Pay to Play in BC with farmland

1. BC has no restrictions on foreign donors to political parties.
2. BC has no restrictions on foreign ownership of farmland.
3. Legislation protecting farmland is a provincial responsibility.

In 1974, BC passed Agricultural Land Reserve legislation to protect farmland but two years ago Christie Clark's government weakened its mandate :

National Farmers Union : Losing Our Grip 2015 Update : How Corporate Farmland Buy-up, Rising Farm Debt, and Agribusiness Financing of Inputs Threaten Family Farms

"On May 30 2014, the BC government weakened BC's farmland protection legislation by passing the Agricultural Land Commission Amendment Act. The new law creates two tiers with reduced protection for 90% of the Agricultural Land Reserve : the Interior (1,528,968 acres), Kootenay (392,557 acres), and the North (2,210,783 acres). These three regions of BC are the most affected by oil, gas, and coal industry development."

Foreign companies buying B.C. farmland to earn carbon credits ...
Last year it came to light that the UK chemical company Reckitt Benckiser bought 10,500 hectares of agricultural land in the ALR in Northern BC and planted it with over 7 million trees to offset the carbon emissions of its manufacturing operations. 

Western Investor May 31 2016 B.C BC's largest land agent really deals in water

From verdant farmland to oceanfront and lakefront escapes, world demand is turning to what the West Coast has in abundance

LandQuest Realty Corp. ... said the biggest international demand is for farmland ...  China-based buyers were the first foreign climate-driven investors to begin buying B.C. farmland, primarily for hay crops. 

“We market British Columbia to the world.”

Despite the growing international interest, Osborne confirms that Canadians still make up about 85 per cent of LandQuest buyers, and this demand ranges from farms and ranches to urban retreats and trophy recreational titles.

BC Finance Minister Mike de Jong said he was not in favour of a tax on foreign investment, fearing it sends the wrong message to the Asia Pacific investors B.C. has been courting for years.

Under public pressure for the inclusion of real estate companies in her recent trade junket to Malaysia and Korea, unregulated foreign investment in urban housing, undisclosed $20K per donor private-access-to-Clark Liberal fundraising events, and her yearly $50K salary top up from the BC Liberal Party, Christie Clark's government began officially tracking foreign ownership of BC farmland for the first time yesterday.

h/t RossK@The Gazetteer for Western Investor link
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Whistleblowers protecting BC farmland muzzled

BC farmland scientists who blew the whistle on turning Agricultural Land Reserve lands into golf courses and then into housing developments are being muzzled, says agrologist and journalist Wendy Holm in this article from The Tyee.

Last year agrologist Susan Ames, then president of the BC Institute of Agricology, wrote against a proposal to withdraw land from the ALR for redevelopment of the Tsawwassen Golf and Country Club in Delta. She cautioned the Delta council against allowing farmland to be turned into golf courses and then into housing, as it "encourages speculation and puts further pressure on the ALR".

An agrologist working for the developer complained about Ames' letter to the BCIA, resulting in a BCIA conduct and discipline committee investigation and a new ruling requiring agrologists to restrict their opinions to only those sites on which they have directly carried out research.

As The Tyee points out: "the ruling allows the agrologists who offer reports that help land owners and developers remove land from the ALR to do their work without fear of being publicly contradicted by a colleague."

The chair of the BCIA conduct and discipline committee, whose expertise is not in agrology but in "accounting, finance, business management and management land use", told The Tyee, "The dollars on the table are immense."

The dollars are always "immense", sir, as are short-term economic pressures to allow developers to build housing on farmland, precisely the reason why we have the ALR in the first place.

The land reserve makes up 5% of B.C.’s land area. Apologists for removing land from the ALR point to stats showing that the total amount of land in the ALR has remained more or less constant over its 35 year history but fail to mention this is achieved by taking land out of the ALR in the lower mainland and adding some on up north.
According to Holm, "there has been a net loss of 10,000 acres from the ALR in the four regions with the most development pressure: the Island, South Coast, Okanagan and Kootenay".


Related : B.C.'s former solicitor general John Les resigned the Liberal cabinet in March after learning he is under RCMP investigation for allegedly having "improperly benefited" from acquiring land within the ALR and subdividing the land into housing lots which were sold for $85,000 each.
A former Vernon mayor has fingered Les as a "silent partner in a plan to remove the protections around some agricultural land in the area and pave the way for development".