta are federal in nature or simply due to an oversight in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
“We’ve got to fix problems in our own backyard first before we go around telling other provinces that they’re doing something wrong or telling the federal government that they’re doing something wrong.”
The Wildrose Alliance has proposed the Alberta Property Rights Preservation Act, which would require government to compensate landowners not only if land is taken, but also if it is devalued, Smith said. The party would repeal Bills 19, 24, 36, and 50.
Then the party would also seek to amend the Alberta Bill of Rights to add a clause to provide “just compensation,” she said, similar to the U.S. Constitution’s fifth amendment. After that, the party would propose the same amendment to the Charter.
“I look at this as a multi-step process … But if it’s going to get started anywhere, it’s going to get started in Alberta.
Randy Hillier, Ontario MPP, Scott Reid, a federal MP, and some others have expressed support for amending the Charter, she noted.
“We have friends and fellow travelers in other parts of the country who are working in their own ways to try to bring awareness to why this is so important.”
In 1997, Smith became the managing director of the Canadian Property Rights Research Institute, a group put together principally by the Western Stockgrowers Association and members of the oil industry, she said.
The groups were concerned about the federal proposed Species At Risk Act, the impact it would have on land use planning decisions, and the ability to have local people make decisions about what type of development would be allowed, she said.
While the group was envisioned as a think tank, it was denied charitable status for focusing on private property and not “common ownership structures,” Smith recalled, leading to the organization going dormant.
“That was just not inside our mandate. We just frankly don’t believe communism works as well as private property.”
In 2006, Smith left a job in the media to help start the Alberta Property Rights Initiative in part because of legislation like the Land Assembly Project Areas Act, she said.
People today realize the seeds of “what we’re seeing were planted about five years ago or longer,” she said. That the acts are about to be enacted upon is what has people up in arms throughout the province, she said.
