Orders of the Day

Hon. M. Farnworth: In this chamber, I call second reading debate on Bill 52; and in Committee A, I call committee stage on Bill 49.

[R. Chouhan in the chair.]

Second Reading of Bills

BILL 52 — AGRICULTURAL LAND
COMMISSION AMENDMENT ACT, 2018

(continued)

D. Barnett: I’m pleased to stand today to speak again to Bill 52, entitled Agricultural Land Commission Amendment Act. It was great to have the opportunity to go to my riding of the Cariboo-Chilcotin last week for a few days after this bill was presented in the House and have the opportunity to talk to the Tatla Lake Cattlemen’s Association, which consists of many, many ranchers from the Chilcotin. They are very concerned about the changes once again to the Agricultural Land Reserve Act. It always affects them, yet nobody ever talks to them before the changes are made.

These changes are going to have some effects on these ranchers who have struggled so much in the past few years — struggled with fires, struggled with predators and predator control. We talk about culling wolves. We are not culling wolves; we are protecting animals. The amount of cattle that have been destroyed or maimed in the Chilcotin and Cariboo over the past few years by predators is unprecedented, and it gets worse every day.

They are concerned about removing the two zones. There are concerns about the guidelines of soil replacement or placement, because there is no definition. The only thing that I could tell them at the meeting was that we will be asking the questions of the minister when we have the opportunity later this week. I will certainly make sure that their questions are asked of the minister so I may take them back to them.

Ranching is not easy anywhere — and in particular, in areas like the Cariboo-Chilcotin, where land is very, very delicate in being agriculture land. Grasslands are tough, and these days, things are getting tougher. The more regulations, the more legislation and the more changes that are continuously made every time there’s a new government put in, it appears, the people get forgotten, and that is so important.

[2:45 p.m.]

With that, Mr. Speaker, I will thank you for the opportunity and thank my colleagues who are here making presentations today. I will turn the floor over to my colleague, who I am sure has some great responses.

R. Coleman: I am pleased to stand and speak to Bill 52.

I will probably ramble, Mr. Klein, so you should be aware of that as you go through your afternoon. I have spoken to my critic, and if I ramble past 30 minutes, I won’t stop. I’ll just continue until I’m completed, because evidently there is time if I want it. It all depends on how much heckling I get from the other side, particularly the member for Powell River–Sunshine Coast, who usually gets me going to the point….

Every summer my family would travel out to my great-grandfather’s farm in Condor, Alberta, from Penticton, British Columbia, and I got to learn a little bit about farming from my great-grandfather and my cousins across the road. They taught me how to ride a horse. I’d ride into Condor, where you could get a 15- to 20-cent haircut. It didn’t mean that it was quality, but it was cheap. Bright and early — that’s where I learned to ride a horse. Obviously, the business of farming was discussed around the kitchen table.

As a young man, my second job, after my paper route, was I picked fruit for two summers in the Okanagan. I picked cherries, apricots, peaches, pears and apples.

I’ll never forget the first time I finished picking my second day of cherries, because the first thing you had to learn was that you can’t actually pull the cherry off the tree; you’ve got to pick it at the stem. Otherwise, the tree doesn’t produce many cherries next year. You had to learn that. But I can tell you that after two days of doing that, you close your eyes at night to go to sleep and all you see are the stems of cherries.

Also, it gave me a real understanding and appreciation for those people that have spent their lives, frankly, building farming in British Columbia and generationally changing how our food is produced, and how those two types of things can change a person’s perception. It’s hard work.

Now, the worst fruit that you can pick, by the way, is peaches, because they have fuzz, just like on insulation. It’s pretty itchy at the end of every day when you pick peaches.

After that, I actually harvested potatoes. When I wasn’t working as an RCMP officer, I had a farmer who was short of people, so I went up and harvested potatoes up near Rosemary, Alberta. Just so everybody will understand exactly where that is, it’s about six miles due west of Duchess, Alberta, which is ten miles north of Brooks, Alberta. You’re getting closer to where you might understand where that is, right? It’s somewhere about 115 miles due east of Calgary and 69 miles from Medicine Hat.

It was really interesting because the gentleman, who was an Oriental gentleman, who owned the farm at the time taught me a lot about farming — the way he talked about how that potato goes from here to here. And, of course, we had an Old Dutch potato chip plant there, so we actually got to go see how potato chips were made. It’s just a little bit of context to my remarks as I go through it.

I have been very gifted in my time in this House to have met some remarkable people in and around agriculture. The first two gentlemen were two gentlemen by the names of Jim Shield and Dick Sendal. Now, Jim and Dick were both chicken farmers, and the interesting thing about it was…. This was back in ’96 when I met those guys. Unfortunately, both of them have passed away since that time. They were very generous with their time, to explain supply management, the background to it and the reason there is supply management in the management of agriculture in B.C.

A lot of people have this misconception about it. They think it’s protecting of markets and protecting of price. But supply management actually came into force in British Columbia and in Canada because farmers weren’t getting paid. Farmers were going broke. They had to pay their feed supplier, but they wouldn’t get paid for their product when it arrived, whether it would be the dairy or whether it would be at the place where they actually process the chickens — the chicken processors — or the turkeys or whatever the case may be. So they made a pretty strong case for supply management.

There are benefits to that type of agricultural product being managed here, and I have concerns about whether the move on the North American free trade deal is actually good for our food production in Canada.

[2:50 p.m.]

You will notice that the poultry has a different colour down in the United States in some areas, because of the amount of corn that is fed to them versus the other type of feed that we may be using in Canada. The quality of chicken is different, if you actually try and taste it, going to certain areas of the U.S.

The reality is that we want to make sure our food supply is protected, and we want to be able to react in periods of time when there may be certain concerns within the food supply.

I’ll give you an example of that. Back a number of years ago, we had the avian flu. We actually had to put down 19 million chickens to try and save the stock, to actually save the product, and it had to be a collaboration with the federal government, the provincial government and the producers. Because the producers were in supply management and had worked together and knew each other, they could get in a room and try and find solutions together. They weren’t actually trying to play off what their own special interests were but rather what the future was, in particular, for the production of chickens in British Columbia.

After many tries at different things, like taking chickens to an old mine up in Princeton, to basically incinerating them — because you had to get rid of them, to try and use an incinerator in Burnaby — we were sitting there one day, and we had this big problem: “We need to stop the avian flu before it crosses the Vedder. We need to get this thing under control.”

Because the heads were together in one room, I remember asking the question. I said: “What temperature do you have to get to, to kill the flu?” I got an answer to the question. Then I said: “What temperature does compost get to in an Ag-Bag?” Do you know what an Ag-Bag is? They’re great, big, long bags where they put in waste and other things to compost. Well, it gets up to a temperature higher than is needed to kill the avian flu.

Because there was collaboration with people around the table, it was solved by simply taking the avian flu–sick chickens, putting them in Ag-Bags with the other stuff that comes from the chicken, like the waste and what have you, and six months later you had topsoil. If you hadn’t had cooperation as a result of people being concerned in that particular business, I don’t think you would have got to that solution. You’d still be talking about how we lost the chicken population in British Columbia.

Now, there’s another piece of that story that I think is important to recognize when it comes to agriculture in British Columbia. On that particular file, because of the management of the resource and the relationship, I think, and the size and volume that could affect people and jobs and, obviously, the supply of food in Canada, the government of Canada stepped up and paid a certain amount per chicken as compensation to the people that were losing their crop.

It’s important to say that, because I had somebody tell me a story the other day about a rancher that was taking eight of his cows to market up in the Cariboo. Some of the cows died on the way to the slaughterhouse, and the others could not be processed because of the damage to their lungs from smoke from the fires in the Cariboo. Nobody has offered that rancher any compensation for something that was out of his control, yet the avian flu wasn’t in the control of the poultry farmer.

It’s important to understand the difference as we get into a conversation in and around this particular act because, quite frankly, there was a reason people worked on zone 1 and zone 2, which this legislation gets rid of. If you’re a farmer in the Fraser Valley and you need to get your tractor fixed, there are multiple mechanics and services around the capacity and the size of farming that you can get that done. If you need a vet in a hurry, you can get a vet in a hurry. There are veterinarians, obviously, because there’s population and activity on the farm base.

If you’re in an area like the Okanagan Valley and you’re in the winery business, you can have a bistro, you have farm-gate sales, and you have an industry that’s been built around the tourism side for you to actually sell your product, direct delivery. It helps you with your profitability and your cash flow so you can continue to farm your winery in the Okanagan Valley. There’s nothing you can do like that in the Cariboo and the north.

[2:55 p.m.]

One thing I learned in Brooks, Alberta back then — because I got to know some of the farmers — was that we had two types of farmers in that area. They had diverted the river, created Lake Newell and an aqueduct, so there were dry-land and wetland farming. Well, a dry-land farmer just basically lives by the weather, lives by whether they get enough rain at the right time, get enough heat at the right time or their crop grows or gets damaged by frost or whatever the case may be; whereas a wetland farmer who’s got irrigation can grow a better yield, simply because they can actually water their crop and have more control about how that crop can be delivered.

You can do that in the Fraser Valley. There’s drip irrigation for raspberries, strawberries and blueberries. It’s not so easy to do in the Cariboo, where you have thousands and thousands of acres without water. You have land that can’t actually produce a crop. So if you’re a rancher, you have to find some area where you can actually grow some hay to feed your cattle after they’ve grazed during the months.

It’s important to understand that these folks don’t have the same services. They don’t have the services at their doorstep with veterinarians. They don’t have the services at their doorstep for fixing equipment. In some cases, they’re 40, 50 minutes or maybe two hours from town. There’s nothing there, yet if they try and do something alternative to actually try and increase their revenue so they can actually stay on the farm, they can’t.

The whole idea of the zone 2 is to recognize that there are two zones in British Columbia: one where it’s very productive and farmers can actually continue to farm, and an area where it’s difficult and it’s tough, and it takes commitment of the farmer. The challenge is what happens in the next generation. The next generation of farmer is having difficulty even considering whether they can farm or not, especially if they’re outside of the Lower Mainland.

I have a friend that has 500 head of cattle in Hedley. It’s a challenge. He can grow the hay, but he has the range area that he has to have these cattle on over a period of time. If he wanted to have a little store for having some of the product that he might be able to produce from his cows for sale on the roadside, he can’t have it. He is restricted because the rules around butcher shops — relative to where they can be and can’t be and how they’re regulated and changed — put them in a situation where they cannot get value-added for their product, their cow, yet they’re expected to maintain that farm and pay its operations and continue on.

In the West Kootenay, it’s a significant challenge. I’d like to quote from something that was actually sent to the Agricultural Land Commission on one of the presentations that was made with regard to the East Kootenays and farming. Now, the lady that wrote it — her name is Faye Street. She was born and raised in agriculture, and if you’ve met Faye, you know she’s deeply committed to agriculture.

I think she has a point here, and I’d like you to work some figures with me as I give you a small example to drive home the message that the urgent situation we face is not regarding the disappearance of agricultural lands but the critical loss of agricultural producers. Faye’s biggest concern is that we’ll lose the farmer altogether and that the agricultural land just won’t be agricultural land.

“If we took the meridian of Highway 2 between Calgary and Edmonton, which is 185 miles and approximately 500 feet wide” — I’ve driven that highway; I’m sure a lot of you have — “with a generous estimation that at least 70 percent of it is usable — overpasses and river crossings, canyons, etc., excepted — of the 11,200, there’s 7,850 acres of land, just in the meridian.

“Potatoes yield, table grade, approximately 12 tonnes per acre, so that is 94,000 tonnes of spuds that would’ve been able to be grown on that land. If we assume a generous average of 40 pounds of spuds per person per year, we can feed 4.7 million people with the Calgary-to-Edmonton meridian.

“Now, let’s talk about how many farmers and ranchers we are losing on a daily basis due to old age, economics and how few of our young agriculture folk–raised people are not coming into the industry. The East Kootenay agriculture stats are actually staggering, and the reduction in new farmers and the farmers being closed down are staggering.

[3:00 p.m.]

“This is a concern, because we only need to look at the increase of food prices, the decrease in the number of mother cows, the decline in pork producers, etc., to know that it is a series of problems for our agriculture industry, the industry that provides good-quality, clean and healthy food for many very lucky people to live in this great province of ours.

“There’s a concern, because if you cannot have an alternative way to actually support your farm in rural British Columbia, people will leave the farm and not farm, and we end up with zero. People don’t have the opportunity to have farm-gate sales. They don’t have the opportunity to actually get the yield off the land, yet we tell them to keep doing it and continue to restrict their ability to do anything.

“I don’t think it’s too much to ask, if we want to somebody to farm thousands of acres of land for wheat or barley or other products, that we would allow them to have some additional activities on the agricultural land that would actually help them to keep their farm and bring in some extra revenue. Some of these operations are just to pay the bills, just so they can continue to farm and provide agricultural products for us in British Columbia and elsewhere. Some of the suggestions that they made are welding shops, carpentry shops, a portable sawmill, a parking and repair shop for industrial equipment that is owned by the rancher or farmer.

“Imagine this, now. In an area up in northern B.C., where you might be able to do some work in the oil patch, you can’t park your trucks on your farm. You could have thousands of acres up there, and you can’t park on your farm, yet without that increase of that other income, the farm goes by the wayside and the next generation can’t afford to do it.”

The question that Faye asked at the time was: what parameters should be allowed around these uses? First of all, that they don’t locate on prime, food-producing land. That’s pretty logical. Why would you take a food-producing piece of property and then park equipment or something on it? We’re going to get to that in a minute, when we talk about some greenhouses I want to chat about, though.

At the same time, the whole purpose of the legislation is to support and enhance agriculture. When the ALC becomes a detriment to future agriculture, it’s time to do some serious rethinking. We’re not doing that in this bill. We’re actually retrenching backwards. We’re ignoring the fact that we will start to lose agriculture in rural British Columbia.

Faye wanted to really encourage people to think about those opportunities for people going forward with regard to agriculture.

Now, I have another little twist that I was given about this particular issue. I want to bring this one into the record because I met this gentleman. He’s one of my constituents, and he had a pretty good point. He did make a presentation to the Agricultural Land Commission consultation on this bill, but this wasn’t taken into consideration in the bill. He asks this: “Imagine what the Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley would be like if all forested lands were cleared for agriculture production or housing. With the current ALC review being carried out, we have seen newspaper articles espousing that all lands on the ALR should be used for farming, and for heavily taxed lands in the ALC that are not currently being farmed.”

Now, that’s the second point. It’s his major point — for heavily taxing lands that are not currently being farmed. He happens to believe that wetlands and forest areas around the urban area are important and sometimes as important, if not more important, for the environment than farming of every last piece of land in the ALR.

“Looking at Google Earth view, the Lower Mainland and the Fraser Valley as it stands, proportionately, there are very few forested areas left between Delta and Agassiz.

“This family is unique. We’re in a unique situation because the land that we own has been in the family since 1953, when our parents, Beryl and Roy Moore, purchased the land. In 2007, there was a 3.5-acre homesite severance for our parents, and we kept the remainder. When the property was initially purchased, there was a small raspberry farm on what was now the homesite severance. A small portion of the land was used for raising pigs until the late ’80s, when it became burdensome for our recently retired parents.

“A majority of the land remains as it was when it was purchased in 1953, a diverse and burgeoning forest. There’s about eight to 12 acres of property that is bog or marsh, perfectly suited for supporting the diverse ecosystem of the forest and the water of the Hopington aquifer and a tributary of McInnis Creek.”

This, by the way, is a spawning creek. The Hopington aquifer — if anybody knows about aquifers — is a very significant and important aquifer in the Fraser Valley.

[3:05 p.m.]

“I’m writing to bring notice to the situation we find ourselves in. With the current ALR/ALC review, there have been a few ideas floated about how to combat speculation on farmland and make sure the farmland is being used.

“We’re in a unique situation where the land has been kept intact and forested, allowing refuge for wildlife, providing nutrients for plants, animals and fish and also the carbon storage, a small but vital part of combating global warming. We want to make sure that our property and others in the ALR that are forested are recognized as unique and vital to diverse-climate ecosystems and aquifers.”

They want to do that not just for the sequestration of carbon but to let people know and understand that they’ve kept this land. They could clear the trees, plant something, affect the watersheds and get enough of a small amount of revenue to get farm taxes on their property. They just would like the consideration that some people who are actually trying to protect the environment, as well, should not be overly taxed because they happen to not be farming a piece of land that isn’t so much farmable but is actually giving another benefit to the environment.

Their biggest concern, when they made their presentation to the committee, was that — that if we’re going to tax people who don’t farm farmland, then make sure we’re talking about people whose land doesn’t have another benefit to the environment or to our future.

Now, the commission has a difficult job, and sometimes they kind of miss the boat. Recently, they put a stop-work order on a farm of 16 acres that was actually going to go back into production. The bees had been ordered to actually have a honeybee farm. The plants had been ordered, a greenhouse for a small area of the property, plus some other plants. They were going to go back into production.

The Agricultural Land Commission decided to put a stop-order on the property because somebody complained that they’d brought in some fill. The fill was the gravel crush to create the driveway to get to the barn and the property to actually farm it. It wasn’t doing anything else but that.

This is where I think the commission sometimes misses the boat, because they’re still fighting over this — probably $50,000 in legal fees on my constituent’s side. All of these things were approved through the local government and through consultations with the Agricultural Land Commission. I think we have to understand it. That’s important to understand, because, at the same time as this happens to one of my constituents, I can point you to a six-acre piece of land that was filled four feet by fill.

Complaints and calls went to the Agricultural Land Commission over the years. These guys got tipping fees for the dump that was put on the land. Then they top-filled a little bit of it, and they grew blueberries there. But they actually never got an enforcement order — they never, ever went out after these guys — in spite of the fact that the commissioners of the day said: “We have to do something about dumping.”

This particular property has one of the largest homes I’ve ever seen in my life, today, in the agricultural land reserve. What it tells people is: “Go ahead. Try and bring a farm into production. My goodness gracious, go ahead and dump fill that’s got rebar and drywall and other stuff in it over here, but if you want to make your driveway, we’re going to come after you.” This is where the balance has got to start coming back into this thing with regard to the commission and how it does its business.

I want to read a section of an act, if I can put my hands on it. I want to talk for a few minutes about greenhouses and the situation we’re facing with regard to marijuana, which will lead me into my discussion about house sizes, generational housing, other uses of property and how to get the next generation to farm. In south Aldergrove, near the border, there’s an 800,000-square-foot greenhouse. The greenhouse is growing marijuana. Frankly, it stinks. It’s a regular series of complaints through my office and into the community with regard to the production of marijuana.

[3:10 p.m.]

Now, I couldn’t get the attention of this company when I phoned them a couple of times to tell them I wanted to talk to them about this issue. Therefore, what I did was I actually wrote to the Minister of Justice, the Solicitor General of the province, the Attorney General of B.C. and the minister responsible for cannabis federally to point them to section 85 of the federal legislation. I want to read section 85 of the federal legislation because this is going to clearly and concisely tell you what these guys should or should not be doing.

This is section 85 of the regulations. “The building or part of the building where cannabis is produced, packaged, labelled and stored must be equipped with a system that filters air to prevent the escape of odours.”

I know the government is aware of this. I know the federal government is now aware of it, but nobody is enforcing this regulation. So let me tell you how they try and do it. As their plants become more mature and humidity builds up in the thing, they open up the vents in the top of the greenhouse, which releases this odour. Having dealt with odours before, whether it be complaints about chicken or mink or turkey or pork or whatever in the agricultural land reserve, I think it’s important to realize that this one is worse. It really is something bad. But this particular situation exists in South Aldergrove.

Let me tell you how they’ve been trying to solve the problem. They have these giant fans and buckets and barrels of a Febreze-type product. What they do is they turn these fans on. They’re not particularly quiet, and they spray the Febreze into the air so they can mask the smell of the marijuana coming out of the top of the greenhouse. But let me tell you it doesn’t work. It just makes it smell sweet-smelling. Same smell — marijuana.

The reason I bring that up here is this is 800,000 square feet — 16.8 acres of land under glass in one location. Just one location. Now, that’s a lot of acreage under glass. Yet, some guy that’s got thousands of acres up in the Cariboo can’t have a welding shop on a piece of the property that isn’t usable for growing anything. But it goes way beyond that. One company alone has three million square feet to grow under glass, which is 68 acres of land growing marijuana.

Now, my colleague from Delta can tell you that one of those particular grow operations is in Delta. If I’m not mistaken, it’s probably one of the largest, if not the largest, greenhouse in British Columbia at about 1.2 million square feet. They’ve got Febreze too. They’re blowing their fans, and throwing their Febreze into the air and going on with this stuff to the detriment of everybody that lives in the area.

The irony of the one in Aldergrove is that the guys that work the border crossing, both the American and U.S. border-crossing guys, have actually complained to me about the smell of the operation at the border crossing. If you drive across O Avenue, 8th Avenue or 16th Avenue in Langley, you’re going to smell it.

But the regulation says they can’t do that. It’s really clear. It’s really clear because it states, right in the federal regulation: “…must be equipped with a system that filters air to prevent the escape of odours.”

Now, I realize the decision was made by the Agricultural Land Commission and under the act, as a recommendation, that cannabis would be an agriculture product. I get that. No different than wisteria would have been for flowers or whatever the case may be. But the federal act is very clear.

At the same time, there are people who have bought and changed greenhouses in my area of the community, one at 250,000 square feet, where they don’t have to open up any vents. They’ve actually done the screening so they can have it enclosed. They don’t have to have the greenhouse vents open. They can handle the smell. Frankly, those are people that I would call responsible companies and citizens.

[3:15 p.m.]

At the 800,000-square-foot property down in South Aldergrove, there’s a 60,000-square-foot building being built. It’s bigger than most of the buildings that are in the Gloucester Industrial Park. It’s under construction today. It got in under the rules that the government got around to changing last summer and is actually going to be the largest industrial building south of the….

Deputy Speaker: Thank you, Member.

R. Coleman: I’m the designated speaker.

Deputy Speaker: There you go.

R. Coleman: It will be the largest….

Interjections.

R. Coleman: I have no intention of doing two hours. Well, I could go back and redo it from the beginning.

The reality is this. Let’s get down to the reality. This will be, from the No. 1 Highway south to the American border, around the 264 corridor, the largest industrial building in the area, and it’s on farmland. It’s on arable farmland. It used to be able to grow strawberries, and it used to be able to grow blueberries. Across the street from the land is actually a blueberry farm.

The guy who owns the blueberry farm — imagine when he woke up and found out. One day he had the guy who was growing peppers and cucumbers across from him. But all of a sudden, he was going to bed every night with a stink, because it was changed to a different product and did not and still does not conform to the federal regulation.

We’re going to have this big industrial building. We allow a 50,000- to 60,000-square-foot industrial building, 800,000 square feet under glass, and then we turn our attention, for whatever reason, to attack the generational farmer. That’s what this is about.

You see, in this act, they decide what the size of a home should be on agricultural land. Now, I get the reason. I’ve got these in my riding. I’ve got people on five acres that have literally built mansions, who actually get some farm taxes because they raise a few horses and they do enough to sell to get enough revenue that they can actually say they’re farming, who are there because they want an estate.

There are a whole bunch of farmers in the Fraser Valley, over in Delta, even out through Abbotsford and into Chilliwack who are what we call generational farmers.

Two of them — I’m calling them generational — are friends of mine. They came to see me, and they asked me this question. Both of them are South Asian gentlemen, originally from the Punjab, whose families came over here and lived three, four families to a house while they picked fruit and built enough equity to get a little bit of land to start farming themselves. They started to grow as a family and build a generational farm over time. They want to know what they’ve done wrong. That’s what they want to know.

This is what they said to me. They said: “Rich, we have a house that’s more than 5,000 square feet. But in our culture, we actually care for our elderly parents at home. We have space in our home so those folks can not have to go into care. They can be with their children and their grandchildren — in some cases, their grandchildren. We have one or two or three families, sometimes, living there because we’re running a farm. We need to have people to run the farm, so the family cooperatively gets together. We don’t live in a mansion. We live in a generational farmhouse. However, it’s more than 5,000 square feet.”

Now, the dumbest thing about this piece of legislation, with regards to the size of the square foot of a home, which is 500 metres — which, by the way, is just under 5,400 square feet, if you come from my generation — is you could build a rancher and cover 5,400 square feet of land, or you could go up and be called 5,400 square feet on less land. But it’s 5,400 square feet.

What we say to people who want to actually build a generational farm is: “We’re going to decide for you because, quite frankly, we think we know better what your family needs.”

[3:20 p.m.]

This isn’t people that are out there building estates with circular drives and fountains. This is people who are running hundreds and hundreds of acres of blueberries, strawberries and raspberries, who work dawn to dusk almost 365 days of the year, who today feel — and these are their words, not mine — that the government of British Columbia is bigoted towards them. That’s what they told me on Friday.

So 500 metres multiplied by the square footage — just look it up and do the calculation — is just under 5,400 square feet. Some people need a bigger house than that.

Interjection.

R. Coleman: No, they can’t. In actual fact, if that’s the case, then the guy that’s running a few horses is actually getting just enough revenue, Minister, to be able to call himself a farm, and he didn’t actually do it. They just sell stuff back and forth. You’ve got to know the game by now. You’ve got to know it, and you’ve got to know the process, because at one time, you experienced that process.

As we go forward, it’s okay to have a 40,000 or 50,000 or 60,000-square-foot industrial building on agricultural land, but we’re going to dictate to people what they get to live in on agricultural land. I just see that as wrong. I think that these guys and their frustration are correct. I think it’s generational work that they’ve done and a generational contribution they’ve made to our province.

I have a friend that came here when he was nine years old. There were four brothers in the family. I think Mr. Speaker might even know some of these folks. They started out in one house, with all their children and their parents, and picked fruit and made revenues so that they could start to build enough equity as a group so they could build a farm and do other investments in British Columbia.

My friend’s family banked some land — land that people said could never be farmed — which today is some of the best cranberry land in the country. But they bought it cheap, they worked it hard, and they reaped the benefits of having a farm. Today the house they live in — with their two parents; two adult children, and some children with them; and themselves running the farm — wouldn’t be acceptable with this government today, which is stunning when you think about it.

It’s absolutely stunning, and to them…. They actually went into a municipality and inquired about building permits in that particular area. They said: “The rules are changing. If you don’t get your permit in, you won’t be able to build that house on your farm.”

That’s the message they’re getting, Minister, directly from the people who are telling them whether they can have a building permit or not. I think it’s quite interesting.

Interjection.

R. Coleman: As the member for Peace River South says, that’s the briefing that we got from — guess who — the Minister of Agriculture on the bill in the bill briefing. That’s what they told us. You don’t have to make this stuff up. It’s actually correct.

Now, let’s talk a little bit about the rest of the province. People, in two years of fires, have had the hoofs burnt off their cows and had to put them down. They’ve had cows that have cancer that they can’t take to market, that they can’t sell — not a dime. Not a dime from this government to those folks at all. Not a dime.

As a matter of fact, I just talked to a rancher the other day, and he said: “These guys don’t care about farming. They actually don’t care about it.”

Obviously I’ve touched a little nerve here, because somebody doesn’t like the fact that we are actually caring about the people in rural B.C. and how they get a chance to farm, one zone versus the second zone.

You have to go and sit at the kitchen table with these folks. Spend some time with them and understand their business. I know. Some of them I’ve known for 20 years, and it’s difficult. It’s difficult in the Chilcotin plateau. It’s difficult in the northeast part of the province and up towards Fort St. John and Fort Nelson — a long way away from services and opportunities for these people.

As far as we’re concerned, they should stay on that land, not be allowed to have any other opportunities to make any extra money, and they should do this for us as people on food supply. Yet we’ll pay for the chickens and the avian flu. Why is that? Why do governments ignore one place in a province and not the other? Why do they think one-size-fits-all solutions fit in this province? It’s a big province, and farming is difficult in some areas. The opportunity to succeed…. It’s important that we allow this.

[3:25 p.m.]

At the same time, I have a friend that grows shrimp on land in Langley — produces shrimp. In all fairness to the provincial government, it wasn’t a difficulty to get that thing permitted, because it was federal. I don’t know what Fisheries and Oceans are doing, trying to regulate and deal with stuff for a shrimp farm on agricultural land — on land — where it isn’t in the ocean, but they did. The process they went through…. If it wasn’t for the determination of the individual, probably most people would have walked away.

There are a lot of families that depend on agriculture in this province. I know a lot of them. A lot of them have become my friends over the years. I’ve gotten to know them as their MLA and also as a member of this Legislature.

Whether it’s grains and oilseeds in the Peace, tree fruits in the Okanagan or cattle ranches in the Cariboo, we have to be mindful of these folks. There are vegetables and a dairy farm in the Fraser Valley, and we shall not forget the Creston Valley, where I had a friend years ago who’s now passed away. He used to raise fruit trees and fruit in the Creston Valley.

Every part of our province is building a stronger future for our families, with the exception of us trying to do one-size-fits-all solutions to take away the opportunities for families to sustain themselves and build a long-term future for agriculture in B.C. So I’d strongly urge the government to reconsider what they’re doing, some of the things they’re doing here, particularly the zone 1, zone 2 piece because, quite frankly, if you keep orphaning the opportunity to actually have a sustainable farm, you’ll orphan the opportunity to grow food all together.

When you ignore the cattle rancher who’s had a tough year at the expense of some of the subsidies and special things they can do on farms elsewhere, whether it be bistros or tasting rooms or whatever the case may be — which I think is great, by the way…. I just think you should give them the same opportunities and understand that zone 1 and 2 are so totally different. I’ve got colleagues who are going to follow me, speaking here, who will probably speak about that much more than I am.

To my South Asian family, who think they’re being prejudiced against because they happen to be farmers and may want to build a house someday; to the rancher in the Cariboo, who my heart goes out to when you see animals that you’ve raised from scratch — spent the time and fed them up — and find out that they’ve got cancer from fires…. Or you have to take care of the animal because their hooves were burned off in a fire.

Then we expect them not to have an opportunity to find other revenues so that they could go buy next year’s inventory — get the calves that they could can do and graze to maybe have an inventory of cows for the next year’s revenue. We slam the door on them.

I thought that when we did zone 1 and 2, we finally opened the door to farming survival in rural British Columbia. This bill slams the door again.

B. Stewart: It’s a pleasure to rise after my colleague from Langley, who has spoken here about some unique and interesting experiences across the province — not only in his riding, but across the province — and the many challenges that people in agriculture will face.

You know, I think about the people that I represent in the riding of Kelowna West. It, you can well imagine, is one of the zone 1 areas at this point in time — highly intensive agricultural production on many pieces of land; not all, but many. I certainly think they’re very interested in terms of the future of the Agricultural Land Commission and the amendments. I say that meaning that the people there were obviously from one of the areas that was targeted back in 1973, in April, when the Land Commission Act came into being. It was targeted at areas where there was a loss of up to 6,000 acres per year. I think that there’s no question. I’ve seen aerial photographs. I’ve seen the changes, both in the Lower Mainland and in my own community.

[3:30 p.m.]

I do think that in the decades since the Agricultural Land Commission has been there, it has been modernized. I think that some of the things that have been very progressive have been opening up the ability for uses on the particular land. That’s one of the things that we don’t know. We’re not in the committee stage. I look forward to getting more specific references from the minister and her staff in terms of specifics about the flexibility — imaginative kinds of options that might exist.

[L. Reid in the chair.]

I know, in my lifetime…. I’ve spent an entire career in agriculture, as has my father, as had his father, all here in British Columbia, farming for well over a century a diversity of fruits, vegetables, tree fruits and, of course, grapes, which we have extensive knowledge of today.

I think that one of the things that I want to speak to today is that agriculture is critical as an industry to the province, not just as it was back in 1973 but as it is today, and it will be for many, many generations and decades ahead.

There are thousands of families that depend on agriculture for their livelihood. I’ve seen it firsthand. Having the benefit of being the minister of this particular ministry for a period of time, I’ve had the opportunity to see the diversity, the imagination, the creation of opportunities that have been created by people taking simple products…. Like Vanderpol’s Eggs — taking the eggs and separating them and turning the product into constituents of what we use in baking.

I was intrigued by that, but I am further intrigued about, you know, the experience that I had personally with representing British Columbia in Asia. In the three and a half years I represented the province, there were literally thousands of opportunities — so many opportunities that we can’t even imagine what the possibility is.

Here we talk about the 4½ million hectares that are under the reserve currently. I still look at the opportunities that are, you know, in places — the Cariboo and Chilcotin — after this particular fire season where many of the forests were devastated. That’s going to have a significant impact not only on farming families but families that depend on the resource sector for fibre supply to make certain that that fibre gets to their mills and there’s a value-added component to it.

I do think that there are new opportunities there for agriculture to take over some of those lands, possibly with some help from the government. It doesn’t necessarily need to have the help of us restricting what the land use is. It’s about making the land usable in terms of making it so that there’s that opportunity for either cattle or other grazing animals to perhaps exist on that land base.

One of the things that I did learn as the minister, and I’m sure that the minister herself has seen this…. Whether it’s grain or oilseeds in the Peace River, grapes or tree fruits in the Okanagan, cattle ranches in the Cariboo and Chilcotin, vegetables and dairy in the Fraser Valley, farmers are in every part of this province. They build stronger families, and they build strong communities. I can attest to that.

One of the very first trips visiting Vanderhoof, earlier in 2009, seeing most communities up north of Prince George where they were single-industry towns, and they didn’t have the luxury of diversity…. I think that what I saw when I arrived in Vanderhoof was that here was a community that had the diversity of agriculture and other things. It had been able to get through those challenging times of the 2008 financial crisis which devastated our forest sector, our lumber industry and the fact that in many of the commodity markets for our products, prices were at rock bottom.

Communities that were single-industry…. Fraser Lake. Fort St. James. Many of them were literally wandering the streets wondering what opportunities were going to be presented to them. I couldn’t help but think about the opportunity that agriculture offered them. Even Mayor Stephanie Killam, the mayor, at the time, of Mackenzie, talked to me about how do we create, let’s say, agricultural land around the village of Mackenzie.

[3:35 p.m.]

In that particular time, we had four sawmills, three pulp mills — absolutely nothing happening. Probably the busiest office up there was our Service B.C. office, helping people try to make certain that they could get access to the government services that we were providing to bridge that gap.

I’m happy to see that the former member and the current member have made it a priority to making certain that those mills are back up and operating. I am sure that Mayor Killam’s idea of expanding agriculture was based on the fact that diversity was an important part of what we need in the province.

If you sit down and speak to a farmer, you’ll quickly learn that the key to success is balance — the right amount of sunshine, the right amount of water, the right amount of nutrients. Too much, too little of any of these and 100 other factors can have a minor to major impact on the crops. I was thinking about that, and I remember dealing with trace micronutrients in a particular application I was doing years ago on our farm and the effects of too much — what the effects can be.

Farming is a very sophisticated, complex, demanding job. In the days of running a diversified, mixed farm in the Okanagan, or mixed farm, if you happen to have livestock…. The diversity was part of a strategy to keep families on the land, being able to put food on the table — and diversity.

I can’t help but think about the community that I grew up in, which is now the city of West Kelowna, but it was Westbank at the time. Many of the people that were there had other businesses that they worked out of their farms. Adrian Reece had backhoes and caterpillars. He dug a lot of our waterlines, helped us install that, but he still farmed his own orchard just down the road from us.

Felix Menu, who did repairs to equipment, welded, did those types of things openly because it was part of the fact that in order to…. He took a skill set, and he went a little bit further. He didn’t give up on farming, but he took that skill set that he’d learned over time and was able to do that. Jack Maddock, in Westbank, had the garage up there that did complex repairs.

So it’s many of these people that continued to help build the community and take it from what it was then to literally where the land prices are staggering for agricultural land. Recently we’ve seen some transactions at near $200,000 per acre for agricultural land.

To be honest, I can’t quite imagine how the land can generate the revenue that it has to generate for that. But we are seeing a number of people that are not traditional farmers come into the Okanagan Valley and grow the idea or grow the business of being in something that’s very romantic. It has rewards, if you get it right. Needless to say, it is making it tougher for the more established farming families to be able to grow their business.

Anyways, one of the things that I think we talk about is balance. In my very first visit up to the Peace River, I remember a document that was given to then Premier Campbell, who passed it on to me. He said to me: “Look, Ben. I want you to look at this. These people really have something here, I think. I want you to investigate, report back to me and tell me what we should be looking at doing.”

The Peace River, for most people, especially the ones that are in this House…. They probably rarely travel up there. I know my colleagues spend a lot of time in planes. I hate to think, if they have to drive, how far it is.

Anyways, the point about it is that it’s no wonder that sometimes the differences between their neighbouring province, which is a competitor when it comes to grains and oil seeds and canola and all the other things they grow up there, whether it’s the grain elevator that was repurposed, reopened by the farmers up in the north…. The bottom line is that these are farmers like anywhere else. They’re just trying to get by.

The idea that you can compare somebody that’s got a greenhouse operation — intensive farming generating, literally, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars on a per-hectare basis because of the intensity….

[3:40 p.m.]

To compare that to the people that are in these regions where there’s a vast amount of land, but the growing season, the soil capability, the shortness of the growing season are the difference between whether they survive to being able to see that next crop next spring, being able to replenish, whether they’re a cattle producer that maybe had a particularly tough year…. I mean, how can anybody not see that we’ve had challenging years in the Cariboo and the Chilcotin?

And our cattle industry. We need to get it to the point where we’re growing the herd size. The bottom line is that a lot of times, farmers are faced, because of economic reasons, with having to sell early and take a lower price for their animals.

We don’t really provide what, I would say, are particularly good risk management programs for those types of producers. We do have some, but they pale in comparison to production-type crops that are very consistent and that look at the volume per hectare or whatever the measurement is for the particular crop.

The point about it is that those people are neighbours who not only have things like oil and gas opportunities that may be beneath the surface — and that doesn’t necessarily mean that they benefit — but the situation is that there are opportunities to maybe being able to do some of the activities that go hand in hand with what the rural nature is.

I mean, it’s rural. We’re talking about…. I don’t know whether it’s a third, but it may be 25 percent of the province. I know the riding of Peace River North, and I’ve been to Fort Nelson and all the way up to its borders and stuff like that. My goodness, there’s nobody in the House that has to travel farther, as far as I know — maybe the member for Stikine. The situation is that there’s a lot of agricultural land reserve up around Fort Nelson. The people up there, the mayor and council, often wondered. Nobody had ever had a farm there. There were a few hobby farms. But they asked the question: “Why do we have this land in the land reserve?”

Well, let’s go back to 1973 when this became an act. How was it determined that land was going to be in the land reserve or not? We have a land map, the Canada land inventory map. It was developed after the war by a soil scientist. Mapping extensively, going around — based on records that they’d had — they mapped out Canada. Those maps were the primary basis of soil capability.

That’s probably a good starting point if you’re looking at technology that’s almost 75 years old or more in data, but the reality is — based on information that I’ve seen and I’ve used and that we currently continue to use in our farming operations — that we look at all sorts of ways of trying to enhance and add balance and things that will make farmland even better.

One of the things that we’re going to talk a little bit about here today…. We’re going to talk about fill, replacement of soil and removal. The bottom line is that that might be seen in some places as something kind of negative. I probably have more experience in doing that work than most people. As a matter of fact, we’ve levelled hundreds of acres and moved it so that land that was not capable of agricultural products could be brought into production, taking out topsoil in low spots, filling it in with alkaline soil or maybe soils that are less desirable, replacing that and putting in drainage so that high levels of salts could be discharged off the land and drained away to improve that.

I have a composting operation that generates over 1,000 cubic metres, every year, of compost that we’ve put out in a directed-discharge manner. We have the unfortunate situation of having land that’s on the borderline of not really being very good agricultural land, just because of the way the Okanagan Valley was developed at the time. I think that every situation is unique.

You know, what I see is that we’re creating…. What’s being proposed in this is the fact that there is no type of landfill or alteration that can be good and the fact that the people that are the regulators have a better understanding than maybe the people that really farm and want to increase the productivity. We see situations such as Grand Forks this year, where they were confronted with farmland that was going to be flooded out. In this particular case, they may as well not be able to protect their land or their buildings or whatever because of the fact that we have rules that may prevent that.

[3:45 p.m.]

There’s no real kind of…. When these emergencies happen, sometimes it’s a case of getting your local truckers or whatever and putting up a dike or something interim to just make certain that your home and your outbuildings or whatever are protected. So I think that the idea doesn’t really quite go far enough. Or maybe that’s imagined, and we’ll get more information from the minister when we go through — how she sees that we’re going to make certain that the ability to be able to rapidly respond to situations like that….

I recently had an opportunity to speak with the CEO of the land commission on the future of our city in Kelowna. I was asked to be a speaker, and I complimented the land commission, knowing it’s not perfect. But the reality is that many of the people that have used agricultural land in the Okanagan have benefited from the ability of being able to diversify. We see people that are building packing houses that are now packing their own cherries on literally hundreds of acres of new cherries that we’ve developed through the Summerland research station. Things that have led to a huge, groundbreaking opportunity for an industry that really….

I mean, I grew up picking cherries, and I can tell you that, certainly, there is nothing about picking cherries that really is a fun thing as a kid. But we got paid, I think, about 10 cents or 25 cents for a bucket of these cherries. They weren’t really treated the way that we do now. The whole idea is that they’re picked rapidly, put into cooling in the shade, etc. But they’re picked so that they’re later and can be produced in areas where we haven’t even contemplated cherries being done.

I’m watching the owner, David Geen, of Jealous Fruits, develop agricultural orchards at high elevations in the Shuswap on the opposite side of where most of the farming takes place on Lake Okanagan, on small pockets of land. The limiting factor, really, in his case, is probably water availability, but for the most part, what he’s done is that he and others like him have pioneered the fact that British Columbia cherries, because of the fact that they’re northern-grown, not only are later in maturing but have better flavour.

They’re in such demand that I can tell you that in Beijing, in some of the markets, especially in the winter season…. The Chileans are bringing it in, and the merchants are repackaging it into Canadian boxes because of the demand for Canadian cherries, seen to be far superior. And I can tell you firsthand that the product is far superior, not only in quality but in size, colour, etc. And that’s because people continue to reimagine.

So every year my guess is that there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of new acres being added to what wasn’t conventional farmland. But does that mean that those people, because they took the opportunity to find a source of water or create a new orchard or maybe some other type of product, should perhaps, all of a sudden, have this term that it’s not protecting the land anymore and it’s now about any of the land that could be used? Maybe that’s a clarification point that we need to have.

But I do know that these people are going to be expanding agriculture, because the opportunities for food production of all sorts in British Columbia is only limited by capital and people’s imagination. It is not limited by the fact that the land base that we have…. I go through areas and I look at underutilization of land. It’s probably one of our biggest limiting factors in terms of agricultural production in the province. I think about the Lower Mainland — the intensification, the high rates of return. Well, it’s all because people have wanted to increase the margins, try to mitigate risk and try to do that. I think that that works, and it’s on a continuous basis.

But I do see that some of the changes being proposed are definitely going in the opposite direction. The flexibility that was created in those areas that are tough as nails to have an agricultural product in, where the season is so limited…. They need to have that imaginative ability to be able to create other opportunities. That doesn’t mean that they’re going to start some sort of natural resource operation there. It means that they’re going to be able to run a business out of their backyard, maybe park some vehicles, have a shop or whatever.

[3:50 p.m.]

I mean, all through the community I live in, many of the old orchardists, for part-time work, were loggers, and they have logging trucks. They still do today. They’ve grown, and maybe those logging trucks are now for non-farm use and they have to take them off the property. But I think the point about it is that they continued to farm while they were working on this, because it was what created a livelihood for them.

I guess the picture I’m trying to portray here to the viewers at home, the people that are here, the minister, is the fact that British Columbia is a very diverse province from north to southeast to west and that the challenges in farming — I can attest to many of them — are not easy to manage. You can’t just have one system fit all. That’s one of the reasons why the attempt at kind of finding a different way through the two-zone system, which had some latitude and flexibility, was part of what was attempted in 2014, when the decision was made to move towards a two-zone system.

I guess, just looking at the approach that appears to be presented, it’s more of a cookie-cutter approach. I have to ask sometimes — and I did ask the question — why is the ALC listed in Burnaby? I don’t know if there’s any land in Burnaby that’s in the ALC. I kind of question. Maybe it should have been moved to Abbotsford or Chilliwack. Maybe the Interior.

Interjections.

B. Stewart: Well, maybe even there. That’s right. I have to say that….

Interjection.

B. Stewart: Thank you. You know what? I think that in some aspects of the bill, there’s a fair amount of it that does deal with real problems. I think that these issues…. We heard the member for Langley East talk about, in his own riding, people having five acres and building these mansions, as he described it. I think that the reality is that that is not what we want.

But the idea that there should be a home plate kind of sizing, maybe, and the fact that the diversity of people from different cultural backgrounds can have multigenerational families in there…. There is that allowance for a secondary home or whatever. I’ve been in many of those homes.

Rajinder Lally from Abbotsford, one of the largest blueberry growers in the province…. The guy told me a story. It’s unbelievable, the success. He does have a big house there, but his sons live there, and he’s hoping for his grandkids and his parents.

The reality is that what we’re really looking towards is the fact that we want to make certain that people like Rajinder, who have turned the blueberry industry on its head…. I mean, I first met him when we had nothing but surplus. The regular blueberry…. Not all of them but a lot of them said that we had a surplus, and we were faced with that. He’s telling me about…. His solution to that was to find new markets.

He had determined that the U.S. market, which ended about July 1, was a market that was looking for fresh blueberries. He started sending trucks down. When I met with him the first time in his original house, he had five semis a day going down to Florida for the 100-day blueberry season.

Here, that has turned into a success, where he has his own IQF plant on site because, of course, if you don’t sell them fresh, frozen is next best alternative. And IQF is the gold standard when it comes to fruits and vegetables and preserving them and their integrity. The cost of an IQF plant is not insignificant. I think that we want to make certain we continue to encourage, invest in these people and the opportunities.

I do have to give the ALC a compliment about what they did in terms of the grape industry. This goes back to the days of a bureaucrat that was here. Vic Woodland was his name. He ran liquor control, liquor licensing. He recommended in 1977 about the cottage winery legislation and what it would mean and what it looked like.

It’s all changed. The rules about land-based wineries have changed. However, along that progression, from the first wineries like Sumac Ridge and Gray Monk and — I’m trying to think — the Claremont Winery, but they had a name before that.

The point being that they started out with the idea that here was something…. “We’re going to have to build a plant on agricultural land.” But it was close to their product. It made sense to add value to the product. And geez, hasn’t that turned out to be something special?

We’ve gone from a handful of wineries in 1977. One of them was located on Quadra Street here in Victoria — from loganberries. We had Port Moody, another great grape-growing region.

[3:55 p.m.]

We had the one in Kelowna, Calona Wines, and then, of course, we had a few others. Anyway, that all changed. The reality is that we still have big wineries, such as the ones I’ve named, but more importantly, we have hundreds of small producers that are doing exactly what we want to do. We want to add value to product. We want to make certain that that product not only gets out around British Columbia and Canada but around the world.

I can remember us lobbying the Agricultural Land Commission to be able to create new opportunities. It’s called a J licence. It was about having food on site. This was difficult for the liquor control and licensing people. In their world, when we had a space where we were going to taste wine, it was mapped out and defined. There was a map that was very specific about where you could pour wine. One step over that line, and you were in violation of your licence from the liquor control and licensing branch.

When we imagined that we would have food on site — my goodness. That was a whole new dimension. The fact is, I don’t think we have as many restaurants as we do wineries, but it’s coming up that many of them are doing the sensible thing about providing people the opportunity to be able to enjoy the tourism opportunities. The food that is produced, which is growing rapidly in British Columbia in terms of the…. I think that the focus in on that 100-mile diet…. I know we’re very proud of Chef Roger Sleiman and his team being able to develop that. Whether it’s Cache Creek aged beef or it happens to be spot prawns from the coast, we work very hard in making certain that our menu is as 100 percent local as possible.

I know many others. Steven and Ezra Cipes over at Summerhill and up and down the valley — they’re spotted all over. There’s an example of where literally thousands of new opportunities have been created, not just through farming but the value-added creation of being able to utilize that and take a page out of Vancouver — the restaurant opportunities — Whistler and, of course, the southern end of Vancouver Island. I don’t see that stopping anytime soon.

I’m sure that in the Kootenays and in the north…. Look at Northern Lights Winery. The former MLA for Prince George–Mackenzie is up to his armpits, as you might say, in making wine and having food on site. I visited, and I can tell you that it’s an opportunity that people don’t necessarily think about. It’s not on agricultural land. He took a piece of land that was well situated for being proximate to the marketplace, but the reality is that he has different plantings of berries, etc., that he’s turning into that.

I think that this idea that one size fits all just does not fit. That’s what I see us kind of moving towards. I think that important….

Deputy Speaker: Thank you, Member.

B. Stewart: I never got to talk about the biophysical characteristics of soil.

Thank you, Madame Speaker, and I’d be happy to carry that on in the future.

M. Bernier: I really enjoyed listening to my colleague from Kelowna West, who was just speaking. I’m not quite as learned as he is on the history and the agricultural components, of course, with himself being a third-generation farmer, as he was saying. He has a lot of that life experience.

The experience that I have as the representative for Peace River South is possibly a little bit different. My colleague before alluded to some of that.

First of all, I just want to say how proud I am to represent the people from Peace River South. Peace River South is an area…. Even though, now, people talk a lot about the fact that it is oil and gas, industry and mining, a lot of people forget that it was actually built on agriculture. We actually have three, four generations of families that have been farming in that area. They’ve been — I maybe loosely say the word — successful, when I say what they’ve had to endure as farmers in that area.

When you look at the history of my region and what people have had to go through, there are very limited opportunities when it comes to the crops — mostly cereal crops — that they’re able to grow in that area. That’s because of, a bit, the geography of the area. But the climate….

[4:00 p.m.]

Of course, last week, when we were in our constituency week, I was the proud owner of a snow shovel, having to shovel four or five days of the eight days we were home. So I think most people in this House can acknowledge it’s not exactly farming season right now in the Peace region. That is a struggle, but it’s one that people have lived with for generations. They understand that farming in the Peace region has those short seasons and long days during those seasons.

As my colleague from Peace River North, who’s going to speak after me, knows, we have the beautiful scenery in the summertime of almost 24 hours of daylight and, this time of year, of the northern lights. So we have all that beauty, but from an agricultural perspective, it also brings the issues and the challenges that they have to face.

The reason why I bring that up is…. If we think back about ten years ago, at the time, I was the mayor in the city of Dawson Creek. We were working with the government of the day, then-Premier Gordon Campbell.

We had, together, a group that held meetings in the area, a citizens’ group that was put together, trying to bring attention to the government of the day, the B.C. Liberal government, that changes needed to be made, that there are regional differences, that there are economic differences. There are population differences, and there are stresses and challenges that government needs to acknowledge and recognize.

Now, changes weren’t made overnight. There were years of meetings, years of consultation and years of discussions that took place. I’m looking behind me because we have another former Minister of Agriculture who was part of those discussions before changes were made. It was one that the government of the day, I think, took very seriously. It did not make any rash decisions. Now, I would actually argue that we probably didn’t go far enough to help the farmers in my region. The reason why I say that, again, is because of the stresses that they face.

When you look at the bill that we have in front of us, Bill 52, this is actually going to go backwards when it comes to what we were trying to do to help families. Now, the reason why I say families is that looking through the bill, there’s lots of discussion and lots of print in the bill about farmland. But I think we can all agree it doesn’t matter how much agricultural land we have protected in the province. If we don’t have people on the land to farm it, it’s all for naught.

The challenge that we have in my region — again, my colleague from Peace River North I’m sure will allude to this in his conversation, in his discussions — is that it is hard enough as it is to have the people in the Peace region make a living in agriculture. We rely on them to do that, and they do an amazing job. We want to look at every opportunity to assist them so they can stay on the farms so they can continue farming in these short seasons that we have.

Now, when we were listening to the people in the Peace region, one of the things that they reminded us of is that per capita, the Peace region has more agricultural land than any reserve land anywhere else in the province. When you actually look at how much protected land we have that the commission is mandated to oversee right now, the majority of that is actually up in the Peace region. One of the challenges, again, that we have is what they can do with that land.

One of the big things that government is failing to do in this bill is put descriptive information forward that will give some solace, some comfort, to the people in the Peace region of what’s actually happening. When you look at this bill right now, it says we’re eliminating zone 2. We’re going back to a cookie-cutter approach of one zone across the province.

[4:05 p.m.]

But it’s actually going to go with no information, because it’s all going to be left to regulation and decision-making by the minister and cabinet afterwards. That does not help the people of my region with any comfort to know that they will actually be able to continue on with what they’re trying to do. Now, the colleagues across, they have their opportunity — I haven’t heard one of them stand up yet — to stand up and talk about what’s actually in the bill, because none of that is in the bill.

For me, what the people in my region want to know is: what are the opportunities for them to stay on the land, to stay on the farm? More importantly, as they continue to age and work that farm, how are they going to be able to then pass that on to their family, to make sure that that farming operation can stay productive in a family atmosphere?

Well, when we were looking at a two-zone approach, it was to give that flexibility — a little bit, mind you; it wasn’t very much — a little bit of flexibility for them to have other opportunities on that land to maybe make a little bit of extra income. I guarantee you, you talk to almost every single farmer in my area that has a side job…. I will call it a side job because, of course, agriculture and farming is their number one job. But the majority that I know actually work on the side.

They maybe have a water truck, or maybe they have a welding truck, or they have something else so that in that six, seven, sometimes eight months a year when there is snow on the ground, they have opportunities to make a little bit of extra money. Almost every single dollar of that money that they make is rolled back into the operation so they can continue farming.

It’s that little bit of hope. It’s that little bit of comfort that they know that there are ideas and opportunities out there for them to continue on with their passion, to continue on with what they grew up doing and, again, opportunities to then pass that on to the next generation to continue to do the same thing.

The whole idea when we originally went to two zones was to recognize, again, those differences, to acknowledge those, to give a little, little piece of hope to people up in the area. Now, it doesn’t mean they all have to avail themselves of what zone 2 opportunities are. But at least it gave them the opportunities if they knew something was there.

I know the minister was saying: “You know, they can still apply, or they can still look at opportunities if it’s not in the act or in the regulations, and they can apply for variance.” Well, if my information is correct that I’ve heard, since the NDP have taken over government and there’s been a change at the commission, there has been one approval — one approval from the commission.

So it’s not really fair to tell people: “Don’t worry. If you’re down in the Lower Mainland and you want a variance to build a larger house, okay, you can apply under this act. Or if you are up in the Peace region, if you want to apply for a home site severance, even though it’s less than a quarter acre…. It’s not allowed in the act, but don’t worry. You can apply for a variance.”

There’s been one that I know of that’s been approved in the last year and a half. Those are the challenges that we face. It’s hard for the government to say, “Don’t worry. Have faith, because you can apply for variance,” when there’s very little comfort that those are actually going to be considered.

One of the other challenges that we face in the Peace region is that we’re bordered with Alberta. We border a province that actually doesn’t even have an Agricultural Land Commission. There is no reserve land. In fact, what they do over there is they’ve…. And we’ve seen it. You actually can drive from Fort St. John through Dawson Creek off to Grande Prairie, and aside from a sign that says, “Welcome to Alberta” or “Leaving B.C.,” you actually don’t see a difference.

Contrary to what people might try to say of: “Oh, we need this agricultural reserve in the Peace region. Otherwise, it’s going to be just overrun with oil and gas activity. It’s going to be overrun with contamination and disintegration of the agricultural land, because look at Alberta….” Well, I’m sorry. I don’t know of anybody here that can actually drive and see where the difference is between B.C. and Alberta, aside from the signs. Those are the concerns that people in my area have. They want to be acknowledged for the differences.

[4:10 p.m.]

When we have people in my region that are farming 4,000, 5,000, 6,000, 10,000 acres of land, they want to be recognized and acknowledged that that’s a little bit different than what goes on down in Delta or Richmond. We don’t have the abundance of irrigation opportunities that the Fraser Valley has. When you look at that, we have to look at the differences that we have in the area.

Interjections.

M. Bernier: I appreciate being heckled by the members opposite. Aside from them doing a flyover maybe once in a while, I live and breathe this. I hear from the constituents, and I know the challenges that they face in wanting to farm and stay in the area.

I know it was mentioned by one of the previous Ministers of Agriculture that one of the challenges we face is actually the identification of agricultural land to begin with. There’s a huge opportunity the government has in front…. If they want to get rid of the two zones and go back to just one zone, maybe they should be fair, then, to these people and do a proper assessment of the soil opportunities that we have in the province.

It’s pretty difficult when you’ve got somebody that has maybe 3,000 acres of land, and in that 3,000 acres, they might have a small five- or ten-acre area that is probably a shale pit. They want to develop it, or maybe they want to sell that shale to the local Ministry of Transportation for the roadworks they’re doing. Maybe they want to build a small, little shop on that so they can actually park their vehicle there.

Interjection.

M. Bernier: The member keeps saying they can do that. The member might want to double-check, because every time they apply, they get turned down.

If the member wants to stand up and say…. If the minister is willing to acknowledge this when we go through committee stage…. If she wants to stand up and say, “Don’t worry. Trust me. Every application that comes forward now from the Peace region will be approved by the commission. I guarantee that….” Of course she can’t do that. But we know that this is the message that they’re trying to say to people.

This is the problem that the people in my region are faced with — the uncertainty now of what they will be able to do in that.

Interjection.

M. Bernier: I really enjoy being heckled because as the member knows, I don’t have a speech. I love the heckling because it helps me keep going. These guys here….

I’d really like it, actually, if the member wanted to come up and tour the area for once, maybe again, and come up and actually see what we’re doing. I’d like to have them up in January. They can bring their mukluks up and actually come up to the area.

Interjection.

Deputy Speaker: The member for Powell River–Sunshine Coast, thank you for your cooperation.

M. Bernier: Thank you, hon. Speaker.

Now, again, the whole point is we want to give opportunities for farmers, not for farmland. Those are two different things. We want to ensure that those opportunities are there for the people in my region. This bill is going backwards. We spent years of meetings and consultation to make sure that when we moved forward to have a two-zone approach, it was something that the people in the region understood, supported, bought into and, in fact, were asking for.

What is really unfortunate is…. The NDP were trying to say: “No, we want to have a cookie-cutter approach.” They love the fact that Victoria and Burnaby tell the Peace region what to do even though they never come up there. This is one of the challenges, again — being so far away from the decision-makers that we have in our region.

If the minister wants to stand up in committee stage and say I’m wrong, if she wants to stand up and say that all these people that will apply will get approval, they would love to hear that. To date, that has not been the case.

Again, one of the things that I pride myself on is the fact that we actually have a strong agricultural hub in the Peace region. The people are active. They are loyal to their farms, and they are ambitious to keep those operations going.

[4:15 p.m.]

The people that I and, I’m sure, my colleague to the north hear from tell us that they have huge concerns because of the lack of recognition that they get in the region for the challenges they have. This cannot be a one-size fits-all. We don’t have the same opportunities up there — the same crops that can be grown, the amount of revenue that can be generated off those crops. It is different. It is completely different.

To have a one-size-fits-all, which this bill is trying to accomplish, is, again, going backwards. I think, with all due respect to the people in the Peace region, they just want government to acknowledge that they are different, that they have these stresses and challenges, not to be compared to every other agricultural farming operation in the province.

With that, I’m going to turn the floor over, I believe, to my colleague from Peace River North. He will continue on, I’m sure, highlighting some of the challenges, because it’s the same from the B.C. to Alberta border. You can’t really see the difference, aside from the Peace River, between the North Peace and the South Peace. We all work together up there. We support each other, and we have the same stresses and challenges.

With that, Bill 52 is something that is going to be, in my opinion, a huge negative hit to the people in my region, which is something that I can’t support.

D. Davies: I’ll maybe wait a moment to see if anybody from the other side might stand up. I don’t want to tromp over anybody, because they certainly enjoy giving their two bits from that side.

Seeing that there are no other speakers coming up from the other side, I will continue. I rise today to speak to Bill 52, the Agricultural Land Commission Amendment Act.

I’m certainly proud to be here representing the riding of Peace River North. As my colleague from Peace River South mentioned earlier, we certainly are a unique riding, just like the rest of this province is very unique. I flew down here yesterday and left my community, where we had about eight inches of snow and about minus 18 with the wind chill. I come down here. Well, it is certainly not the case.

When we talk about the Agricultural Land Commission, I think we need to keep in mind that this province is incredibly diverse on so many angles. I’ll talk a bit about that in a little bit.

Agriculture is a critical industry in this province, and we all agree with that. Many people, though, associate folks up in the Peace country and that general area as an oil and gas town or an oil and gas area. But we are very diversified. Yes, we certainly do have these great resources up there, but we have an incredibly robust agricultural community in Peace River North as well as in Peace River South. In fact, we’ve got around 90 percent of all the grains produced up in the Peace country. We’ve got canola. We’ve got cattle ranches. We’ve got vegetable farmers, just to mention a few.

Across this province, there are thousands of people that depend on agriculture, that put their livelihoods in this province in the agricultural sector. Whether it’s grain or oilseeds up in my region, tree fruits in the Okanagan, cattle ranches in the Cariboo, vegetables and dairy in the Fraser Valley, farmers in every part of this province are building stronger futures and stronger communities for themselves, their families and all of us that are here in this room today.

If you sit down and speak to a farmer, you’ll quickly learn that the key to their success and the key to success in general is balance. It’s the right amount of sunshine, the right amount of water, the right amount of nutrients. Too much or too little of any of these will have dramatic impacts overall.

[4:20 p.m.]

That balance, on this side of the House, was sought in the agricultural land reserve and the Agricultural Land Commission reforms that were introduced in 2014. Then the government of the day created a two-zone approach because, knowing the realities of farming in the north, the interior and in the Kootenays are quite different than the realities of the rest of the province.

There are different agricultural practices throughout this province, in all four corners — different populations, differences in geography, different developmental pressures, different social and cultural realities in all the different regions. A one-size-fits-all regulation to farming does not reflect the reality of this incredibly diverse province.

We had two zones. In fact, one could probably almost argue we could do with additional zones, looking at the incredible diversity. But rather than reflect the reality of government with this bill, we seem to be heading to another typical, cookie-cutter approach on land regulation in the province. In fact, this bill is a clear indication that the government is only interested in the land itself and not necessarily the benefits that the land can bring thanks to the ingenuity and the incredible efforts by our farmers throughout this province.

This bill throws things even further out of balance by the sweeping change in defining agricultural land. If this bill passes, agricultural land will no longer consist of the land that has been established as part of the agricultural land reserve. Instead, all agricultural land will now be encompassed in the agricultural land reserve, and that means that all land suitable or somewhat suitable for farm use is part of this reserve now.

My colleague from Kelowna West talked a few moments ago about some of the land up in Fort Nelson or north of Fort St. John. Again, if anybody has been up there, you understand that the land is very unique up there.

In fact, I’ve got a constituent that I’m working with right now who is trying to utilize their land. It was in the ALR, wasn’t…. It’s bounced back and forth. They’re trying to subdivide their land and allow other opportunities for themselves, and they keep running up against this roadblock. It’s now in the ALR. Well, I’ve seen this land. It is full of rocks the size of my car. It has no soil, hardly, on the land. Yet here it is in the agricultural land reserve — again, a piece of land that should not be part of this reserve.

This expansion of the definition…. You know, one can only wonder, down the road, what the government intends to do. Really, no one can wonder, because dozens of places within this bill are based on the whole philosophy around: “Just wait for the regulation. Wait for the red tape to be coming in.” That is where we are concerned, and that’s where the clarity of a lot of pieces in this bill are raised.

This bill represents yet another concentration of power at the cabinet table and not here in this place. That’s why we’re certainly looking forward to the committee stage, where hopefully we can figure out some of these issues.

To use some farm-inspired lingo, the government is once again asking British Columbians, basically, to buy a pig in the poke. They promise one thing but are so sketchy and hazy on the details that British Columbians will very likely get the opposite of what they promised. In fact, this is, in many ways, a step backwards for all of us.

I’ll relate this kind of move of the government to, let’s say, proportional representation, as another example. This government is making a promise that every vote will count. We’ll solve world peace with proportional representation. Yet the backroom deals and decisions within political parties are going to be done through insider party lists and selected MLAs through a mathematical formula, and so on and so forth.

There are going to be lots of names for what this accomplishes, but it’s a stretch of immense proportion to pretend that PR is an increase in democracy. One can guess that an approach like this, with the government’s claim to improve the protection of farmland, has to be more of a sinister reality behind this as well, when we compare it to how PR is also being implemented.

[4:25 p.m.]

I’m hoping maybe the members on the other side might stand up and challenge me after this.

You know, if all land that could possibly be farmed is now agricultural land, one can see that this government is using this to slam the brakes on the progress of many resource projects in our province on land that has not been considered agricultural for four or more decades. We are really worried up in my region that this is going to be a roadblock for the development of these resources.

This session in the Legislature, we have seen multiple bills coming forward as almost an assault on families and workers who depend on the resource sector. I believe that this bill also continues with that assault on families that are connected to the resource sector.

Interjection.

D. Davies: I look forward to your opinions right after I’m done speaking.

It’s troubling, though, for all the families dependent on agriculture and our responsible resource projects. It concerns me a lot.

There are a few other concerns that I’m looking forward to exploring once we go into committee stage. One of them is, of course, the housing limits, which have been talked about a lot. We support the concept, but we need to get clarity, again, around the size limits and what those look like. Right now it’s based on the total area of the building, rather than the actual footprint on the land. We’re going to make sure that we can deal with this and that it’s not something that is sorted out later around the cabinet table. It doesn’t make sense if the goal is protecting land. It is the footprint on the land, and not the area of a multistorey building, that needs to be restricted.

We’ll also look at secondary homes on land. Again, it’s not clear in this bill if people are allowed to have a secondary home on their land. I know, up in the north and around the province, we have a challenge of keeping younger people or getting the next generation into farming. There are lots of opportunities out there for our young people.

If farmers…. Some of these farms have been owned by families for generations. If they can’t get a secondary home and have that opportunity to maybe bring their family and keep their family on the farm…. I’m really concerned about what the future of farming is like in this province. That also goes for dividing the land, giving the opportunity for a farmer to give a parcel of the land or a portion of the land to their family.

Again, these are things that aren’t clear right now. I’m certainly hoping that we can get clarity on these, when we go into committee stage, from the minister.

As well, the restrictions on removing soil and fill. The con­cept is sound. Obviously, we don’t want to lose soil. The need to apply for a permit ignores emergency situations like flooding. Again, I’m not too sure what this looks like moving forward. Issues around…. Again, it seems like more layers of red tape and such, which…. We already have an incredible amount of regulation in this province.

Farmers may need to use filler soil at a moment’s notice to save their land or their livelihoods. We’ve seen flooding over the past few years, where farmers have had to move land to build emergency or temporary dikes. What does that look like?

Altogether, we on this side…. There are certainly good things in the bill that we do look upon favourably, but there are a lot of gaping holes. We want to make sure that we do understand these and how these are going to roll out to British Columbians.

It places protection of land in general above the protection of agriculture, which isn’t good for the future of this province. Instead of striking a balance that ensures opportunity for all British Columbians, it seems to tilt against families and our communities that depend on agriculture.

[4:30 p.m.]

I, again, have a lot of people that work in the resource sector in my riding. Many of these are farmers that have small welding shops or pipefitting shops on their land. They may have some heavy equipment to work in the pipeline industry — have a shop on their land where they work on their equipment. They need to have this additional income so that they might be able to continue farming, which is something that they absolutely love and enjoy doing.

As my colleague from Peace River South mentioned, we get about five months of the season of a year that we can actually do hands-on farming in the Peace country. It’s kind of like the chicken-and-the-egg scenario. We need these farmers to be able to continue to work and to be able to continue to farm in our area, but they also have to have these small businesses in order to stay and to continue doing that.

We need to make sure that we can strike that balance that I talked about earlier, where they can work and have a small business on their land — a shop, a welding company or something — so that they can provide for their family when they’re not able to farm.

[The bells were rung.]

I’ll wait for the dingy-dingy. I know it’s the other House.

I talk about the requirement to make farming attractive for our young people. And I think that is a real concern when we talk to…. We recently had Ag Day — two weeks back, I guess that it was. I had the opportunity to talk to a number of farmers. One of their big concerns is getting young people and keeping their family involved in farming.

[R. Chouhan in the chair.]

I think British Columbia is really going to be challenged when we look at that and how we’re going to move forward to make sure that our farms remain viable. Part of that was having the two zones, making sure that people could work, making sure that people could continue and commit to farming and, more importantly, people could offer something to their children. The children need to have something that they can continue and make sure that they can continue working on those farms while being able to provide for their families.

We need to get more people into farming. It worries me that going back to a one-zone cookie-cutter approach is going to be impacting getting more people into farming. In fact, I believe it’s going to do quite the opposite. We need to be looking closely at this bill and how it’s going to be rolled out if we are going to be protecting this important industry — agriculture.

In closing, at the end of the day, as we move through this, we owe it to our ranching families. We owe it to our farming families. We need to make sure that we do this right and we do protect the agricultural community for the future, moving forward.

M. Morris: I’ve listened to my colleagues from the Peace River — Peace River South and Peace River North — and, of course, I border Peace River South with my riding. The issues that we have in my riding are much the same as reflected by my colleagues to the north.

I go back to years when I’d look at my mother-in-law’s partner that she had. He had a cow-calf operation, a couple hundred calves every year. When the beef prices were high, it brought in a pretty good income for the farm and supported everybody. When the beef prices were low, then, of course, they were starving and had to find other means to supplement the income for the household.

That particular operation also included some logging equipment. A couple of the sons operated a logging truck. They operated feller-bunchers, and it supplemented their income enough that they were able to help out with the farm but also maintain a living for their own families. I think now the farm is run by one of the sons. He drives a logging truck, and the wife more or less stays home, looking after the farm. She drives the equipment, and she looks after pulling calves in the spring, as does everybody else. That was a big part of my role in the springtime when the calves were coming.

[4:35 p.m.]

That’s not a unique situation. That situation is multiplied by just about every single farm that we have in the interior of the province.

There’s another gentleman who was in my office, actually, this week. We were talking about farming in the Interior, and he’s got a 45-acre parcel of land. He’s a very passionate farmer. He has 15 hectares that are arable. He farms that. He produces vegetables for the local market, and he gets quite a bit out of that 15 hectares of land. But out of that 45 acres, the rest of it — the 30 hectares — is pretty much solid rock, and he can’t do anything with it. It would make a great quarry for rock products out of that, but by going to the single zone, that would preclude that kind of thing from being entertained.

There’s another example up in my riding of a gentleman who owns a hay farm that is approximately 100 hectares in size. He produces a lot of hay every year, and he’s got all of these barns and sheds that he keeps the hay in once it’s taken off the field. And some of his equipment goes in there. He’s got such a good product, I guess, but he sells his hay, and by mid-fall, all the hay is gone from his property to the folks that are going to be consuming it on their own farmlands, and his buildings are vacant.

He runs an RV shelter business throughout the winter months, so every shed, the hay barns and everything are full of RVs. That, again, is something that’s duplicated by many of the farmers throughout the interior part of the province. It supplements the income coming in. If they didn’t have that supplemental income coming in, they couldn’t cut a loan on the proceeds of the farm.

Of course, up there in the interior of the province, there are a number of factors that come into play. I remember when the government announced that they were going to go back to the single zone. I believe it was the mayor of Richmond who said it was great and that it was good to see everybody operating from the same set of rules. And I thought to myself that there’s somebody who probably hasn’t travelled too far outside of the Lower Mainland to see that the same rules don’t really apply or can’t apply to the entire province.

The geography is not suitable in much of the area here. We’ve got the Rocky Mountains that divide this province up into the northeast corner and the southern and the western part of the province, and there’s a significant difference between those two areas.

We have, I believe, at least 14 or more bioclimatic zones within the province that have different characteristics within the province itself. There’s a difference in the number of frost-free days that we have in the province.

In the Lower Mainland, throughout the Fraser Valley, much of the Okanagan and parts of the southern Interior, they enjoy up to 250 frost-free days a year — in some cases, more than that. In the Interior and the Prince George area, I’ve seen as little as 30 frost-free days in the year.

The beautiful garden that my wife and I grow every single year sometimes is destroyed before July is over, and we get no return or no yield out of that garden. That’s something that all the farmers face in the interior of the province. So there’s a distinct difference between what we have in the Fraser Valley, in the beautiful Okanagan area, in the southern parts of the province and in many of our river-bottom valleys that we have in the province.

We look at Dease Lake and the northwest part of the province — long winters, lots of freezing weather. But if you go over the mountain from Dease Lake to the west and down into the Telegraph Creek area, it becomes a completely different area. They’ve got trees and various vegetation down there that we don’t see up on the upper areas. That’s the same in the Bella Coola Valley. The Bella Coola Valley, coming down from the Chilcotin Plateau — very different, very distinct bioclimatic zones and things that you can grow there.

[4:40 p.m.]

Those are the kinds of things that zone 2 took into consideration in providing an avenue for anybody that wants to farm. And there are a lot of people out there that do want to farm; we’d like to see more. It provided them an opportunity to make another income to supplement their passion for farming and to supplement the bad years they have due to the weather that nobody can control, due to the flooding and the freshets and the issues that we put up with in the interior of the province, more so than the controlled areas that we have in the Fraser Valley and some of the more prolific farming areas in the province here.

The types of geographic areas that we have along the Fraser River, along the Nechako River — the Nechako Plateau, the Chilcotin Plateau — vary significantly from the river bottoms up in elevation. You know, 100 feet of elevation or 200 feet of elevation can make a real difference when you’re living in the interior of the province and even north of that. Those are the things that need to be taken into consideration when we look at zone 1 or zone 2 applications.

I know many people working within my riding that have small cow-calf operations that have to buy their hay from somebody else. They might produce some of the hay themselves, but they’ll have to buy some to supplement what’s going on. One of the spouses, one of the partners, is at home looking after…. The other one might be teaching. The other one might be working at Mount Milligan, in the mine, or driving a transport truck on the highway or working at some different job in the resource sector in order to maintain that business.

The opportunity for them to put a shop up on their property…. My colleague from Peace River North was talking about a little welding shop or a machine shop. A lot of these folks that run these farms are pretty adept with their hands. They’re good mechanics. They’re good machinists. They’re good fabricators. So they run a little business on the side out of their farm to supplement the income they have coming in. That’s what keeps that farm viable. If they didn’t have that opportunity, that farm wouldn’t be viable. The people would move off, or the farm would be left vacant, and it would be taken out of production.

Part of the problem that we saw earlier, over the last couple of years…. Again, that’s attributable to the lack of viability of the farms that we have and the lack of interest from young people, because you need to have something that supplements your income from that. It led to the large pharmaceutical company from Europe purchasing a lot of the farmland in the interior of the province because nobody else would buy it. They converted it over into…. They planted forests in there for carbon credits or whatever they had, and that was a crime. But one of the reasons that made that attractive to the people that sold that property was that because it wasn’t viable, they needed the opportunity to work at something different in order to support the farm income they had for that.

Children are leaving. The folks that own some of these farms…. I know a couple of them that are getting up in years. They have farmed it for the last 30, 40 years with a passion. They’ve developed it. They cleared the land themselves. They planted the crops. They built all the fences in there. But it doesn’t appeal to the young folks because you don’t make enough money at it. You can’t afford some of the luxuries in life or some of the trips, some of the benefits that come from a higher income. Again, that’s a factor that seems to be missing by going to this one zone from a two-zone structure.

I won’t carry on too much longer, Mr. Speaker. I know that in my area, in the interior of the province — and we’re right in the very centre of the province, where we’ve got anywhere from 30 to 100, maybe 150, frost-free days if we’re lucky — it really makes a difference to everybody there. We’ll see what the regulations hold when they come out. I’m sympathetic to these folks that have these farms that need that supplemental business on the side or the income on the side to support that farm, so that’s why I’ll be voting against Bill 52.

T. Shypitka: It gives me great pleasure to rise and speak to Bill 52, the Agricultural Land Commission Amendment Act. It gives me great pride to represent the southeast corner of the province — the gateway from Alberta, the gateway from the United States — and represent the hard-working and fun-loving people of Kootenay East.

[4:45 p.m.]

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. We’ve heard the theme here all afternoon on this bill that we are a diverse province. Nobody here in this House will dispute that. We’re blessed by that diversity. Our cultural and social differences make us a melting pot of all types of religions, ethnicities and beliefs. We’ve answered the call, and we’ve welcomed the world. Whether you believe in Mohammed or Buddha or Jesus Christ or a whole list of other beliefs and religions, B.C. will recognize all our differences and what makes us unique. B.C. is truly an inclusive province.

However, what truly defines us as a wonder amongst all our jurisdictions in the world is our geographic diversities. People that live here enjoy the variety of our climates and landscapes. We are the home to the deserts of the southern Okanagan, the moist climate of the Great Bear Rainforest, the low-lying deltas of Richmond and the Fraser Valley to the highest mountain peaks of the Rocky Mountains, where I reside, the vast grasslands and the prairies of the Peace region.

I was interested to hear the member from the Peace north region say that 90 percent of the grain in the province comes from the Peace. I had no idea. We all get to learn a little bit every day about how diverse our province is.

Our great river systems — the Columbia, the Fraser, the Thompson and the Kootenay — to thousands of lakes across the province. Our climates give us rain and moisture to the Island and up and down the west coast — to the snowfall that we’ll be seeing here soon enough and already have in places like the Bulkley Valley, the Rogers Pass that the member here for Columbia River–Revelstoke knows so well, and the one that I know so well, the Kootenay Pass.

Balmy temperatures that we see here in Victoria today that were in the double digits to the frigid temperatures elsewhere — Burns Lake. I’ve mentioned Peace River North. They are going to be seeing double digits on the minus side here this weekend. Sorry to say that to the member there, but minus 17 lows.

So we see a huge diversity. In my hometown of Cranbrook, we enjoy the most sunshine hours of any other city in the province. But when it’s wintertime and it’s mid-January, sunshine doesn’t always mean warmth. It means cloudless days and very cold temperatures on the ground. It’s usually a warning sign to get inside before you get frostbite.

If you sit down and speak to a farmer, you’ll quickly learn that the key to success is balance. The right amount of sunshine, the right amount of water, the right amount of nutrients. Too much or too little of these and 100 more factors could have minor or major impacts.

I did a little bit of research and downloaded and printed off the Land Capability Classification for Agriculture in British Columbia this afternoon. As I quickly glossed through the 62 pages, it is chock full of different class types — every class from 1 to 7. But not only are these classes from 1 to 7, 1 being the best type of soil to grow anything on to class 7, which is essentially very non-fertile…. But not only do the classifications go from 1 to 7, but they are also broken down — class 2A, 2B, 2C, 2D, 2E, 2F, 2G, 2H and 2I. All those classes are represented by these very detailed breakdowns.

That’s enjoyed, and that’s throughout our province. We have diversity everywhere we look in this province. It’s not too hard to understand. I think, like I said before, we all agree to that. That is the balance of this side of the House.

In 2014, we sought out, through the agricultural land reserve, a bill that introduced two zones. It was very important to some of these farmers that are in parts of the province that aren’t quite as blessed with fertile soil as we see in the Fraser Valley and some of the delta, low-lying areas on the coast. So a two-zone approach was created that recognized these realities that we face in the north and the Interior and the Kootenays, that we are all very different, diverse, in this province.

I think that was a pretty realistic approach. I think to think of it as a one-size-fits-all…. We’ve heard that analogy here. I know for myself, personally, those one-size-fits-all T-shirts only usually seem to fit one person. It’s usually a rather large person, but they still say it’s a one-size-fits-all. But it doesn’t really necessarily do that. I think that’s kind of what we’re seeing with this attempt at this bill here.

[4:50 p.m.]

There are different agricultural practices. There are different populations. There are different development pressures, and there are different social and cultural realities in each of the regions. Yes, cultural regions, all over the place. A one-size-fits-all, like I said, is not reflected in this reality.

Rather than reflect reality, the government, with this bill, is heading back to that cookie-cutter approach, that one-size-fits-all approach back to land regulation. In fact, this bill is a clear indication that this government is only interested in the land itself and not the benefits that the land can bring, thanks to the ingenuity and efforts of our farmers.

Our farmers have faced adversities. They’ve faced hardships through generation after generation. It’s a learned trade. Through that diversity and through that true grit that farmers have, they’ve learned to adapt. It’s not getting more land into the ALR that is the biggest challenge here. It’s getting more farmers and ranchers to work with what we have.

I’ve got a report here from the Kootenay Livestock Association, a great association in my riding. A quick shout-out and a quick hi to Faye Street, who provided me with this information. It gave me a little bit of a snapshot on what our production is like in the Kootenays right now. It’s a ten-year study here. I was trying to get the last five years, but I can show you, after I list off the statistics here, that it’s not going in a positive trend.

In 2001, the total farms that were reported in the East Kootenay were 214. In 2006, 193. In 2011, it was 148. Cattle and calves were 26,187 in 2001, down to 23,000 and then down to 17,000 in 2011.

Total sheep and lambs, farms reporting once again, were from 34 to 25 to 19 in that ten-year period. The total number of sheep and lambs were from almost 1,200 to 700 to 375. Growing and finishing pigs, farms reported, went from 16 to ten to five. The number of finishing pigs went from 262 to 52 to 29 in 2011.

I would really not be too positive in seeing what the 2016 reports say. I would dare say that it would be a continuing downward trend with the producers in the Kootenays — in the East Kootenays, at least.

This is troubling. These are troubling statistics. When I say that this isn’t about getting more land in the ALR…. It’s about getting more people to work it and sustaining the people that work it. That’s part and parcel of what this bill really represents and why I’m so staunchly opposed to it.

There are some good pieces in it, of course. I’ll get to that in a second. But I’m going to address some of the ones that I know that my constituents are very passionate about. They’re the ones that are watching here today, and I’ll try to do them the justice that they deserve in this debate here.

When I look at this bill and read how we’re addressing our unique, diverse province and forcing it into a one-size-fits-all box, I wonder a lot. I wonder if this is a little bit of foreshadowing to eliminate our regional Agricultural Land Commission to one central land commission here in Victoria. This is something our people in my part of the world and the people that are speaking on this side of the House are very concerned about.

We cannot afford to lose our regional voice in our unique and diverse areas of the province. We all have something to offer, and it’s all quite different. To regulate and legislate from afar, from 1,000 kilometres away, and have no boots-on-the-ground people there that are actually face to face with the constituents is troubling. It’s very concerning.

We don’t want to lose that regional voice. I wonder if this bill will somehow foreshadow that. I certainly hope not. We’ll see in the regulations once this bill, more than likely, will pass. But I really have a big fear, and so do my constituents, that this may be the reality that we see down the road.

Will this be in the new regulations? Is this what we’re setting up for, right here? Will we embrace our geological and economic diversities, or will we drive a wedge deeper between rural and urban B.C.? Regrettably, I’m reading the latter in this bill. It troubles me deeply, like I stated before, and it troubles my constituents.

[4:55 p.m.]

It troubles my farming and ranching community, who aren’t looking for a handout but for a government to support them, to make them more productive. We need to have two zones in this province that recognizes our diversities. It’s plain and simple. Like I said, it got off the ground in 2014. This new piece of legislation hasn’t even been born yet, so to speak. It’s just getting up off the ground, and to lose it now would be very detrimental to the people in my riding.

We are losing not only farmers and ranchers, but we’re losing the generational farmer that the member for Langley East mentioned earlier today — the generational farmer. I’ll read, actually, something on generational farming. I’ll find it here, from Faye Street once again, from the Kootenay Livestock Association. It was kind of a cool little description about what she thought generational farming was.

She said: “Agriculture is not a learned-overnight industry. It takes many, many years of blood, sweat and hardships to become a good, productive rancher or farmer. We need our grey hair to work shoulder to shoulder with the dark hair to make these operations work. They also need government to get the hell out of the way of progress and get in the way of helping with programs where and when needed.”

Faye is a very colourful person, so I would read some other descriptions in here, but it wouldn’t be parliamentary language. It would not be appropriate. But she’s very passionate. She goes on to say: “It is important to consider that zone 1 has a much better climate for growth and production. It has higher productive soils and much better access to market.”

I thought that was kind of a neat thing that she highlighted — that it has better access to markets. Another thing that we don’t understand a lot when we look at agricultural land and the costs that are associated with agricultural land and production of agriculture is the access to markets.

Some of these places in rural B.C. are literally hundreds of miles from the closest port or farmers’ market or grocery store or anywhere they can get their product to. This adds to their bottom line. This is a big cost. Fuel costs are going up. You’ve got higher carbon taxes and all of those other things that are going into it. For our farmers to be under the gun a little bit on these costs and not being recognized for these costs…. We’re essentially going by the wayside on farming in rural B.C. because of these oversights.

Zone 2 addressed those oversights. It said: “Yes, let’s give some of these farmers in British Columbia that are….” They have short growing seasons. I know in some regions of this province, we have a four-month growing season. I just highlighted earlier, the temperatures. We don’t realize it.

I was talking to a cabbie today. He asked me where I was from, and I said the Kootenays. I mentioned how nice it was out. He said: “Oh, what’s the temperature where you live?” I said, “Well, minus 5, minus 6,” and he couldn’t believe it. I don’t think a lot of people really, truly understand that.

That’s why we need to have a zone 2 in our province, to recognize those diversities. Without a sustainability plan for some of these farmers and ranchers where the soils are extremely limited and the growing season, essentially, like I said, is four or five months of the year, we’re all dead. We’ll essentially kill off farming and ranching in our communities if these issues aren’t recognized and we don’t give them the tools to allow them to have secondary incomes, something to keep the farm going over the long winter months.

The son of a rancher will be much more inclined, in my area, to drive a heavy haul truck at the mine than he would risk putting in a 16-hour day of rural farming with no promise of compensation or no secondary source of income to help him through those months. You can’t blame them. You’ve got families to feed, and you’ve got an industry such as agriculture that isn’t being helped by government and recognizing our diversities.

In my region, we’ve got farmers where their children are just getting rid of farming. They’re getting away from ranching. They’re going to the mines, and they’re making their six-digit incomes and saying: “To heck with it. Why should I risk when the government is not supportive of us?” That’s if we have any industry left. That goes on to my next topic of the sinister undertones that I read sometimes in this bill.

[5:00 p.m.]

This bill has sinister undertones that address appropriating land that may be used for agriculture and ignores other best uses such as our other natural resources. This bill throws things even further out of balance with a sweeping change in defining agricultural land. If this bill passes, agricultural land will no longer consist of the land that has been established as part of the ALR. Instead, all agricultural land will be in the ALR. That means that all land suitable for farm use is part of the reserve.

That represents a broad expansion, and one can only wonder what the government intends to do. How can one resource ministry arbitrarily mandate the interests of another resource ministry when it comes to our collective economic benefit? One can only wonder, because in dozens of places, this bill is based on the philosophy of “just wait for the regulations.”

That’s why I spoke earlier about the ALC and maybe getting rid of our regional ALC and centralizing it. I don’t want to wait for the regulations. If we have to address it here and in committee, we will be addressing those concerns.

This bill represents yet another concentration of power at the cabinet table and away from the Legislature. To use some…. I think that the member for Peace River North used…. British Columbia is going to have to “buy a pig in a poke.” I thought that was kind of funny, because it kind of spoke to the agricultural theme that we’re going for here. But it’s much like the approach they have taken to proportional representation. He said that he’d promise you the world, yet the details are very hazy in this bill.

There can be lots of names about what this accomplishes. It’s a stretch of immense proportions to pretend this is an increase in democracy. One can guess that with an approach like this, the government’s claim to improve protection of farmland has a more sinister reality behind it. If all land that could possibly be farmed is now agricultural land, one can see this government using this to slam the brakes on the progress of resource projects on land not considered agricultural by experts for the past four decades.

In my region, some of the land in the ALR right now is seriously contested by the residents of my riding, where we see some soil types of 6s and 7s being painted in the ALR. The ALR, back in the ’60s, I believe, was painted with a pretty broad brush, and it wasn’t really examined, I don’t think, nearly properly enough to actually examine the actual soil types that it was included in. In my part of the world, and I know in lots of other parts of rural B.C., these ALR designations are pretty vague at best. Instead of readdressing the actual quality of the ALR, we’re actually expanding it now to include more cloudiness on what can be and can’t be farmed.

For example, zone 6 land could be usable if irrigation is used — proper irrigation. So what does that mean? Does that mean that all soil type 6 is now in the ALR? Is this now farmable? You essentially could make any land, you know, growable to any kind of crop if the proper care and attention is done to it. This bill kind of shines a light on some of those unknowns and some of the non-clarity that a lot of people in my riding are asking about.

This is not because we have people lined up to operate farms — far from it. This session of the Legislature has been an assault on the families and workers who depend on the resource sector, and this bill continues that. It’s troubling for all of the families depending on agriculture and our responsible resource projects.

There are two other concerns that we’ll be exploring in committee stage. I’ve listed one, on zone 1 and zone 2. The first is regarding limits of size of housing on agricultural land. We support the concept.

[5:05 p.m.]

I understand that down in the Lower Mainland, you may have some smaller lots that are in the ALR, and some people that own these properties are creating these monster homes and secondary suites for income that is not associated with farming. But that’s not the way it is where I’m from. Nobody’s building huge mansions and condos on agricultural land. Once again, we look at the diversities that are around us, and it’s not apples to apples.

Right now it’s based on the total area of the building, rather than the actual footprint. This doesn’t make sense if the goal is protecting land. It’s the footprint on the land and not the area of a multi-storey building that needs to be restricted. Once again, is it a 10,000 square foot area on the land, or is it 5,000 going up two floors? The second example is less impact on the land, and this doesn’t address that.

When we transition from one generation to the next, the aging parents decide — in my region anyways — it is time for the children to carry on with the business, or they stay on the farm when they reach adulthood and think of raising a family of their own. We need to encourage provisions that will allow this to happen. This bill discourages that.

In my riding, for example, you see it all the time, where the parents have the farm, they raise their family, and the young children take the reins as they’re growing up. It gives them a little job, a little income from the parents. They raise the chickens, they slaughter the pigs, and they do whatever they can to keep the farm going. Through that generational experience, they get a lot of experience.

In my opinion, ranching is a trade. It’s something that’s learned. It’s not an overnight experience. I read something from Faye Street here that illustrates that.

These are transitional things that happen naturally in farming. Children grow up. They go to school. They graduate. They find a spouse. They want to raise a family. But at the same time, they’re actually still working the ranch. Now the parents are aging. They want to pass the farm off to the children, and because the children are now young adults, they want a secondary home on the ranch so the parents can stay there and still actively work. They want to transition into the next generation.

This is very important that we have secondary homes on these or at least allow to subdivide or look at them regionally and not provincially, because every area is different, and every plot of land that every rancher has is different. You may have a plot of land that’s in the ALR, where some is low-lying, and it’s good for hay production or a series of any other ranching applications. And then you will have another part of the land that is not susceptible to ranching at all, and that’s where you build the family home.

So it’s really important that we have a regional ALC that comes on site, check it out — in conjunction with the regional district — and comes up with good, commonsense solutions to generational farming. Because without this transition, without this addition of having another home on the land, there’s no other recourse but for the child to move elsewhere or to give up that ambition of running the family farm. It just doesn’t become sustainable. It’s not economically possible for them to go buy a house in town or wherever and then come back and work the farm until the parents, unfortunately, die, and then they take over the farm. It’s just not a natural way of doing business, so these are huge concerns.

We’re not building monster mansions or big condos down in the Kootenays by any stretch of the imagination. It just, once again, speaks to the diversity that we have here in the province.

The next thing is the restrictions on moving soil and fill. You know, climate change right now is a big factor. I think we all agree on climate change and what it’s doing. We’re seeing more fires, more floods.

Even though the concept of removing soil and fill is a good one, there are some examples where flooding happens. You need to dike part of your land. I mean, this is emergency preparedness. This is something where you can’t wait for legislation or for somebody else to say: “Well, go ahead.” So something has to be built in the bill that addresses these types of emergencies, and that’s something we’ll be speaking to in committee stage as well.

I would like to go on more. There is so much to this, and we’ll be addressing it in committee stage.

[5:10 p.m.]

I want to thank groups like the Kootenay Livestock Association, the B.C. Cattlemen’s Association, ranchers and farmers everywhere that do what they can. I mean, it’s troubling…. And I applaud the minister for shining the spotlight on agriculture and how important it is. I think we all agree it’s important.

It’s troubling to know that B.C. can’t sustain itself with agriculture. We have a huge land area, and we’ve got some of the richest soils in the world. Yet we fail to…. Well, we rely on imports, plain and simple. We’ve got to get out of that. Food security is huge. I think we all recognize that.

Starting on that ground level of recognizing how important agriculture is, I once again want to just underline how important it is not only to increase our land but, more importantly than increasing the agricultural land, to actually increase the people that work it, the stewards of the land — the ranchers, the farmers — and to take that approach first.

In my region, 6 percent of the ALR land is being worked — 6 percent. That’s not because there aren’t other options. It’s just not sustainable. The growing seasons are too short, the costs are too high, and we need secondary incomes to keep it going.

By limiting zone 2…. This is terrible for my region. I can honestly tell you. This is really, really bad news. I’m afraid you’re going to see a further decline from the stats that I told you earlier, going from 26,000 cattle down to 17,000 cattle ten years later. Sheep and lambs from 1,200 now down to 375. Pigs from 262 to 29. Farms, 214 to 148.

We’re losing the battle here, and zone 2 was a ray of hope. It was a ray of hope for these people, and now we’re going to take that away from them. I just would hope the minister would consider that. I know she’s heard about it. I know she has considered it. This is a big deal in rural B.C.

On that, I can’t support this Bill 52. I look forward to my other colleagues continuing the debate.

L. Larson: I rise today to speak to Bill 52, the Agricultural Land Commission Amendment Act. Agriculture is a critical industry in this province and particularly in my riding of Boundary-Similkameen.

The Similkameen is well known for its organic farming industry and boasts of the number and variety of fruit stands through Keremeos and Cawston. It has also begun to be recognized as a great wine region, producing many award-winning wines.

The earliest fruit harvest comes out of Osoyoos, usually cherries, and is celebrated with the cherry festival on July 1. The Oliver area is known as the wine capital of Canada. It grows the largest quantity of red grapes in the province of British Columbia, but it also has soft fruits like peaches and cherries, as well as ground crops of peppers, melons and squash.

The Boundary’s wide open spaces provide the grasslands for cattle, as well as sheep, some pigs and a variety of other farm animals. The Grand Forks area is known for its crops like garlic and potatoes, as well as many other vegetable ground crops and berries. There are also nurseries growing a variety of trees and shrubs to supply garden centres all over western Canada. Scattered throughout are greenhouses supplying tomatoes and cucumbers to Lower Mainland markets.

The agricultural industry in British Columbia is as diverse as the province’s unique topography, and each agricultural industry produces a product unique to that region. That product is grown or raised in each area based on its viability to survive the climate and to take advantage of the appropriate soil conditions.

Thousands of families depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, and British Columbia has a proud agricultural history. Even in my area in the South Okanagan, cattle were introduced more than 150 years ago to feed the gold miners.

Farmers are experts in each of their areas of agriculture. They understand the right balance of water, temperatures and soil nutrients to produce the best from the land that they manage.

[5:15 p.m.]

In 2014, we strived to strike the right balance in the agricultural land reserve and the Agricultural Land Commission with the agricultural land reforms that we introduced. We recognized the difference in farming regions around the province by introducing the flexibility of two zones, and we made sure local people would be involved directly in agricultural land use decisions by appointing regional boards. The people who live in the Peace region or the Kootenays should be the ones to make decisions on land use in that region, not a board in the Lower Mainland.

Most of the land use decision-making has had strong voices with local panels. They’re eyes on the ground around the province that have served agriculture well in the last four years. The panels were three members each, but four of the panels are now only two members. The local board members, many of whom grew up in the areas they represented, who know the history of the land base…. They know how the land was farmed in the past, where there were flood concerns, where there was no soil, only rocks. They made their recommendations with the economic viability of the farm in mind and the desire to ensure a farmer could survive on the land.

I am concerned, with the centralization in the Lower Mainland of the large ALC body, that the regional voices will not carry the same value anymore. Because of the insights and the previous makeup of the ALC, the decision on applications was moved through the process in under two months. Since the changes by this Agriculture Minister, the backlog is more than six months. Time is money, and the timing of planting crops and the acquisition of livestock is not one of waiting for paperwork on someone’s desk to be processed. The very farmers that we are trying to protect are being driven out of farming.

I’ve always been a believer in growing your own food and a country’s ability to feed itself first. The two-zone approach was created because the realities of farming in the north, the Interior and the Kootenays are very different from the realities in the rest of the province. We need to remember that each region has its own agricultural practices, its own developmental pressures. Each region has its own social and economic realities. It makes no sense to blanket the entire province with one set of rules and regulations without regional considerations.

Conditions in British Columbia simply do not fit into a one-size-fits-all category. This approach does not reflect the economic reality of farming in British Columbia. The two-zone approach allowed farmers living in less hospitable parts of British Columbia to make decisions on their land that would allow them to keep farming each year, if only in a four-month window.

A secondary industry, often a value-added one, gave a farmer an income during the eight months of the year that farming was not possible. The value of that grain or hay that was grown in that short window feeds cattle and other farm animals that we depend on for food.

To keep their families on the farms or ranches, they were able to create another source of revenue, perhaps a shop to repair farm equipment or a building to offer storage to other farmers.

Why would we make it more difficult for these areas to be productive? If issues in the Lower Mainland are the reason for the changes, then deal with those issues by region. Fix the Lower Mainland, and leave the rest of the province out of that envelope.

This bill demonstrates that the government is only interested in the land and not the bounty our hard-working farmers could produce in each region with appropriate and fair land use regulation. This bill threatens the delicate balance that each farmer has worked so hard to create in each of their unique agricultural landscapes.

In this bill, agricultural land will no longer consist of just the land currently within the agricultural land reserve. Instead, all the agricultural land will be grouped into one resource pool, the ALR. This means that all the land suitable for farm use, as determined by government, not necessarily by farmers, will become part of the agricultural land reserve, regardless of what conditions are necessary to make ranches and crops flourish in their respective regions.

All the land will be subject to one set of legislation, reducing all the unique farmlands to a single land mass, leaving the farmers to wonder how they will survive — more red tape, more applications to be made, more paperwork.

This is another piece of legislation brought in by this government where the real issues will be dealt with under regulation, not legislation, and, therefore, without input from those affected — another example of decisions being made away from the public’s eye.

[5:20 p.m.]

How will this broad-based legislation affect other current uses of our land base? Our resource industries that currently produce the majority of the wealth this province enjoys are now caught up in this new ALR designation. One can assume the amount of paperwork through an ever-expanding bureaucracy will slow projects down, and in some cases, the investment will just go to another jurisdiction. If all of the land that could possibly be farmed is now agricultural land, one can see this government using this to slow down or even stop resource projects on land that was not considered by experts for the past four decades as viable agricultural land.

I totally understand the issues in the Lower Mainland, where some of the best farmland in the province has been lost to development. These are lands that can produce food all year long, not only by growing outdoors but with added greenhouse capacity in the cooler months. I do not want to see greenhouses that grew tomatoes and cucumbers for human consumption now being converted to growing cannabis and food production lost by this rollover that’s happening with the greenhouses in the Lower Mainland. There are massive…. That’s another story.

The legislation also dictates the size of a residence on ALR land. It’s focused on the giant homes in Richmond on farmland. This legislation assumes that they are all foreign buyers who may or may not be farming the land the house sits on. Who will determine that? It is not the size or cost of the house that deters young farmers. It is the cost of the land and the value of the crop that determine what the price will be.

On the prairies, over the past number of years, small farms have disappeared to become mega-farms in order for the farmers to actually make a living in huge areas with only one farmer. Making the house smaller is not really going to make the land more affordable.

In the South Okanagan, we have many extremely large homes on farmland, but those homes are multi-generational families, and they all farm. They live together to share the work and the costs of farming. The land would not be farmed without these family groups. The details of how this new legislation will actually be implemented are, as usual, in the regulations that have yet to be developed.

The other targeted area in the legislation is the dumping of fill or other matters on farmland or the removal of the same. The concept is sound. We obviously do not want good soil removed from viable farmland or land contaminated by the dumping of waste materials. It’s what will be in the details that concerns me.

My area was hit severely by flooding two years in a row. A large amount of agricultural land that was flooded requires materials for diking to repair what was lost. That process is already tied up in red tape through FLNRORD, and it takes months for permits to come through. During a flood event, again, materials are needed immediately for protection, and doing anything in a timely manner is already difficult without adding another layer of paperwork on top.

As a follow-up to the flooding, many large nursery and ground crop operations along the rivers had their good farmland covered by several feet of gravel from the river during the extreme flooding. That land is ALR but is now no longer farmable. What type of red tape will those farmers need to go through to remove that land from the ALR and create some value-added business? Eventually, we will lose localized on this, as the ALC has become more centralized.

If the purpose of this legislation is to protect farmland in British Columbia, then where are the supports for the farmer to actually put land into production? I believe the legislation on the table makes it more difficult for farmers to make a living on the land. There is no incentive for anyone to begin farming, and certainly no reason for young farmers to follow in their parents’ footsteps.

I will, as my colleagues will, be pursuing more of these details in committee. I thank you for this opportunity to speak.

[5:25 p.m.]

Deputy Speaker: The member for Columbia River–Revelstoke. [Applause.]

D. Clovechok: I brought my own fans.

It’s always an honour and a pleasure to rise in this House representing the hard-working people of Columbia River–Revelstoke.

Mr. Speaker, I do see the minister is in the House today. I, on behalf of my constituents and my family, wish you and your family the sincerest condolences at this tragic time. I just wanted to say that out loud.

I am speaking today in opposition to Bill 52, the Agricultural Land Commission Amendment Act. I want to make it clear right off the bat what I’m opposing and what I’m not opposing, because that’s really important.

What I’m not opposing is the concept of protecting land in this province, land that has a reasonable chance of being used for farmland. On that central value I’m in complete agreement with the minister, and I’m confident all the members of this House also share this value. I’m also in complete agreement with the minister and my colleague from Delta South that things like dumping refuse on agricultural lands cannot be tolerated.

I’m in agreement with the concept of restrictions on removing soil and fill and the need to apply for a permit to do so. However, this restriction ignores emergency situations such as flooding. A rancher may on a moment’s notice have to save their lands or properties, their livelihoods or even their lives to dike against rising waters, and this needs to be recognized in this bill as a potential.

I can actually agree with many of the changes in this bill that go further to protect usable farmland. This is critical to the future of this province, the future of our kids, our grandkids and all those kids that will come after them. These are the values that I agree with.

[L. Reid in the chair.]

So as I proceed with my remarks today, I want the context to be that I’m a huge supporter of the agricultural industry, especially of small farms and ranches. I also strongly believe that if the land is good ag land, it ought to be retained in the ALR for agriculture.

With this context in mind, what is it that I don’t like about this bill? I’m opposed to this bill because it’s intrinsically biased against the region that I represent. That, of course, is the East Kootenay — my colleague from the East Kootenay just spoke — and the upper Columbia Valley as well.

Let me explain. My goal is to get the minister — I’m really pleased, Madame Speaker, that she’s here today to hear this, because I know that she’s passionate about it — to acknowledge that what I’m saying here is true and that her bill needs to be amended.

Let’s turn to the history channel for a brief moment. The truth is that when the ALR was created in the early 1970s, my region was one of the last regions to be mapped, and last in this case was not an advantage. Not only were resources such as GPS mapping not available; the people creating the ALR at the time had run out of financial resources, and therefore, they simply drew lines at the base of the Rocky Mountains to the east and the base of the Purcell Mountains at the west and pretty much called it a day. Anyone who knows the Rocky Mountain Trench knows there are smaller mountains even within that trench.

The bottom line is that the people that I represent are mountain people with a mountain culture, which means we’re surrounded by mountains — which means rock, mountains with very little fertile land. There are steep rocky cliffs, swamps and millions of hectares of forested land that after…. Hundreds of thousands of years of conifer needles dropping into thin clay soil has left massive amounts of land that is totally and completely unfit for agriculture — massive amounts of land that are totally unfit for agriculture. Then there is the short growing period. My neighbours who are ranchers are lucky to get two cuts of hay — if they’re lucky. All of these are indisputable facts.

Even the most fervent supporter of the ALR must acknowledge that there is a lot of land in my region where agriculture just doesn’t work. If the minister doesn’t know this, I would suggest strongly that she educate herself quickly about this reality, because her bill is about to become a significant impediment to the ranchers and the farmers where I live and represent.

[5:30 p.m.]

This bill represents a significant obstacle to economic growth where I live and a very big political issue that she and her government will not come out of unscathed. One of the best ways to illustrate this situation is to tell a bit of a story — a real story about real people. I’m going to tell this story, and I’m glad that the minister is here to hear that.

About a week ago, as the MLA, I was approached by a constituent. A fourth-generation Kootenay family business volunteered to give up 80 acres of waterfront land that they could have developed. They could have developed it, but because they are good, responsible people who care about their community, they decided to make a deal. This family agreed with FLNRO, the ministry at the time, to exchange their very valuable 80 acres of developable but ecologically sensitive land for 40 acres of non-arable land on the boundary of one of our municipalities — cut a deal.

The land exchange took two years, and by all accounts, government staff was very pleased to effect the land trade because the 80 ecologically sensitive acres would be put into conservation forever. A good deal for everybody. Given that the 40 acres of Crown land sits directly on a city boundary, the city and regional district were very supportive of the land exchange. Regional government was supportive of that land exchange, believing — naively, it turns out — that the province would respect local interests and the views of locally elected leaders.

The family business finally secured the 40 acres from the province after years of hard work, a lot of frustration and a lot of money. Then, they applied to take the 40 acres that they had cut the deal with, by giving 80, out of the ALR, believing that their case was a slam dunk. They had strong support from local leaders. No local rancher objected to this application. In fact, no one objected to this application.

Let me tell you about that 40 acres. Not only is this land on a municipal boundary and surrounded by existing rural residents, the land is heavily forested by what we call trench fir where I live. These are crooked, non-marketable trees growing on glacial clay over rolling, rocky hills — trench fir. Five-acre parcels and homes, like what already exists in the neighbourhood, would work on this land. Not even the most dedicated farmer or rancher would ever want to try to convert this bad ag land into agricultural usage. It just doesn’t make any economic sense to do that.

This land is, of course, too close to the municipality even for grazing. Too many roads. Too much vehicle traffic. Just simply no good for agriculture — period. So I’m betting that anyone who’s listening to me here — and I think that there are a few — likely knows what I’m going to say next. These guys made a deal, and you know what’s coming.

The NDP-appointed ALC panel rep shows up, walks the land with these people that they’ve made a deal with, and the new owners, and tells these new owners that his job is to ensure that the size of the ALR does not diminish under an NDP government. Tells them that. Yes, Madame Speaker, you heard that. Tells them that.

We’re in a so-called zone 2, where appointed ALC panels are supposed to use some common sense and local perspective, yet the NDP appointee says out loud that he doesn’t care how bad the land is. He doesn’t care how close to the municipality the land is. He doesn’t care about fairness.

Interjection.

D. Clovechok: I’m sorry? Oh, any time. Any time, pal. You bring it, pal. Any time.

He doesn’t care about the local economy. He just cares about an arbitrary commandment he’s been given by the minister that he cannot, he must not — I’m sure that’s not the case, but that’s what we heard — let the size of the provincial ALR resource change. This is so beyond wrong, it’s offensive. It’s dishonest. This is completely opposite to the fairness the minister and her government claim to believe and continue to preach.

[5:35 p.m.]

This underhanded approach simply says: “To hell with the local people and local values. To hell with whether the land is good for agriculture or not.” So I say to the minister and her government, “Take a close look at this example,” because there are so many other similar situations throughout rural B.C. And while you’re thinking about this absurdity, think about where good agricultural land does get taken out of the ALR — for highways, for airports, shopping malls, housing subdivisions and industrial development.

This sort of thing happens in Metro Vancouver. It happens on southern Vancouver Island. It does not happen where I live. We have precious little good, arable land where I live, and I can say without hesitation that yes, we darn well want to preserve that land, but we need this government to understand that the majority of our land base is not agriculturally friendly.

Yet it would seem that this government and this ministry are talking out of both sides of their mouths. You tell us you want to preserve agricultural, good farmland. Well, by all means, go ahead and make the tough decisions on the Lower Mainland, southern Vancouver Island, where you are in fact losing arable land to development. But don’t preach to us in rural British Columbia about preserving good farmland and then make your point by forcing rural families and communities to bear the cost of your virtual signalling. Trust me. We can believe you care about preserving good farmland without you forcing us and private rural landowners from making productive, non-farm uses of land that will never be good for farming.

What I have just said in the last few minutes is a perspective that…. The government, if only for its own political good, needs to get its socialist head wrapped around this. There is ALR land all over this province that is not good for agriculture but which the private land owners and their communities want to use for the good of the family and the community at large.

By the way, this new bill refers to a fee. I know what the minister’s intention is here, and believe it or not, I think I’m okay with it. I am. But in reality, fees for people who own land in the ALR that should never have been in the ALR in the first place are a cruel insult to them — should never have been there. First, an NDP government in the 1970s sterilizes their private, non-arable land, and then today you’re rubbing it in their faces by telling them that they have to pay a fee to correct a problem that the NDP government created in the first place.

It’s important for people to clarify. The people I’m talking about are not typically wealthy people. But the minister obviously has set her sights on the Lower Mainland. There are no 40,000-square-foot houses on arable land where I live — not in the Kootenays, not in the upper Columbia. Rather, the people I stand here for are ordinary, incredibly hard-working people, and she knows that — Kootenay families who are often land-poor, sometimes ranchers but most often just people living on 20 or 40 acres somewhere in the Rocky Mountain Trench on land that is absolutely no good for agriculture.

There are so many cases where sometimes a rancher or a landowner wants to allow a son, daughter, grandson or granddaughter to develop a small business on non-arable lands, portions of the ranch, which is something very important to understand. These folks need to subsidize their living. And by the way, there are no ranchers that I know where I live that do not subsidize their living. Some of them have trucking companies. Some of them have gravel pits. Some are guide-outfitters. The list of things that they do goes on and on.

Ranching in the Kootenays is a very tough business, and my hat goes off every time when I talk about ranching — these families in the region, where the growing season is short, the soil is typically bad, and there is often limited or no access to water. The terrain is so steep and so rocky. It’s hard work, with little return on investment. I know this personally because I worked in a feedlot. I put myself through university on the back of a horse. I know how this works. It’s not an easy job, but it’s a rewarding job.

Ranching in the Kootenays is a lifestyle choice. In so many cases, it’s generational. Parents and grandparents want their kids to stay ranching on the land that has been held for so many generations, but they struggle to generate enough income. They need help from this government to allow small, non-intrusive businesses and separate residences to be placed close enough to the ranching business that grown children are around to help with the ranch.

[5:40 p.m.]

These ranchers tell me that they could make good use of the money from the sale of small, non-arable parcels to invest in their ranches and their businesses. What is so often forgotten by all B.C. governments in this heated political correctness of this issue is that many rural British Columbians live on acreages that will never be used, ever, for agriculture. These thousands of British Columbians are not in the ag business. They just choose to live outside of town, a free, individual choice. I hope that’s still allowed in this province.

Commanding — no, dictating — that these people can never use their land that they own to create a five-acre parcel of non-arable land for a daughter or a son is patently unjust, something an NDP government or any government ought to care about. Arbitrarily commanding that all land in the ALR where I live or in the Cariboo or the north must never be taken from the ALR is counterproductive to rural families and rural communities.

I come to the list of opposition to Bill 52. Although, interestingly enough, the minister didn’t mention the revocation of two zones, she bragged about it in her news release. I understand the temptation of the NDP government to overturn every last thing the B.C. Liberals did on this planet when they were in government.

The creation of two zones in the ALR was controversial and, I have to say, very much misunderstood. But the creation of zone 2 was not intended to encourage the removal of good farmland from the ALR in my home region that this government seems to consider to be fly-over B.C.

Zone 2 wasn’t intended to ensure that the provincial governments focused almost entirely on a tiny portion of provincial land mass at the coast — shows respect for the differences that exist in rural B.C. Zone 2 reflects the perspective I have presented in this House today. It’s so important to the people that I call my neighbours and my friends.

By getting rid of zone 2, Minister, you and your government are thumbing your nose at the ranchers and private rural landowners not only where I live but, again, in the north, in the Cariboo. You’re literally spitting in their face and telling us you actually do not believe that the central principle of the ALR, that only good agricultural land must be protected…. By getting rid of zone 2, you’re saying that political payback and ideology trump common sense and the value of protecting good farmland.

Minister, your decision here with this amendment is sending a clear message that your government does not understand the differences between places like Richmond, Chilliwack, the delta and the more rural regions of British Columbia. In doing so — and heads-up — you have just provided rural British Columbia MLAs with a strong political issue. But frankly, I would prefer that the minister do what is right for rural British Columbia and rural British Columbians and recognize and respect the very real and different usable and non-usable agricultural lands that are real in this diverse province.

I cannot support this amendment. I encourage the minister and her government to amend this bill, taking into account the points and examples that I’ve made here. Doing so will not only recognize and demonstrate an understanding that when it comes to the ALR usage, all land in the ALR does not need the same protection — it doesn’t — and that one size actually does not fill all needs….

I implore the minister to look at this very carefully. I know she cares about agriculture. I know she has a passion for it. If you don’t believe what I’m saying, come on out to the Kootenays. I’m happy to show you around, and we’ll dig a hole and see how long we get to the rocks.

M. Hunt: It’s my honour to rise today to speak to Bill 52, which is the Agricultural Land Commission Amendment Act. I think we can all agree in this House that agriculture is a critical industry for this province. Of course, thousands of families are dependent on agriculture for their livelihood.

I had the privilege of being able to serve on Surrey’s Agricultural Advisory Committee for many years. I know and recognize that there are lots of opinions within the farming community, and they’re all very willing to express them. I’m sure the minister has endured much of that.

But if you sit down and when you speak to a farmer, you very quickly learn that the key to success is balance. Whether it’s the amount of sunshine, water, nutrients — whatever it is — you get too much or too little, and you have problems with your end result.

[5:45 p.m.]

As a matter of fact — interesting — the definition of toxic is simply “too much,” because too much of anything can kill us. But that is the kind of balance that this side sought to bring to the agricultural land reserve and to the Agricultural Land Commission when we made reforms in 2014.

We created the two-zone approach because we knew that the realities of farming in the north, the Interior and the Kootenays, as you’ve heard from my colleagues up north, are very different from the realities of the rest of the province. There are different agricultural practices, and that’s why we had local panels where we had local farmers involved in making decisions, because they knew what worked best in their communities.

Now, I know it’s a little strange. I’m here representing Surrey-Cloverdale, but actually, previously I helped a friend doing homesteading on the Alberta side of the border up in the north, in the Monkman Pass, which swings through down to a lot of the Peace area up there.

You know, every one of the farmers in that area all had some form of supplementary income. My friend worked with pressure-treating wood. That’s what he did. He had a vessel there. He pressure-treated wood. It didn’t take up a large piece of the property. It didn’t alienate a lot of the land from agricultural land uses. It was just a very simple way that he could help to supplement the income.

Because the reality is that when you get up into northern B.C., you’ve got five or six months of snow. Now, I know that’s hard to believe while we’re here down in Victoria enjoying the beautiful sunshine, but some parts of B.C. are already covered in snow.

We have an extra little visitor running up and down the aisles here today. This is the most interesting part of the agricultural festivities of today, I am sure.

The reality is that one size does not fit all in this beautiful province of B.C. Rather, we need to reflect the reality of what is happening on the ground. Unfortunately, we’ve heard it repeated so many times. Whether we call it one-size-doesn’t-fit-all or whether we call it a cookie-cutter approach, it’s clear when we look at this legislation that this government is only interested in the land itself — not the farmers, not the farmers’ families, not the benefits that the land can bring thanks to the ingenuity and the efforts of our farmers.

Now, last week, as a matter of fact, I was at home, and we were talking with one of the farmers. He said: “It seems that this government is more concerned about growing cannabis in the ALR than they are about the livelihood of farmers.” It’s interesting that the cannabis industry has been a booming industry in B.C., and it has not been using agricultural land previously. As a matter of fact, in my municipality of Surrey, a lot of it was grown indoors without soil — well, without the normal soils, we should say.

So it is just so strange that this bill throws things even further out of balance with sweeping changes to the definition of agricultural land. If this bill passes, agricultural land will no longer consist of the land that has been established as part of the agricultural land, but all agricultural land will be in the ALR. That means all land suitable. Now, if I’m quoting this out of the amendment, it says that all land suitable for farms is part of the reserve. That represents a very broad expansion, in my opinion, and I have to wonder: what is the intent of the government here?

Let’s simply take the situation in Surrey as an example. When the ALR was established in the 1970s, Surrey’s municipal council made a decision that the lowlands would be in the reserve and the uplands would be the area for future residential and industrial uses.

This has served Metro Vancouver well, because while the city of Vancouver has been converting its industrial lands into residential high-rises, Surrey has kept large areas available for industrial development. As Metro has grown by over one million residents, Surrey has used a lot of its uplands to absorb over 30 percent of that growth.

[5:50 p.m.]

Now, with Bill 52, will all of those lands that have been designated by Surrey, in its official community plan, for either residential or industrial development, be in the ALR, because they are being used for farming and they have historically been so? Metro Vancouver has agreed with Surrey in its regional land use plan. Again, will these lands suddenly become part of the ALR by a wish of that committee?

Now, some members on the other side are going to say: “Well, hold it a second. Just wait till the regulations.” Well, I’m sorry, but once again, this bill represents another concentration of power into the cabinet offices and away from this Legislature. We’ve seen what that has done in this whole proportional representation issue. I won’t go into that because we’re talking about agriculture here, not the referendum.

I have three major concerns with this bill, besides the two generalities that I’ve already talked about.

First, this is regarding the whole issue of limiting the size of housing in the agricultural land. Now, while I support the general concept — and I have to say I was involved in working with this issue while a councillor in the city of Surrey and on the agricultural land reserve — right now what is before us in these amendments is an amendment that is based on the total area of the house, rather than the actual footprint. If we’re trying to save agricultural land, shouldn’t we be working off of the footprint? Who cares how many storeys it is? But that’s what we have before us.

We’re not protecting the land. We’re simply dealing in the politics of envy because I don’t want somebody to have a bigger house than me. I’m sorry. In Surrey, we tried to deal with what we called a home plate. Now, maybe that was the wrong term for it, but that’s what we were trying to look at. We were trying to say: “Okay, based on how big the farm is, let’s take a percentage of that.”

That area is where you can deal with all of the non-farming uses, like the residential use, the houses, the barns, the shops, the processing. All of that can be here, in this area, and outside of that, all of that land is to be used for farming and the production of crops or feeding animals or whatever it is that you happen to be doing in your farming practices.

Now, I know that the minister has been on radio in Surrey. This whole issue has been raised to her, and she says: “It’s not a problem. Just make an application, and you can get an amendment.” Good try. You know, make the application, and the application takes how long to get through? And the panel has already been told the answer is no, so we’re getting the answer no. But you can apply, and the minister can hide behind that. But I’m sorry. Why doesn’t she just protect the land and deal with the footprint of the house, not how many square feet it is?

Secondly, what about the definition of “unfinished pre-existing residence”? Now, here we’re dealing with, again…. In the definition that she has in this bill dealing with an unfinished pre-existing residence, all required authorizations to construct have to be granted in order for this to be grandfathered.

Well, as I said previously, in Surrey, all of the agricultural land reserve lands are in the lowlands, not in the uplands. The lowlands are where you have soft soils. So in order to build, you have to preload, and that preload has to be brought onto the site. It has to be allowed to be settled for up to two years.

There are a lot of good people, good farmers, that in good faith have received permission to go and do preloading on their farm for their house to be built, and now we have the minister changing the rules and saying: “No, unless you’ve got the foundation poured, you’re not getting it. You don’t have approval.” Now you’ve got to get all that fill taken off. You’ve got to put this land all back together again. This is crazy. This is simply not reasonable.

These farmers, in good faith, have got their permissions to do the preloading. They’re waiting for that land to be able to settle so that they can build houses. And if you don’t believe it, all you have to do is go look at some of the older houses in the agricultural land reserve in Surrey, and you’ll see that the floor isn’t straight. It isn’t level because you build a fireplace on this side and it compresses the soils and you have complete destruction of those homes.

[5:55 p.m.]

We need to have a proper, fair process here for people who, in good faith, have gone in to work with this, not for those who haven’t yet poured their foundations.

The third restriction that I’m concerned with is the removing of soil and fill. Again, Surrey has lowlands. Most of that land is protected by dikes. While the concept that the minister is putting forward is sound, because we don’t want to lose soil, we have a problem with emergencies, and there are absolutely no provisions in this bill dealing with emergencies such as flooding. Again, I’m sorry that this will be a situation.

I’m getting signals from the House Leader. I reserve my place in the line, and I move adjournment of the debate.

M. Hunt moved adjournment of debate.

Motion approved.

Reporting of Bills

BILL 49 — PROFESSIONAL
GOVERNANCE ACT

Bill 49, Professional Governance Act, reported complete with amendments, to be considered at the next sitting of the House after today.

Hon. M. Farnworth: In this chamber, I call continued second reading debate on Bill 52. In Committee A, I call committee stage on Bill 45, Budget Measures Implementation Act.

Second Reading of Bills

BILL 52 — AGRICULTURAL LAND
COMMISSION AMENDMENT ACT, 2018

(continued)

M. Hunt: The three issues that I have as we get into the specifics of this…. Regarding the house size, it shouldn’t be house size. It should actually be on the footprint of the land where that house is going to sit. If they want to go multi-storey, let them do it. We’re trying to preserve the land here.

The second one is dealing with the definition of “unfinished pre-existing residence,” because the soils in Surrey require compaction, and therefore, it takes time for that process to happen.

Third is dealing with the removal of soils and fill. Again, the reality in Surrey is Surrey is dealing with lowlands. Because we’re dealing with lowlands, we can very easily…. I know while I was a councillor in the city, many times we had flooding of the agricultural land because of the storms that come through, particularly the ones that come through in November and in January, when we’ve got king tides as well.

We have our rivers, which flow into the ocean. The water is up high. The dam is holding the water back. The water comes piling back up through our three rivers, and we end up with challenges and flooding within the agricultural land. We have to be able to deal with these emergencies, because they are real. They’re not hypothetical. They’re not possibilities.

With the agriculture in the lowlands, a farmer needs to be able to use fill and soils at a moment’s notice to save his land, his livelihood, even his life. There is no time for an application. There’s no time for approval processing to go through the situation.

Taken together, I have problems with the legislation that is before us. It places the protection of the land above the protection of agriculture itself, which is bad for the future of this province. It’s bad for the continuation of farming, because we already know the average age of farmers today is quite elderly. We know that we have a tremendous challenge with trying to get new farmers in.

[6:00 p.m.]

We talk about the need for skilled trades and all this sort of stuff, in construction and all these other things. One of our most critical situations and our critical needs is for farmers and new farming. I see this legislation as working completely and absolutely against encouraging young farmers to get into the industry. I think it’s bad for the future of this province. Instead of striking a balance that ensures opportunity for all British Columbians, it tilts it against families and against communities who are dependent upon agriculture. I believe that farming and ranching families deserve better than this.

J. Isaacs: I rise today to speak to Bill 52, the Agricultural Land Commission Amendment Act. Agriculture is a critical industry in this province. It touches all of us every day. Whether you shop for your groceries at a big-box store, a brand-name grocery chain, a no-brand-name chain, a fruit and vegetable store, maybe a meat and deli shop, a farmers market or a roadside stand, we all go to one place or another throughout the seasons to purchase our food.

The big-box stores and the brand-name grocery stores, as well as the no-brand-name chains, buy their food through expanded global markets. They have the advantage of purchasing power, allowing them to purchase greater volumes at reduced prices. They rarely, and only in peak seasons, buy their produce locally.

Bigger stores also provide access to a pharmacist — and have the added benefit of pharmaceutical sales — and provide information and guidance in health and wellness matters. Many of them usually sell items other than food, such as TVs and appliances, furniture and even jewelry. They also sell a range of hardware, such as faucets, plumbing materials, vacuum cleaners and a host of other items.

Stores operate year-round, despite the season, and the food supply and food options are available to consumers any time throughout the year. That access is available to consumers because the bigger stores have access to farmers and farmers’ crops from areas that have an advantage of growing multiple crops throughout the year, mostly because of favourable climate. There are thousands of consumers that depend on this consistent and stable food supply, because we all have to eat.

There are thousands of families right here in British Columbia that depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. Whether it’s grain and oilseeds in the Peace, tree fruits in the Okanagan, cattle ranches in the Cariboo or berries, vegetables and dairy in the Fraser Valley, farmers in every part of this province are striving to build a stronger future for their families and their communities. But they don’t have the advantage of year-round planting or multiple harvests.

In most cases, they have a single growing season, and what they yield is entirely dependent on the right balance — the right balance of sunshine, the right amount of water and the right amount of nutrients. Too much or too little of any of these factors could have a major implication on what is yielded. Our ranchers and dairy farmers also have external factors that they manage, including unexpected veterinarian visits that can lead to loss of productivity.

Any one of these factors, along with many others, such as outbuilding maintenance, purchasing and repairs of farm equipment, seeds, soil, feed and repairs…. They will all impact these farmers. All these factors create challenges for farmers and affect their bottom line.

We need to support our farmers and provide them every opportunity to manage unexpected events — a poor crop due to weather or financial hardship because of a limited and underperforming growing season.

The agricultural land reserve and the Agricultural Land Commission reforms were introduced by the previous government in 2014. At that time, we created a two-zone approach because we knew that the realities of farming in the north, Interior and the Kootenays are very different than farming in the rest of the province.

[6:05 p.m.]

It’s logical to have different agricultural practices for different populations and different regions around the province. The culture and the social makeup between the different regions also need to be recognized. There will be many areas, particularly in the rural areas, where consumers do not have access to big-box or brand-name stores and they rely on local farmers to bring their goods to the community.

A one-size-fits-all approach to regulating farmland does not reflect this reality. This bill does not take into consideration the variety of food being produced, the external factors farmers face, the uniqueness of each producer and the added costs and regulations imposed on farmers.

Instead, this bill suggests that the government is only interested in the land itself. It is not interested in the benefits that the land can bring, and they are not providing any opportunities for farmers to maximize the use of the land, especially during those times when the growing season has expired. The use of the land can be greatly enhanced by optimizing ingenuity and creating opportunities to better utilize the space which is already there.

This bill actually throws things out of balance with a sweeping change to how agricultural land is defined. If this bill passes, agricultural land will no longer consist of the land that has been established as part of the agricultural land reserve. Instead, all agricultural land will be in the ALR. That means that all land suitable for farm use is part of the reserve. That’s a broad expansion, and we are left guessing what the government intends to do and what the actual regulations will be.

This bill and the subsequent regulations will transfer the power to the government and their cabinet table and away from this Legislature. It’s more backroom decisions made by a few people that affect all of us. It is so similar to their proportional representation approach: vote now, and we’ll figure out the details later. Once again people are being asked to vote on something when the details have not been made available.

Are we really voting to improve the protection of farmland, or is there another underlying motivation behind this approach? If all land that could possibly be farmed is now agricultural land, one can see this government using the same approach to halt the progress of resource projects on land that may not be considered agricultural. This session of the Legislature has already seen a pause to the progress in the resource sector, and this bill only makes it continue. This is a big concern for families who depend on agriculture and responsible resource projects.

There are two issues we are concerned with and will explore in committee stage. Firstly, we know that the issue of larger houses on agricultural land has been disappointing and there needs to be some amendments to limit the size of these houses. We support the concept, but we need to get clarity around the size limits of developments. Right now it’s based on the total area size of the building rather than the actual footprint. If the objective is to protect the land, then the existing footprint of the land is not the issue, and the footprint would remain intact. With the footprint secure, there should be no reason or restrictions to a multi-storey building, as the land use is still within the same footprint.

The second issue is around the restrictions on removing soil and fill. We don’t want to lose the soil. So the concept is good, but the need to apply for a permit ignores emergency situations such as flooding. There are occasions when a farmer may use fill or soil and may need to have access to the soil very quickly to save their land and their livelihoods from rising waters. There simply may not be enough time for an application and approval process, and lives could be at risk from quickly rising waters. The only alternative to saving the land or lives is to immediately put in a dike.

[6:10 p.m.]

Families and community depend on agriculture. There is no one-size-fits-all in a diverse province like British Columbia, where there are different growing seasons and different geographic conditions in different regions. This bill does not strike a balance that ensures opportunity for all British Columbians. It places the protection of land above the protection of agriculture. That’s not good for families who are farming or ranching, and it’s not good for communities who want access to local produce and livestock.

We need to make every effort to ensure that opportunities are given to families who want to farm and to ranch in the province of British Columbia.

Deputy Speaker: Seeing no further speakers, the minister closes debate.

Hon. L. Popham: It’s my pleasure to close debate in second reading so that we can move forward to committee stage, because I think there’s an opportunity to clear up a lot of issues that the opposition has brought up. I think that each speaker who spoke believes in agriculture. I heard why from each one of them, and I’ve listened to every single speaker from last Thursday and today.

[Mr. Speaker in the chair.]

I heard from the MLA for Chilliwack-Kent, who worked on a dairy farm as a young guy and got up in the morning, put on his rubber boots and chased cows.

I heard from the MLA for Delta South about being a third-generation dairy farmer and how he’s living on the farm that he grew up on. He’s been there for 62 years.

I heard from the MLA for Saanich North and the Islands, who talked to his grandpa. His grandpa said that he didn’t work in the dirt; he worked in the soil, making a connection to the big…. There’s a difference between how farmers till the soil and what’s referred to as dirt.

I heard from the member for Cariboo North. She came into farming, in 1933, into the Cariboo with 160 acres, a cow and a tent.

I heard from Abbotsford-Mission, who was very proud, when he was visiting down in Arizona, to see in the local Safeway store blueberries from Abbotsford, British Columbia.

We’ve all spent a lot of time in this chamber over the last few hours talking about why agriculture is important and why it’s important to our province. I can tell you that I believe when we go through committee stage next, we will be able to clear up a lot of the fears that the opposition has and, I think, allow them to feel confident that they would be able to support this bill.

We did a consultation. We took from that a report, which was given to me. We took the top three issues of concerned British Columbians, and we’ve made, in my view, a simple bill that I believe could be supported by both sides of the House.

I’m going to highlight a couple of things that I think will enable the opposition to maybe think about how we go through committee stage, with just a bit more information. It’s important to highlight that the goal around this legislation is to make agriculture stronger. It’s about protecting farmland, but it’s also about supporting farmers. I agree with the opposition that there has been a lack of support for farming, although we have tried very hard as a province to protect the land.

I’m just going to point out quickly a few things, and then we will go into committee stage, hopefully by the end of this week, and clear some more things up.

[6:15 p.m.]

It’s important for me to highlight that those legitimate farming families who believe they need a house size greater than 500 square metres can, with support from their local government, apply to the Agricultural Land Commission for an exemption. That’s for legitimate farmers. There’s also an application process to the ALC for farmers and ranchers that require a secondary residence for housing for workers or other agricultural activities.

I heard that addressing soil and fill use is an important step. There are some concerns from the opposition about that, but I think we have general support. And I will take this moment to say that in an emergency, a crisis, of course the emergency overrides the soil bylaw. We would obviously consider the emergency situation and do whatever we needed to do. So the members don’t need to worry about that.

I want to reassure the members that there has been careful considerations of the implications for the removal of zones and the importance of reinstituting one zone with consistent provincial decision-making. The province can further economic opportunities for ranchers and farmers through finely tailored regulations that better recognize geographic regions in a manner more refined than the two-zone concept.

I just want to mention that I believe that the members who spoke so passionately about the need for zone 2 may not understand how zone 2 is working currently. The Agricultural Land Commission is required to use section 6 as the priority criteria for decision-making, and that criteria is to preserve agricultural land and to encourage farming. Zone 2 saw section 4.3…. And that’s what this zone is about — section 4.3. It required that the ALC first consider section 6, which is the section I just mentioned, around preserving agricultural land and encouraging farming. It must consider that first, before any of the other criteria in 4.3 go into consideration. So you always use a lens of agriculture, even in zone 2.

That being said, issues that the members have raised and the uses that they have told this House are important to their constituents are farm uses that are permitted under home occupation businesses on the ALR with local government approval. For example, welding, mechanic shop, mechanics bay — these are allowable uses in the ALR, even in zone 1 currently.

We look forward to going through the committee stage, and I’ll state again that I think the amendments are going to make farming stronger. I’m grateful, and it’s a pleasure to be able to discuss with the opposition in as much detail as they wish.

I move second reading of Bill 52.

[6:20 p.m. - 6:25 p.m.]

Second reading of Bill 52 approved on the following division:

Hon. L. Popham: I move that Bill 52 be referred to a Committee of the Whole for consideration at the next sitting of the House after today.

Bill 52, Agricultural Land Commission Amendment Act, 2018, read a second time and referred to a Committee of the Whole House for consideration at the next sitting of the House after today.

Private Members’ Motions

MOTION 32 — FOREIGN DONATIONS
AND POLITICAL ACTIVITIES
OF ORGANIZATIONS

(continued)

Mr. Speaker: Members, we have, you will recall, a deferred division, which we may do right now. This is pursuant to Standing Order 25. We have a deferred division on Motion 32. Do we have an agreement to waive the time?

Motion negatived on the following division:

Hon. M. Farnworth: I move a recess till seven o’clock.

Mr. Speaker: This House stands recessed until 7 p.m. this evening.

The House recessed from 6:29 p.m. to 7:03 p.m.

[R. Chouhan in the chair.]

Hon. M. Farnworth: In this chamber, I call second reading debate on Bill 54, Lobbyists Registration Amendment Act. And in Committee A, I call continued committee on Bill 45, Budget Measures Implementation Act.

Second Reading of Bills

BILL 54 — LOBBYISTS REGISTRATION
AMENDMENT ACT, 2018

Hon. D. Eby: I move that Bill 54 now be read a second time.

This bill amends the Lobbyists Registration Act to ensure that it achieves its purpose and provides a sound transparency framework for lobbying in British Columbia. This transparency framework is important in safeguarding the integrity of the public decision-making process and contributes to public confidence and trust in that process.

Transparency in lobbying supports the legitimate, necessary participation of different voices, views and expertise in a democracy while preventing actual or perceptions of undue influence, unfair competition and regulatory capture.

[7:05 p.m.]

Like other jurisdictions in Canada and elsewhere, British Columbia’s act provides this transparency mainly by requiring paid lobbyists to publicly register both themselves and their lobbying activities.

In B.C., two categories of lobbyists must register: consultant lobbyists, who lobby on behalf of their clients, and in-house lobbyists, who lobby on behalf of organizations where they are employees, directors or officers.

As is also the case elsewhere, the act generally does not regulate lobbyist behaviour or conduct.

The amendments in Bill 54 would significantly enhance the five cornerstones of lobbying transparency: who is lobbying, on whose behalf, who is being lobbied, about what and with what intended outcome. The amendments would also support public trust in ethical lobbying and strengthen compliance and enforcement.

These amendments build on the two-year cooling-off period for former public office holders that was introduced last year, and effective May 1, 2018. The bill results from the comprehensive review of the act of that government announced during last year’s debate. It acts on the recommendations made in 2013 by the former registrar of lobbyists, consultation feedback, including from the current office of the registrar, and an analysis of developments in lobbying regimes in other jurisdictions.

First, significant changes to registration reporting requirements would substantially increase transparency. One-time and semi-annual reporting of expected lobbying would be replaced by monthly reporting of actual lobbying activity. In-house lobbyists would be required to register within ten days of beginning to lobby, instead of waiting up to 60 days after lobbying 100 hours for their organization.

Under new registration reporting requirements, lobbyists would identify parties other than the lobbyist’s client or employer known to have a direct interest in a lobbying outcome. This will make more visible the ultimate client and other direct beneficiaries of lobbying efforts.

The new monthly reporting requirements would significantly expand public information about who is being lobbied, when they have been lobbied and the subject matter. Lobbyists would be required to report each month the names and position titles of senior public office holders, dates and subject matter of lobbying activity and the lobbyists involved. Senior public officer holders include public service and public sector executives, MLAs, ministers and their respective staff.

Together, these amendments would produce a considerably more accurate picture of lobbying in the province, bringing a substantial amount of now unreported lobbying into the public domain and improving the accuracy of the information in the registry. The changes would also provide more equitable treatment between the two classes of lobbyists.

We heard and listened to concerns that changing the registration threshold for in-house lobbyists could impose an unwarranted administrative burden on small organizations. As a result, organizations with five or fewer employees would be exempt from immediate registration and would continue under the existing regime but with a lower registration threshold of 50 instead of 100 hours, the same as in Ontario and Alberta for all organizations. This exemption would not apply, however, to small organizations that lobby primarily to represent their members’ interests or for issue advocacy. All of this lobbying would now be in the public domain.

Second, key changes support both transparency and public trust in ethical conduct. Consultant lobbyists would be required to report whether they are lobbying under a contingency fee arrangement. All lobbyists would be prohibited from giving gifts and other benefits to public office holders, with the exception of gifts below a prescribed dollar amount that are incidental to protocol and social obligations. All eligible gifts that have been given each month be must be reported as part of a monthly return.

Related amendments would require lobbyists to report whether they have made contributions that are reportable under the Election Act or the Recall and Initiative Act to any MLAs they are lobbying.

The amendments also provide for lobbyists to report whether they are governed by a relevant and publicly accessible code of conduct. This approach contributes to lobbyists’ public accountability and trust but remains consistent with the former registrar’s recommendations against a stand-alone code of conduct. After extensive study and consultation, the former registrar recommended instead that key provisions of a code of conduct, like those in this bill, be incorporated directly into the statute.

Next, Bill 54 would strengthen and enhance compliance and enforcement. It will close a technical loophole to ensure that both the cooling-off period and the requirement that lobbyists identify themselves as former public office holders clearly apply to all former ministerial staff, regardless of the minister’s status as a current or former member of executive council.

Harmonized registration and reporting requirements for both classes of lobbyists would reduce compliance anxiety and related compliance and enforcement costs.

A related technical amendment based on consultation feedback would allow regulations to clarify, if necessary, whether certain classes of individuals carrying out certain activities under certain circumstances should register as lobbyists. This will support compliance and also avoid under- and over-registration and reporting that compromise the accuracy of information in the registry.

The amendments would expand the administrative penalty regime to authorize the registrar to impose a ban in the public interest on lobbying for up to two years for repeated contraventions of the act. As a safeguard for this powerful deterrent against non-compliance, an affected individual would be able to seek reconsideration from the registrar and, subsequently, court relief from the prohibition.

To ensure that the act achieves its objectives and keeps pace with future developments in lobbying practice, it would be reviewed every five years by a committee of the Legislative Assembly.

[7:10 p.m.]

Finally, as a result of provisions added over the years, and some that would be added under this bill, the act is no longer considered solely as a registry. Its title act would be changed to the lobbyist transparency act. This title change is in keeping with both the purpose of the act and the nature of the bill.

With these amendments, British Columbia’s lobbying regime would be the most transparent in the country. I commend this bill to the assembly.

M. Lee: I rise to speak this evening to Bill 54, the Lobbyists Registration Amendment Act. I don’t think that the Attorney General originally intended that this lobbyists registration legislation last fall, having been amended then, would be on the floor of this House again within a year. But here we are again, not even halfway through the term of this government, and we’re looking at this piece of legislation again.

I acknowledge that two consecutive governments didn’t focus on the loophole being addressed in Bill 54 in their reviews of the legislation. Last time, of course, in the fall of 2017, the government was newly on that side, and the opposition was newly on this side. It’s certainly appropriate to address the loophole identified by the registrar of lobbyists in his letter to the Attorney General dated August 1, 2018, a copy of which was also addressed to myself in my Attorney General critic role.

That error was in the definition of “former public office holder,” which is being revised in Bill 54 to include, for example, individuals who were formerly employed by a current member of cabinet and not just a former member of cabinet.

Having this opportunity again from this government gives us a chance to consider the debate from last fall and the amendment that we introduced to this act, an amendment that would have expanded the coverage of the act to include members of the government’s transition team and employees of the confidence and supply secretariat, the million-dollar secretariat, as my colleague from Prince George–Valemount so aptly describes it.

That secretariat doesn’t seem to be that effective, though, given the amount of times the minor partner in that relationship appears to be blindsided or shocked by government actions. Although since they still have a perfect record in supporting the government — the NDP government, that is — despite the rhetoric indicating the contrary, it appears to be doing its job of keeping the Third Party in tow.

Nevertheless, that secretariat has a great deal of access to government, including cabinet and the Third Party. That, as is aptly described or demonstrated many times over in this House, is more than half of the members.

Former staff should be covered by these lobbying rules. Let’s also consider the government’s transition team. Eighteen months ago, we also attempted to have them covered under the amendment. That transition team includes some members such as the daughter of a former Premier, one who I understand has voted against the government’s referendum.

Some people have received $25,000 in contract work for 17 days of work. What an outstanding example of patronage. One of those went to a former NDP provincial secretary. The biggest contract was a $36,000 contract for 17 days of work. It also turns out that those contracts have gone to individuals who had donated tens of thousands of dollars to the NDP. Additionally, they all belong to the unions who had donated more than $3.5 million to the NDP.

This is the very definition of providing protection to friends and insiders, something that the members opposite so often accused others of doing. None of these people are covered by this lobbying legislation — not one. We see that this government is protecting their friends and insiders here. They protected them in the municipal election legislation, allowing them to provide in-kind donations to their favourite candidates, and now they’re leaving their closest friends out of any lobbyist registration reporting requirements.

Are any of the members of that transition team part of the unions that are now being given multi-billion-dollar contracts as part of the community benefit agreement scheme, or part of the team that lobbied government for the terms of these agreements? Were any of these members part of that team?

Now the Attorney General gets a second chance to amend this act, and he still left in that gap. Those former members of the transition team, former members of the million-dollar secretariat — they’re all free to lobby as they wish. That’s not transparency.

What’s more, this government has now given themselves, under this bill, the ability to exempt whoever they want from having to register as a lobbyist. Now their friends and insiders can be protected, by a simple order-in-council, from having to register their lobbying activity.

[7:15 p.m.]

Once again, the government is putting the ability to regulate their friends in the hands of cabinet. That’s not transparency either. Politicians should not decide who has to register to lobby them. That should be left to the independent registrar.

This bill also adds substantial disclosure requirements to the act, including a monthly reporting requirement. The registrar can also give bans on lobbying for two years of non-compliance. It is remarkable that the government decided to give the registrar this power but not the power to exempt lobbyists from the registration requirements.

This bill also changed the requirements to register in other ways as well, including removing the 100-hour-per-year registration requirement. Instead, under this bill, any organization with fewer than six employees that does less than 50 hours of lobbying a year is not required to register, except in the case of advocacy groups. That seems like a needlessly stringent rule.

So if the Attorney General were to meet with owner of a small business in his riding to discuss the employers health tax, and that small business had seven employees, that small business owner would have to register as a lobbyist. This is putting a highly unnecessary burden on British Columbians who wish to meet with their MLA. It is infringing on their rights as members of the public to air their grievances or seek clarity from their local representative — although, in light of the referendum this government has put forward, I suppose they don’t put such a high premium on local representation anymore.

We here have a piece of legislation that attempts to close some loopholes but leaves others already identified open. It also gives some disconcerting powers to the government and cabinet. On the second time around for this legislation in a 12-month period, we still see that this NDP government hasn’t got this right.

A. Olsen: I was kind of caught off guard. It was almost feeling like it was just getting warmed up. Then, it was just over, over there. So I’m kind of shell-shocked a little bit, as I’m trying to gather myself to make sure that I can say some coherent words on the Lobbyists Registration Amendment Act, Bill 54.

It is important just to clarify that the Attorney General, if my memory serves me correctly, did — at least, I think — stand in this House and talk about how there were going to be further amendments coming forward to the Lobbyists Registration Act. The amendments that were made last fall — certainly, I remember speaking to those amendments and suggesting that they didn’t go far enough.

One of the things that we talked about was actually further amending and asking the government to make further amendments. I don’t know that this is necessarily…. I think that there is something that needs to be fixed here, as was pointed out by the office. But nonetheless, I think that it’s not correct to suggest that the Attorney General is scrambling to make further amendments. That was certainly suggested, that it was going to happen.

The B.C. Green caucus does welcome this bill. It’s a part of a broader approach that we believe in improving trust in our government. This process in the Lobbyists Registration Act is something that we — the B.C. Green caucus, the B.C. Green Party candidates — talked about in the 2017 election as part of the reforms that we would like to see under a much broader democratic reform platform that we ran on.

This process to amend the Lobbyists Registration Act was a process that was part of the confidence and supply agreement that the member on the opposite side of the House talked about. This is part of the negotiation in the agreement that we have made with the government, that we take a look at this bill.

We’re quite happy that we are having this discussion and this debate in the House about strengthening the lobbying regime in British Columbia, so I’m pleased to speak in support of Bill 54. I think that it does make significant strides to improve transparency of lobbying and to strengthen the lobbying regime in British Columbia.

[7:20 p.m.]

Reforming our lobbying regime is a critical step. It’s a critical part of restoring people’s trust in government. It was certainly an issue that I heard on the doorstep over and over again — that people’s trust in our government had eroded substantially. This was an important part of re-establishing trust in government, making government more accountable in the decision-making process and strengthening the integrity of the decisions and the trust that people have in the decisions and how government decision-makers are advancing public policy, where that public policy’s genesis is. And it’s a part of a suite of measures that we have undertaken alongside the B.C. NDP government, which include banning corporate and union donations from elections and from recall campaigns.

I do want to talk a little bit about the process of how we got to where we are. Implementing lobbying reform was part of our platform, as I suggested, in 2017. We felt that it was a part of restoring people’s faith in government. It undermined our democracy and people’s trust in their elected officials, so it was a critical part of the work that we did.

We need greater transparency. We need greater accountability, and this is one part of that. So after the election, we negotiated lobbying reform into the confidence and supply agreement. It really was on the table of all the discussions that we were having after the 2017 election. It was an important part of our campaign, and it was an important part of the conversations with both the then B.C. Liberal government and the B.C. NDP. And as British Columbians can see quite clearly, it forms a part of our confidence and supply agreement.

In the confidence and supply agreement, the government committed to do three things. They agreed to institute a multi-year prohibition on lobbying for former senior public office holders, increase penalties for violations of the Lobbyists Registration Act and initiate a comprehensive review of the Lobbyists Registration Act, including the Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists, the mandate of that office.

The government acted on the first two commitments this time last year. The member opposite was talking about that. They implemented a two-year ban on senior public office holders from becoming lobbyists. This was an important step to close the revolving door, as has been said, between government and the lobbying industry and to protect against people being able to use their inside knowledge and relationships as lobbyists to have undue influence on government decision-making.

But this on its own isn’t enough. After these initial changes, in line with our agreement, the government undertook a more comprehensive review of the act. That was certainly a part of the discussion that I was excited about — that the Attorney General was going to take a much deeper look at this act. That was definitely in line with the confidence and supply agreement. We see the results of that in this bill that we have before us today.

In this bill, in Bill 54, we’ll make meaningful and substantive changes on how lobbying is allowed to take place in British Columbia, and I’m glad to see that the registrar of lobbyists is supportive of these changes. The current registrar and registrars before him have made a number of suggestions on how to improve our lobbying regime to make it more transparent and ethical, but until now, their recommendations have largely been ignored. Our regime in British Columbia has lagged behind other jurisdictions in Canada.

Perhaps the most significant change made in this bill is the change to the reporting regime. A key shortcoming in the current regime is the fact that filers are not required to differentiate between intended lobbying and actual lobbying. When I talk to my constituents and when I talk to British Columbians about this, they really can’t believe that there isn’t that differentiation made and that former governments haven’t closed that gap.

It has significantly hampered the transparency around what lobbying actually takes place. Many lobbyists currently put everyone they might possibly lobby, making it impossible to see what lobbying is actually happening in this House. We can’t tell who has lobbied who or when, for how long, or what they’ve lobbied that person on. That is being fixed in this bill, and we’re very, very thankful for that. And I think British Columbians will be very thankful for it as well.

[7:25 p.m.]

There’s no doubt that lobbying and lobbyists bring important information. The meetings that I’ve had with lobbyists, government relations people, bring us important information on a daily basis. The 87 members of this place can’t possibly know everything about every issue. So when government relations folks bring their clients in, they educate us.

But it’s important that British Columbians have access to the information that they need to know who those people are, when they were here and what impact they might have on public policy that’s being developed in this province. Now lobbyists will have to file an initial registration outlining who they expect to lobby and about what.

Significantly, they’ll also have to file returns each month describing the actual lobbying that took place over the past month. These monthly returns will include a lot of information, including the name and position; the title of the senior public office holder who was the object of the lobbying activity — this includes ministers, ministerial staff, MLAs, MLA staff and senior ministry staff; their prescribed position in the provincial entity; the date the lobbying took place; the names of the lobbyists who participated in the lobbying activity; particulars to identify the subject matter; and whether the lobbyist made a political contribution to the MLA or a political party.

All of this information is very, very important information in a transparent and accountable government. I am very, very happy, and my colleagues are very happy, that this government is taking the initiative to make sure that this change is coming forward. The change will greatly increase transparency, as I said, and it will make this registry actually useful. When we set up a registry, when we set up a bureaucracy like this, I think one of the things that we have to ask ourselves is: is this bureaucracy useful? And I think that in the past, it has been limited in its use.

The registrar has pointed out how it can be strengthened and how it can become more useful. That has fallen on deaf ears up until now. This change has been called for by the registrars. It’s been called for by past registrars before the current one. This legislative amendment change brings us in line with other jurisdictions, like the federal government.

Now, this bill also makes some other significant changes. It removes the 100-hour threshold that now exists for in-house lobbyists. One of the things that I think I disagree with my colleague from the official opposition on is this doesn’t…. This 100-hour and 50-hour change…. There is currently a 100-hour threshold that allows a significant amount of lobbying to take place without being subject to reporting requirements or any of the other provisions of the act.

This change is in line with recommendations from B.C.’s registrar of lobbyists. We’ll be changing that threshold to 50 hours. Small businesses and small organizations, as was highlighted by the member of the official opposition who spoke to this, will still have a significant window to be able to undertake their lobbying activities under, but they won’t have the 100 hours. It will be cut to 50 hours, which should be more than enough. Certainly, B.C.’s registrar of lobbyists, the federal Commissioner of Lobbying and the Ontario registrar of lobbyists, among others, have supported this change.

There has been some criticism of this decision to provide this lower threshold for some organizations. But in all, I and my colleagues believe that it’s sensible to make sure that we aren’t being too burdensome on very small organizations that don’t exist for the sole purpose of lobbying. Again, this is not these businesses’ sole purpose. They do other work, other great work, and it’s important for them to be able to have access to the government decision-makers, to provide their information, but it’s not the primary reason for their existence. We will be having a further discussion and asking further questions about this with the Attorney General in the committee stage.

This bill also clarifies the definition of lobbying for consultant lobbyists to reduce compliance anxiety. It also closes a loophole that became evident over the summer, as was aptly pointed out by my colleague across the way.

[7:30 p.m.]

Before the definition of “public office holder” technically only covered former employees of former ministers, meaning only former employees of former ministers were covered by the act, including the two-year ban on lobbying. But if you used to work for a minister who is still in office, you weren’t subject to the ban. Clearly, this was a mistake, and it wasn’t in line with the policy direction that we or the government wanted to go. So the registrar pointed this out this summer and asked the government to fix this loophole, which they’re doing with this legislation. We’re thankful for that.

This bill also requires the disclosure of a number of things that were previously hidden from the public. Lobbyists will now be required to report, if you’re lobbying on a contingency basis, who the ultimate client is, any third parties with a direct interest in the outcome of lobbying and anyone who donates a certain amount of money to the lobbying effort. This will also be clarified in the regulations. That’s my understanding.

Contingency fees. This is an important one which I don’t know that British Columbians know much about, but this is a payment that is made dependent on whether that lobbyist is able to secure a certain result for their client. The government has chosen to take a middle road. Instead of outright banning the contingency fee contracts like some other jurisdictions have done, the B.C. NDP government opted for requiring disclosure of contingency fee contracts, which is a middle-road approach, as I said.

There has been some criticism. We acknowledge the criticism that’s been made, and we’ll be asking more in committee stage about why the government chose to take this path instead of an outright ban.

Under this new act, you will also have to declare if you adhere to a code of conduct, like the federal Lobbyists’ Code of Conduct, the Law Society code of conduct or other professional standards that exist out there. If you’re a lobbyist, you’ll have to let the government know if you already have a code of conduct that you have sworn to uphold.

We, the B.C. Green caucus, actually wanted this legislation to direct the registrar to create a code of conduct themselves for lobbyists, so this is not quite the approach that we would have taken. However, I think the government is acting on many of the elements that would be in a code of conduct in this bill, such as requiring the disclosure of contingency fee contracts, requiring identification of third-party interests and regulating gift giving.

The government has chosen to prohibit gift giving except in certain situations where it’s incidental to protocol. An example of where gifts might be allowed is as part of a customary ceremony or an event. I can think of First Nations ceremonies, as an example, in which you would be given a gift and it would be problematic for you not be able to receive that gift.

A final substantive change that the government is making with this bill is increasing the power of the registrar against people who break the rules in the act. Of course, as we know, if you don’t have a strong ability to enforce the rules, then what do you have? So this change is in line with our agreement to increase the penalties for violations in the act, and we’re quite happy with that aspect of it.

Under this change, the registrar will be able to impose a ban on lobbying for up to two years if they determine a grave and repeated failure to comply with elements of the act. This change actually adds a significant tool for the registrar to enforce compliance, and we’ll be asking more about that in the committee stage as well.

In conclusion, we’re happy that this second phase of amendments to this very important piece of legislation is coming forward in this fall session. And, to point out, this was a piece of work that we had talked about last fall. We started last fall, and we talked about continuing. So we’re very happy that it indeed has continued. And the B.C. Green caucus is quite happy with the direction that government is taking. Although not entirely the things that we would have done, we’re certainly happy with the direction.

As was pointed out, lobbying reform was an important element of our platform in 2017. We believed that we needed to clean up the lobbying that happens in this place, that British Columbians have a level of confidence that the kinds of decisions that are coming forward from public policy are influenced by stakeholders and by people, by British Columbians, but that they understand what events took place in order for public office holders and decision-makers to get to that decision. So these changes that have been outlined, I think, are very, very important.

[7:35 p.m.]

We’ve been criticized, I think, for having some of the laxest rules. Now I think that we’re modernizing our lobbying act, and we’re getting ourselves into a position now where we are comparable, if not leading, the country in our legislation. Again, we want to be able to be transparent, to be accountable and that the people of British Columbia are confident in the work that we’re doing in here and how we arrive at the policy decisions that we get to.

With that, I’ll take my seat. I’d like to thank the Attorney General for bringing this legislation forward. We’re quite happy to support this bill, and we have some questions in committee stage.

Deputy Speaker: Seeing no further speakers, the Attorney General to close the debate.

Hon. D. Eby: I thank the members who spoke to this, the member for Vancouver-Langara and the member for Saanich North and the Islands. I very much appreciate their comments.

I will note that the member for Vancouver-Langara has a number of misconceptions about the bill, and it’ll be helpful to be able to clear those up in committee. As always, my ministry is happy to offer briefings and has offered briefings. I encourage him to take advantage of those. In any event, we’ll canvass it, I’m sure, in committee stage.

I’ll point out that, yes, in fact, when we introduced amendments to this act in a previous session, I made it very clear that we’d be coming back — that we wanted to act very quickly on things we could act quickly on. On things that took more time with the registrar, the members here would be seeing this bill come back. It was all part of the plan.

Thank you to the member for the Third Party, who brought forward a number of comments and direction around questions he’ll be raising at committee stage. I look forward to canvassing those with the staff in the room as well. Hopefully, we’ll be able to address everyone’s concerns — whether or not to their satisfaction, I guess we’ll see.

With that, I move second reading.

Motion approved.

Hon. D. Eby: I move the bill be referred to a Committee of the Whole House to be considered at the next sitting of the House after today.

Bill 54, Lobbyists Registration Amendment Act, 2018, read a second time and referred to a Committee of the Whole House for consideration at the next sitting of the House after today.

Hon. A. Dix: I call Bill 47, the Health Sector Statutes Repeal Act, for second reading.

BILL 47 — HEALTH SECTOR
STATUTES REPEAL ACT

Hon. A. Dix: I move that Bill 47, the Health Sector Statutes Repeal Act, be read a second time.

This legislation, as you will well know, hon. Speaker, the Health Sector Statutes Repeal Act, would repeal two existing acts — the Health and Social Services Delivery Improvement Act, commonly known as Bill 29, and the Health Sector Partnerships Agreement Act, commonly known as Bill 94 — in their entirety.

One of the extraordinary benefits, I think, of being a member of the Legislature, being Minister of Health, is to witness on a regular basis the extraordinary work done by skilled health care workers in British Columbia and by health care professionals from care aides to health science professionals, to doctors, to nurses, to the people who prepare food and ensure that hospitals are clean and safe. The people who work to make those hospitals secure — everybody.

It is a team that makes our health care system so important. It is a team of people and, hopefully, an atmosphere of respect that allows people to receive care and to get well when they’re sick.

I reflected on how to start speaking about such a significant piece, I think, of legislation in terms of the recent history of British Columbia, and one that continues to have deep significance today. Since introducing the legislation a couple weeks ago, I’ve heard from many health care workers and what it means for them and also from many seniors and their families and what the legislation means to them.

Of course, this is significant legislation in that it involved a lot of powerful people. Premiers and the Legislature and the courts and the Supreme Court of Canada and labour unions and businesses and multinational corporations — all of those were involved. We’ll discuss a little bit of the history in a moment and its impact and, as well, what we hope will be a better future.

[7:40 p.m.]

I wanted to start not by quoting any of those things — any of those powerful voices in the province and the things that occurred in what are sometimes called high places — but by quoting from a couple of people who have had experience with the legislation and what it’s meant to them.

Many members of the House will have met Edna Sandoval, whose mother is at the Madison Care Centre. Madison is the most recent, perhaps the last, care centre to face what’s sometimes called contract flipping — the lack of rights of workers to continue to work in a facility, to have successorship in a facility, the threat of mass layoffs of workers within a care home and their impact both on seniors and on caregivers alike.

Edna Sandoval wrote about her mother. The Madison Care Centre is in Coquitlam, and I think members on both sides of the House spoke about this issue just recently on Health Care Assistant Day with Ms. Sandoval.

She writes in the context of this, in the context of all of the care staff being laid off or being threatened with layoff. We managed to avoid that possibility, but for a long time, it was a great worry. She wrote:

“My mother is 103 years old. Last year she fell at home and had to have hip surgery. She spent six months between Royal Columbian and Eagle Ridge. When she was well enough to be moved to a care home, she said she did not want to go. She liked it at Eagle Ridge. The nurses all knew her, and she knew all the nurses. I heard what she said, but I did not get it.

“When we arrived at the care home, there were two care aides waiting for us. One was Spanish-speaking. They wanted to reassure mom, in case she couldn’t speak English, that there was someone that she could speak to, she could ask for, that knew her first language.

“The next day, I arrived midmorning and found mom breathing with difficulty and tears streaming down her face, and I could not get her to focus. I ran and got help. Mom started calming down and breathing properly. She had had a panic attack. My mother is not the kind of woman to get panic attacks; she gives them.

“Hours after she calmed down, she told me she had been totally embarrassed and humiliated to be bathed and changed by someone she did not know. Now I got it. It took time, but finally she started to settle in.

“My mother can express her feelings and opinions in two languages, but what about those seniors whose illness impedes their ability to communicate? They depend on care aides that are with them day and night and can read their body language.

“These caregivers do an excellent job, not only because they are experienced but because they have a special way of caring for their fellow man. These nurses and care aides become a lifeline to these seniors. They become family. Research shows that some seniors get ill or die when there’s a change in a care aides.”

That’s one voice, and I think it reflects the voices of seniors who have been in these circumstances, who understand, I think — especially in long-term care but also in acute care — that continuity of care is important. Because care aides, when you are in care, provide you the liberty you have in life. All of the challenges people face in care homes, all the physical challenges — care aides are there to provide that support, that liberty, that continuity, that sense of normalcy that is so important.

I want to just quote a second person, a care aide who had the experience of losing her work in 2002, in 2003, in 2004, in that period. She described her feelings about the fact that we’d introduced this legislation. She talked about the past, and she talked about the effect of Bill 29 on her life.

She says:

“I lost everything when they did that. I had to claim bankruptcy. I had to leave my son behind for six months to look for new work and a new town to live in, because I could not find any work in the Lower Mainland.

“My life took a different path. I had to pack up my Toyota Echo with ten boxes, drop my son off, who I couldn’t feed, at my mom and dad’s house and drive 16 hours up the highway to sleep on a couch to look for a job in the oil patch. That should never have happened. I was a care aide, not a medic. I didn’t work in an oil patch; I worked in a care home.

“I still wasn’t able to really make enough money. I had to declare bankruptcy. I was $30,000 in debt, a single mother and couldn’t pay my bills. So I declared bankruptcy. Six months after I moved out, I moved back. I brought my son up.”

[7:45 p.m.]

The actions, of course, we take in legislatures have real consequences, and everyone understands that, I think. Everyone understands the significance of these actions.

The legislation in the acts that we are talking about today, that we are repealing today, were significant acts in B.C. history. I don’t think they reflect, I would say, the best of us. They don’t reflect the best of us and what we can be as a society.

What we’re trying to do today, I think, by dealing with these legislations is to chart a better path together — not just the government, not just the minister, not just MLAs but employers, employees, families and people in care. Chart a better path together — that is the purpose of what we’re doing today. That is its importance.

The two bills that we’re repealing, of course, were enacted in 2002 and 2003. The Health and Social Services Delivery Improvement Act was enacted for the express purpose of excluding care aides and non-clinical health sector workers from B.C. labour code protections.

They also provided health sector employers the right to contract out non-clinical services as defined under the act that included food and housekeeping services; residential health care aides; facilities, janitorial, maintenance and laundry services staff; food services workers; security staff; and IT and accounting staff, despite any restrictions on contracting out contained in health sector collective agreements.

In 2003, the Health Sector Partnerships Agreement Act, Bill 94, was enacted with the intention of facilitating the development and implementation of public-private partnerships in the health sector by providing the same flexibility that Bill 29 provided to employers in contracting out and restructuring private-sector operators in P3s.

Those were the changes. We need to, I think, put those changes in a historical context. They seem like dry pieces of legislation, but they led, of course, to the layoff of 10,000 health care workers, mostly women, in that period and in the period since and had a significant effect on the nature of health care in the province.

There was an element, I think…. And it is a lesson for all of us who are in the Legislature. There are lessons for us about that. Back then, in the 2001 election, the Premier — the Premier was Gordon Campbell — campaigned and said, specifically to the Hospital Employees Union, on the record: “I don’t believe in ripping up agreements. I am not tearing up any agreements.”

Yet in a weekend, on a Friday in 2002, in January, the government — they had won the election, as we all know, with 77 seats, and there were two members of the opposition — introduced legislation, Bill 29. They ran it around the clock, and over the weekend, I think just before dawn on a Sunday morning, they passed the legislation. I don’t think anybody thinks that promising one thing before an election, doing another and then acting in that way is the right way to go. They tore up signed collective agreements as a result.

I would say this, because it’s important for the historical record to note this: more than two members voted against that legislation. Those two members, of course, were the members of the opposition, Joy MacPhail and Jenny Kwan. But another member who felt the injustice was so large stood up and voted with Jenny and Joy. That was Blair Lekstrom, the then member for Peace River South, who also stood and voted against that legislation.

Subsequent to that, of course, there was a series of events that led to pay cuts for Hospital Employees Union members across the sector and significant dislocation and public anger. I think probably it’s fair to say, for that government of the day, that was the end, and that conduct signaled the end of any honeymoon they might have had. The next election, of course, was very close. They lost significant support, but that’s not the important thing. Of course, the important thing is the extraordinary dislocation this caused — the layoffs, the changes in the lives of seniors and of care aides, some of which I evoked earlier in quoting Amanda and Edna.

What later occurred, of course, was that the legislation was challenged by the Hospital Employees Union and by the B.C. Government Employees Union, and many of its provisions, particularly with respect to collective bargaining and the tearing up of contracts, were found to be unconstitutional. They were found to be illegal.

[7:50 p.m.]

That is the core of it. That is the source, I think, of some of the frustration, which is an election promise, a Legislature that acted in a way that isn’t consistent with what anyone would like to see, and then a piece of legislation that was found, in significant parts, to be illegal — although not all of its parts. And the legislation continues to be in place today.

As I noted, after the Hospital Employees Union, the BCGEU, the B.C. Nurses Union and many individual plaintiffs challenged the constitutionality — and after the Supreme Court of Canada ruled against the government, saying that several provisions of the act violated section 2(d) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms — the government negotiated and repealed some aspects of that legislation. I think it’s fair to say, from the point of view of the Hospital Employees Union, that some extraordinary work was done.

I want to acknowledge, here today, the absolutely extraordinary leadership of the member for New Westminster, who at the time was the leader of the Hospital Employees Union, who brought and fought for change and got the best deal possible for workers and for all of the people. I think the member for New Westminster would be the first to say that all of those workers — laundry workers and care aides, people who are not blessed with power in our society — nonetheless stood up for the people that they served, that they cared for. They stood up for their fellow workers.

In some cases, in the case of some care homes, unionized and then re-unionized, contracts were flipped, then flipped again and then flipped again — six times in one case and four in others, in places like the Seniors Village in Nanaimo, for example. The work and the representation that was brought, under some of the most difficult of conditions, is extraordinary. Of course, if you’re working in a care home where they do not want you to unionize and you lead a unionization fight, you are the one likely not to be rehired. To act in those circumstances is to show, I think, real courage in the public realm. People demonstrated, again and again, that courage.

I think it’s fair to say that things in the period after that — on the facility side, which was affected by Bill 94, and Bill 29 — things got better. The union raised wages in that period, working with employers in many cases, and fought both to unionize and to defend the rights of people, but their work was always precarious. Even though the major layoffs occurred in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006, on 11 occasions since 2015, contracts have been flipped — in recent years, including this past summer at Lakeview, Lakeshore and at Madison. These are significant and ongoing changes.

At this point, I’m suggesting that all members of this Legislature, whether they reflect in the same way as I do about the past or not, should support this legislation now. I put that forward for three, I think, important and central reasons.

The first is that this legislation will improve the quality of care. The precariousness of work, the contract flipping actually affects people’s ability to deliver care, of course, and affects the lives of seniors and people in care — whether it’s people in a hospital who need their hospital to be safe and clean or to have high-quality food while they’re trying to recover, or people living in care homes who need a high quality of care from care aides.

We know that frequent contract flipping destabilizes health care delivery for patients. We know that the associated turnover of staff has negative effects, not only on workers but on people that care for them as well. We know that frequent turnover of staff in long-term-care homes can lead to an increased incidence of pressure ulcers, dehydration and rates of hospitalization and to the decreased ability of seniors to engage in the activities of daily living.

[7:55 p.m.]

The sections of the bill that have remained in force, which essentially exempt health care workers from rights that everyone else has in British Columbia under sections 35 and 38 of the labour code, negatively affect the quality of care. We know this. While we have study after study to show it, we know it intuitively.

We know that people with experience who have a connection with seniors will provide better care. We know this intuitively. Studies tell us this, but we know it intuitively. We know it improves health outcomes. We know it intuitively. We know it in our hearts, and we know it in our heads that taking away the precariousness of this work — ensuring that people have experience and know what they’re doing in providing critical, non-clinical services in health care — is an important thing. We know this intuitively.

We know it improves the quality of care. Every time a worker is fired and rehired, that employee will be less likely to pursue employment in the same facility. It causes, simply put, destabilization. That’s the first set of things. I think we can accept this — that Bill 29 and Bill 94 in the present context negatively affect the quality of care. We can do better, and we can do better without them. That’s point 1.

Point 2. Everywhere, I think, in our health care system — this isn’t particularly new, but it’s more important now — health care workers have to work in teams. They have to work together. Having one set of health care workers with one employer not directly associated and working with everyone else doesn’t make sense in hospitals, any more than it makes sense anywhere else.

I would say this is clear, and it’s probably why — the Minister of Labour is here, who’s been a leader on some of this question — the labour relations code review committee essentially recommended the action that we’ve taken. I think the examples of this are myriad. Let me just give you one example, within hospitals, of what I mean. Consider, for example, security services at Abbotsford Regional Hospital and Cancer Centre. Bill 94 prohibits the security and/or the housekeeping staff employed by a subcontractor or the P3 vendor the ability to apply for a common employer ruling regarding the subcontractor, the P3 vendor and the health authority.

Complicated, right? This arrangement has allowed for a dilution of management direction, where care staff employed by the health authority cannot direct the housekeeping staff employed by the subcontractor to perform work. In other words, there’s a problem in a room, and the nurse or the care aide can’t call someone directly to clean the room. This is not a team working at its finest. We have, and this is, a significant problem in terms of the way a team needs to operate and the way continuity of care needs to operate in facilities.

Further, the differentials in compensation create, essentially, a churn in health care, as employees leave one part of the sector to seek higher wages offered by other employers. This affects, as well, the continuity of care throughout the health care sector. This churn has been constant and automatic, and it simply affects the quality of care and affects the ability of health care workers to work as a team in facilities.

Finally, it’s a new time. This is a new time, I think, in health care. One of the things I’m proudest of…. We announced it in my colleague from New Westminster’s constituency, and I’ve spoken about it with members of the opposition, with my colleague from Coquitlam–Burke Mountain. This is a time when we need to support health care workers because we need health care workers.

As you know, we are increasing standards in care homes across British Columbia. As it happens, approximately 85 percent of care homes didn’t meet provincial standards — in other words, 3.36 hours per resident day. They didn’t meet provincial standards, and we need to meet provincial standards.

The member for Penticton has spoken about this to me personally. He knows this in his community. We need to reach standards. To reach standards, we need more people to become part of the health care team. We need more people. We need more health care workers. We need more care aides. We need more health sciences professionals. We need more nurses. We need more people working in non-clinical areas of hospitals. We need everyone to join the health care team.

[8:00 p.m.]

Saying to those workers that they don’t have access to rights that every other worker in B.C. has is not a good recruitment tool. Just to meet the 3.36, we need to add net new. That means replacing, in a sector which is aging as the society ages, one-third of workers over 50. Many are near retirement. We need to replace all those and add 900 net new care aides and 1,500 net new health care workers to meet the 3.36, to meet provincial standards now.

I want to put that in further context. I was in Fort St. James recently. We announced the hospital in Fort St. James. It was a very, very moving day. My colleague from across the way, from Nechako, was there with me that day, and we announced that hospital. Of course, when you go and announce a hospital, you try and learn everything you can about health care in that area. One of the things I learned is there’s an expectation that the number of people over 75 in the Fort St. James local health area will grow by 185 percent and that the number of people under 75 will drop.

We announced a hospital in Cowichan. The number of people over 75 will be up by 143 percent over the next 20 years. The number of people under 75 will stay the same.

This has huge societal implications, but here’s one: we need more care aides. We need more people to be part of health care, and that means we need to take the steps required to do that. Of course, that’s a ton of training and recruitment.

This is a change in society. The community in Fort St. James will be different in 20 years than it is now, and we surely need more people to take care of us at that time in every community across British Columbia.

The B.C. Care Providers Association did a study recently where they talked to care aides. They said: “What is the most important thing that would influence you in terms of pursuing careers in the health care sector?” Number one on that list: job security and stability.

That’s why we need to get rid of Bill 47. We need everybody as part of this. We need the employers and the employees. We need the community. But mostly, we need to respect health care workers and ensure that this is a place where people want to work. It is a wonderful place to work. Can you imagine going to work every day and helping other people? It is hard work at times, and we all know this. We all know the value of the work that is done. We all know the physical toll that’s often taken, especially by health care assistants, and why it’s so important that we provide them support in the care home and in the community.

It’s for these reasons that I ask all members of the Legislature to support this piece of legislation. We need a new day. It improves health care. It allows and respects health care workers as a team. It allows us to build the public health care of tomorrow, the public health care that all of us will need. That’s what this does, and I think that we can do that together.

[L. Reid in the chair.]

People ask how we’re going to bring this into force. Members of the House will know that this is a simple bill. It’s 85 words, 85 words. Imagine that. I’ve spoken for close to half an hour now about 85 words, but they’re significant words, of course. We’re going to bring this bill into force by regulation, and one of the reasons why is that we want to work with everyone in health care over the coming months — private, not-for-profit, non-denominational, denominational, unions, health authorities — to understand any implications the repeal legislation will have.

We’ve started a working group that’s already worked to understand the known opportunities and challenges of the repeals. The group will now begin more active engagement with government partners and stakeholders. I met with the care providers in the Denominational Health Association last week, as well as health authorities and contractors. We will amend existing contract legislation where necessary and communicate expectations to employers, partners and stakeholders to ensure the legislation is enacted fairly and collaboratively.

We know that the way Bill 29 was brought into force in 2002 was harmful, harmful for everybody involved, and we need to act differently. We need to learn the lessons of the past together and take our time to do things right and build a system that works for employees and employers and especially for the people they care for.

[8:05 p.m.]

Hon. Speaker, I’m very proud, and I commend to you and all members of the House this legislation. I think that the role of people who provide care in our society is something that brings us together as a Legislature. It’s not a Vancouver issue or a Penticton issue. It’s not a Dawson Creek issue or a New Westminster issue. It’s something that brings us all together.

At the time of some of the major disputes between the Hospital Employees Union, between workers and the government at the time and health employers, Diana French wrote in the Williams Lake Tribune. She said: “In a small community like ours, HEU workers aren’t the faceless, unskilled, overpaid workers the government wants us to believe they are. Most of us know they are good, decent, caring, hard-working citizens. They are our friends, our relatives, our neighbours.”

We can do this better together. That’s why I ask all members of the Legislature to come together for this new day — that we work on together and support Bill 47 and build a public health care system that includes everyone on the team and has in its mind’s eye the proper care for seniors and people who need supports, people with disabilities, people who are sick and need to get better in our society.

I ask for your support, and I move second reading.

J. Isaacs: Thank you to the minister for his comments.

I rise today to speak to Bill 47, the Health Sector Statutes Repeal Act. Firstly, I want to take a moment to recognize the important role and contribution that employees from across the health sector make in delivering a spectrum of health care services each and every day. Everyone who works within the health care sector works hard to deliver high-quality care to British Columbians.

Together these participants strive to contribute, in one way or another, to deliver that quality of care. It’s the kind of care we deserve and depend upon for our loved ones. Whether it’s food and meal preparation, housekeeping services, delivery and maintenance of medical equipment and devices or hands-on and direct care provided to patients through acute care, hospice, allied professional support or care at residential homes, the health care sector crosses over multiple areas. We all rely on this broad scope of services for our health care needs.

I want to acknowledge and honour the work being done by each of these individuals in whatever capacity they contribute and thank them for their dedication and commitment to push through the everyday challenges they face, challenges that can sometimes impair their ability to carry out responsibilities in the manner they would prefer. It is a difficult and challenging work environment that is exacerbated because of a critical shortage of skilled workers and a failing recruitment and retention strategy.

I do support the intention of the bill, but I would like to add a few comments. Government will need to address the impact this bill will have on the sector, particularly the impact on private care providers. They will need to determine not only the immediate increase of costs but also future costs in order to effectively manage and grow much-needed capacity within the health sector.

These costs must take into account a rapidly increasing age demographic as well as an additional population boom from immigration to the province. These factors alone will undoubtedly affect our health resources and impact health outcomes. The need for government to develop strategies to manage the volume of concurrent changes in this sector will be essential to support the future of our health care system.

Over 50 percent of our $50-billion-plus budget is spent on health care. That means over $25 billion is currently designated to health care spending. That number will grow, and it will cause an enormous strain on resources and health authorities.

[8:10 p.m.]

It is imperative that every dollar spent be effectively allocated in order to maximize the return of dollars invested. We need to modernize and update health care options through continued innovation and technology, best-practice models and other efficiencies in order to deliver a health care system that is flexible enough to meet the growing demand of a range of services.

The increased volume of an aging population, who will most certainly be tapping into the health care system and on a more frequent basis, must be adequately addressed. With more long-term, chronic and complex cases that are being diagnosed at an earlier age, the health care system will need to prioritize its spending to not only maintain what we currently have but to also meet an inspiring goal to provide person-centred care. We will need to reform old ways and habits of doing things if we are going to get there.

This bill suggests a more fair work environment for the employees working in the system. I think we all agree that employees, from whatever profession they work in, should be able to have a fair work environment. Again, I support the intention of the bill to create that fair work environment.

But I think it has to be fair for all participants involved across the sector. Any changes must take into consideration the scope of services and supports that will be affected and include all those who contribute and deliver support to the health care sector, including those in the private sector.

This bill suggests there’s only one pathway to superior health care. It lends its preference to a unionized workforce as a solution to providing better health care. While superior health care is a desired outcome for all of us, the bill does not promote meaningful progress to develop quality, flexible and cost-effective health care for British Columbians.

The government suggests that this bill will encourage more people to join the health care sector as aide and hospital workers. With a critical shortage of skilled workers, every effort to recruit and retain employees should be applauded. Competitive wages are attractive, but there’s no guarantee that this bill alone will attract workers and fill that gap.

The only guarantee, as presented in this bill, is that the cost of care will significantly increase. The increased cost does not translate into additional dedicated hours of direct care, nor does it improve services or supports in any substantial way for patients or residents of long-term care homes.

There is no correlation that supports the notion that one workforce is better equipped, more compassionate or more experienced over another workforce. Most people in the health care industry are attracted to the industry because they love what they do. They love helping people, and they feel good about the care they deliver.

There will always be better ways to get to a best-practices model of care. The need for improvements will change as conditions change. We are in a different time with different challenges and different needs. Health employers and social service agencies need flexibility to deliver cost-effective and improved services to the people who need them most: seniors, children and those with specialized medical needs.

Employers need flexibility to deliver both administrative and supportive services and to have the ability to reorganize services, making it easier to match resources to patients’ needs. Our health authorities need this autonomy to ensure that patients are receiving optimal care.

The Health Sector Partnerships Agreement Act opened up opportunities for government and health authorities to partner with the private sector to provide British Columbians with the quality of health care that they demand and deserve. It also enables partners to finance, design and build or renovate health facilities and to deliver non-clinical services according to set standards that are monitored by the government.

This opens the way to partnerships that will add capacity and efficiency to our health care system. It creates better facilities for patients while upholding the principles of the Canada Health Act.

[8:15 p.m.]

These are important and necessary partners who provide the capital and infrastructure needed to accommodate patients and residents. Partners take on the project management role, the financial risks and major aspects of operations, and at their cost and time. These are professionals who undertake to deliver quality care, service and support for those who are in need of care, while at the same time reducing the financial burden on taxpayers.

The B.C. Liberals have already committed more than $500 million to increase care for the seniors in our province. There have been additional increases to seniors care by the current government, and we are pleased to see numerous initiatives, upgrades and equipment investments that have been made and are a benefit to this population.

It is the senior population that needs to be protected by our health care system. Many seniors are living on fixed income, and any increase of the cost of vital health care will threaten their access to these vital services.

Our seniors do not deserve to be burdened by additional finances. Instead, they deserve the peace of mind that they will be looked after and able to receive the necessary services. Many of these seniors have paid taxes and contributed to British Columbia their entire life. There should be assurances for them that the health care that they paid for, and now may need, will be available to them when and if they need it.

It will be a tough choice for government to balance the increasing and ongoing costs of health care investments, upgrades and equipment investments, while at the same time balancing the growing costs of labour. The system needs to have some flexibility and options to deliver cost-effective and improved services for people that need them.

The best system to fulfill the varied needs of our residents is the current public-private partnership. This system has been successful in British Columbia but also in the United Kingdom, Spain and Australia. This system not only gives the health care authority the means to find the most cost-effective and efficient ways of delivering support and administrative services; it also gives patients a choice on how they obtain the services that they so urgently need.

In order to meet the needs of patients and senior residents in this province and continue putting them first, we need to make sure that every dollar spent is invested into patient and quality residential care. The decision to match resources to patients’ and residents’ needs should be made by the health authorities that understand the needs of the front-line workers.

Working together, private and public agreements are the best way to ensure our seniors, children and patients receive the vital care they need, and in an efficient and accessible manner. Workers should be assured reasonable job security and prevention of wage loss.

Bill 47 will substantially increase costs and impact an entire sector, and further discussion and consultation with stakeholders is needed. I support the intention of the bill, and I look forward to discussing it further at committee stage.

Hon. J. Darcy: I want to begin by acknowledging the Minister of Health for bringing forward this legislation that will repeal Bills 29 and 94. I want to acknowledge the Minister of Labour for his active support for this initiative and the Deputy Speaker, who left the chair just a few moments ago, who certainly knows these issues firsthand. But most of all, I want to acknowledge the courage of the health care workers of British Columbia who have worked for this day, who have fought for this day, who’ve shown the courage to persevere for almost 17 years, waiting for this day.

The member opposite concluded by saying she supports the intention of this bill, but to be honest, most of her comments seem to not support the substance of the bill.

[8:20 p.m.]

I had the great honour and privilege of representing health care workers and the hospital employees for 6½ years. I want to take most of my time sharing my experience of what Bill 29 and Bill 94 meant for those health care workers and the impact of Bill 29 and Bill 94 meant for those health care workers and the impact of Bill 29 and Bill 94 on vulnerable seniors — on our frail elderly, on our parents, our grandparents and our loved ones in care.

The Minister of Health has already made clear who lost their jobs. It was the single-biggest layoff of women workers in Canadian history, close to 10,000 workers, the majority of them women and, also, the majority of them workers of colour.

Let’s talk about the cost. The Gordon Campbell government was intent on privatizing health care and provoking, frankly, a race to the bottom, where it affects the wages and the working conditions of people who provide care. But also, frankly, a race to the bottom in the provision of seniors care in the province of British Columbia.

If we want to talk about the cost of that, these workers — 9,000 or 10,000 workers who were laid off — were guilty of nothing except pouring their hearts and souls into working in health care every single day. They worked in housekeeping. They worked in food services. They worked in seniors care. I can’t tell you how many of them over the years said: “What did we do wrong to deserve this? All we care about is providing quality care. All we care about is providing quality services.”

They were working jobs where they were earning decent, family-supporting wages, not high wages, not Cadillac benefit plans, but they were able to support their families. They had decent, family-supporting jobs.

After the layoffs began in 2004, workers went from $18 or $20 an hour — not huge amounts of money…. Initially, when contractors were brought in, they were paying people $8 an hour, but they couldn’t attract people at that wage, and they moved to $10 an hour. Those workers had to fight and fight and fight over many years to, first, get up to $13 an hour and then to the princely sum of $15 an hour.

There are people in my community…. When I am out in the community or when I’d knock on doors, to this day people talk to me about what the experience was like for their families. This wasn’t just one person in a family. Sometimes it was the mother and the father. Some of my colleagues have told me that often their children, a son or a daughter-in-law, also worked in health care. People lost their jobs. People had to declare bankruptcy. People suffered incredible financial crises, personal crises, psychological crises.

Many of them applied to get jobs with the contractors, and they would then reorganize — a right under the constitution of Canada — to join a union, to bargain collectively. Then often a whole lot of them would be fired. A contract would be negotiated, and people would be able to come back if they were prepared to take a major, major cut in pay.

Bills 29 and 94 also laid the groundwork for what happened in 2004 when the wages of health care workers were rolled back 15 percent. In a race to the bottom, when you’ve got wages being paid at $10 an hour, it gave the Gordon Campbell government the ability to push wages down. So Bill 29 not only had a direct impact on the workers directly affected in housekeeping, in food services and in seniors care; it also laid the groundwork for robbing tens of thousands of other people who work in health care of decent family-supporting jobs.

[8:25 p.m.]

The member opposite talked about flexibility. Well, what flexibility meant was that it was okay. It was a licence given to contractors — not just health authorities to contract out in the first place, but contracts to be flipped over and over and over again.

As I stand in my place in this debate, I see the faces of the people who work in health care who lost their jobs, sometimes were rehired, had to reorganize, sometimes were fired again. I think of the incredible courage of people like Carlita and Harjeet and so many other people who were involved in the campaign that took 16 full years to get these bills rescinded.

I remember very well sitting in a circle with people who were employed by the contractors and having a discussion about the need for a living wage. Workers decided together that they were going to go out in the community and launch a campaign both for themselves and other people in the community under the theme “Work should lift you out of poverty, not keep you there.” These people worked full time. They often worked two jobs, and they still couldn’t make a decent living wage for their families.

As we went around the table that day and asked some of these workers what a living wage would mean to them, they didn’t talk about being able to go on fancy vacations. They didn’t talk about being able to go out for nice dinners. I remember like it was yesterday one woman saying: “I get up really early in the morning before my kids are up. I don’t get to see them before they go to school. Then I go to my second job, and by the time I get home at night, my kids are in bed, and I don’t get to see them. A living wage for me,” she said, “would mean I would be able to see my children.”

Another worker who spoke was a Chilean refugee. He said: “My daughter has incredible musical talent. I want what every other parent wants. If a child has talent, I want the ability for my child to be able to pursue her musical talent. A living wage for me would mean my daughter would be able to take music lessons.” To a person, all of those people said: “This is about our family. This is about our kids.”

Over time, these workers slowly improved their wages and their working conditions, although they are still many dollars below what they were earning before, and that has a huge impact on their families.

It’s important, when we talk about cost, to remember that as a result of the egregious actions taken by this government, when the case went to the Supreme Court of Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled, for the first time in Canadian history and the first time in legal and labour relations history in this country, that it was imperative to redefine what collective rights meant under the Charter. For the first time in Canadian history, as a direct result of this government’s egregious actions, the Supreme Court said that yes, in fact collective bargaining rights are Charter-protected rights and they will be from this day forward.

Again I salute the working people, the working men and women, who kept at it, who persevered, who showed determination and courage year after year after year and who ended up not winning enormous wages for themselves but changing the ground rules for working people across this country as a result of the Supreme Court of Canada decision.

I want to talk about the impact of Bill 29 and, especially, Bill 94 on seniors. I want to start with a report from the Ombudsperson in British Columbia. This is a report that was issued as a result of what happened — not as a direct result of Bills 29 or 94 but the closure of a seniors care home called Cowichan Lodge in Duncan that had resulted in massive dislocation of the workers.

[8:30 p.m.]

In that decision, in that report issued by the B.C. Ombudsperson, she said:

“Mass replacement of staff can occur when facility operators switch from contracting with one private service provider to another. Such turnovers can disrupt the lives of seniors in residential care, especially those residents whose care needs are complex. Over time, long-term staff acquire specialized knowledge of these needs, so the simultaneous replacement of many employees can make it difficult for the seniors because continuity of care is disrupted. This is particularly the case for residents with dementia. It can also be stressful for families, since they often need to provide extra support to their relatives.”

Those were the words of the Ombudsperson in 2008. But any of us who have family members in care…. Certainly, my father died in the 1990s, but he was in seniors care. There are few people in this House who don’t either have parents or grandparents or know someone who’s in seniors care. We know that the care staff who care for them deal with their most intimate care needs. They deal with feeding them, bathing them, toileting them, and they are also there to hold their hands and comfort them sometimes in their loneliness, sometimes in fear at the end of their lives.

What Bill 94 did, what the member opposite referred to as flexibility…. What it did to these seniors in care was tear away care providers from them and disrupt that close and intimate relationship that exists with people who are caring for seniors. In some places, that happened not just once, but twice, three times, four times, sometimes even five or six times in the same care home. Imagine what that would do to one of our loved ones, when care is disrupted in that way over and over and over again.

We’ve certainly seen that in places like Nanaimo Seniors Village, where, after Bill 29’s passage, they attempted to negotiate a $10-an-hour wage cut. Subsequently, there was contracting out, more contracting out, over and over again. That contract was flipped four times. Each time, the workers had to engage in a race to the bottom, saying: “I’ll work for $15 an hour.” “No, I’ll work for $14.” “No, I’ll work for $13.” Sold to the lowest bidder. Not only that; the seniors in those care facilities had their care disrupted over and over again. And there is significant research that shows that that affects not just the acuity, not just the illness and the severity of the illness that seniors are living with, the severity of their health conditions; it also affects mortality.

We’ve seen the same thing at the Inglewood Care Centre in West Vancouver. That is perhaps the most extreme case of contract flipping in the province, and the residential care sector there has contracted out those contracts six to eight times since 2003, depending on whether you’re speaking strictly about care or also housekeeping and food services — six to eight times.

This bill rescinds Bill 29, and Bill 94, in its entirety. It does not undo the damage that these workers experienced for many, many years. It doesn’t undo the damage to seniors and their well-being. Many of those seniors are not alive to speak for themselves, but certainly, I want to also salute the courage of the families of seniors in care who also worked very, very hard and spoke up repeatedly over the years in order to say: “This is bad legislation. It’s bad for seniors care, and it needs to be changed.”

What this bill does do is rescind the parts of the labour code that discriminate against health care workers and only health care workers, saying successor rights should not exist for health care workers.

The day that the Minister of Health introduced this legislation, there was a convention occurring at the same time, of the Hospital Employees Union, and they broadcast the proceedings in this House live in that hall.

[8:35 p.m.]

I’m sure that if there had been a BCGEU convention or any other conventions in progress, there would’ve been the same reaction. I am told that there was not a dry eye in the entire room. The room came together as one, and they wept. They wept with joy that this day had finally come. They also wept, remembering everything that they had been subjected to over many, many years.

Health care workers have waited almost 17 years for this day to come. And again, I salute the Health Minister, the Minister of Labour and the Premier, and I salute those workers who had the courage to carry on, to carry on doing some of the most important work in our society.

I know that it was popular on the other side of the House at the time to denigrate the work of housekeeping workers and of food service workers, referring to housekeeping workers, by one previous member of the House, of the Legislature opposite, as unskilled toilet bowl cleaners — unskilled toilet bowl cleaners.

These are people who ensure the cleanliness of our health care facilities. The people who work in food services did their best every single day, despite limited budgets, to provide the best possible care. They are critical parts of the team in health care.

Let me just also say that the seniors in this province have suffered as a result of this. That cannot be undone. But passing this legislation will create the conditions, together with the major initiatives that our government has taken to change the hours and the staffing levels seniors in care homes, so that seniors in British Columbia finally begin to get the dignified respect that they reserve.

Today is a good day for health care in British Columbia. It is a day when we begin to give back to health care workers the respect that they deserve. It’s a day when we recommit ourselves to ensuring that our parents, our grandparents and our loved ones, who have given their all to their families and to this province and helped to build this province and build this country…. This is an important step forward to ensuring that they get the dignity and respect that they deserve in their last years.

This is an important step forward in building a stronger public health care system in the province of British Columbia to serve British Columbians in every corner of this province. I’m proud to stand in my place and support this bill that finally rescinds Bill 29 and Bill 94 and the destruction that they wreaked in health care in British Columbia.

Hon. J. Sims: It’s with great pleasure today that I rise to speak in support of this legislation. But before I start talking about the repealing of Bills 29 and 94, I want to pay my respects and admiration to the Health Minister. I really appreciate the fact that this legislation was brought forward and that it’s being brought forward as quickly as it has been to address a wrong that was done 17 or 16 years ago.

When we all run to get elected, we all have many reasons why we run for office. It doesn’t matter which side of the House we sit on. But I can tell you, it’s when you get to pass legislation like this legislation that you think: “Yes, I am glad we are here, and I am glad we’re going to be doing something that’s going to make a difference to thousands upon thousands of British Columbians.”

In 2002, with the stroke of a pen and a legislation being proclaimed, 8,000 workers were fired through contracting out because of Bill 29. As my colleague from New Westminster said so eloquently, there they were making what anybody would consider a living wage of about 18 bucks an hour one day, and the next day the very same job was $8, $9 or $10 an hour.

[8:40 p.m.]

Imagine what that does to you as a worker, when one day you’re working for $18 and the next day you’re expected to do exactly the same job for half your wage. I personally cannot even imagine the anguish those workers went through.

Not only that, what we’ve seen since then, of course, because the legislation enabled it, was even when those workers organized, formed a union and got to the position where they could negotiate, the contract flipping that occurred was ongoing.

It’s because of that, and many other reasons, that I have so much respect for the hospital employees and for their union. Despite all of the challenges they faced, they didn’t give up. They kept speaking up. They kept fighting for their rights. Every time they stood up, they were knocked back again when the contract was flipped, and the workers rose again. That takes a certain amount of courage, persistence.

That’s the key thing I heard when I was visiting the convention just very, very briefly. Worker after worker came up and said: “We never thought this day would come.”

So to the Labour Minister, to the Health Minister, thank you for the work you’ve done on this, and to my colleague from New Westminster, who led that group of valiant heroes during some of the most heartbreaking times — I’m going to use the word “heartbreaking” — for her courage at that time.

I have a lot of respect for my colleague from New Westminster for her advocacy and her passion and her ongoing commitment to making it better for workers. I know that it warmed my heart when I saw her on the stage. I cannot imagine how she felt, but I do know how I felt that day — this exhilaration that we as a government are able to do something for a group of workers that do incredible work.

My mom has been in and out of hospital a fair bit recently. She’s 93 and has had a series of health issues. I can tell you that as much as the doctors and nurses who take care of her, just as important are all the other workers at that hospital. She looks forward to the different people she sees, but what happened with contract flipping is that those people were changing all the time as well, and that creates a lot of fear in senior people.

When my father was struggling with Alzheimer’s, in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, I know how upset he would get when almost every other day there was a new worker in place. A lot of that was happening because people couldn’t make a decent living and because of the contract flipping.

What I’m looking forward to is that this legislation that our hard-working Health Minister has brought forward will ensure some stability. Not only is it going to be good for those who work in health care, in providing critical services and food and janitorial services and all of those, but it’s going to be really good for those who are dependent on their services, whether they are in a hospital or whether they are in a care home or whether they are in a rehabilitation facility. All of that is critical.

If any of you have ever visited Surrey Memorial Hospital, you know it’s a happening place. It’s a very busy place. We have one hospital in a very large city.

[8:45 p.m.]

I want to take this opportunity to thank our Health Minister for opening an urgent primary care unit there just last week. People from Surrey are looking forward to that, because that’s going to take a lot of the pressure off our emergency room, and it’s going to provide much-needed urgent care services to those who live there.

But when I’m at the hospital, as I go in to see my mom when I’m not here, what I see are staff who are incredibly hard-working and committed to doing their job and their very best. But what they tell us over and over again, as we are there as a family, is what they have experienced over the last number of years.

I can tell you this. Last week when I was at the hospital and visiting, I received lots of hugs. Lots of people said: “When you get back, say ‘thank you’ to the Minister of Health.” So to the Minister of Health, lots of thank-yous from a lot of the health care workers that I have come into contact with.

Once again, as I said at the beginning, I’m so, so proud to be part of a government that is showing that it has a heart, it cares about workers, it cares about our health care services and it cares about looking after our seniors and providing British Columbians with the kind of stability they look for. I’m so, so proud to be supporting this legislation.

Hon. H. Bains: It is with honour that I stand here today to support Bill 47. I just can’t find words to say thank you to the Minister of Health. Thank you to all those thousands of workers who never relented in their attempt to right the wrong. And to find that the day will come that I will be part of the debate that I’ve been engaged in…. Finally, in 13 years of me being elected in this House, we will actually be voting, debating and voting, on a bill that was illegal, that was declared illegal.

I just want to say that Bills 29 and 94 represented abuse of power, represented denial of constitutional rights to the workers. It represented creating second-class workers. It represented disrespect towards the working people. And it, in fact, represented total contempt shown by that government towards the working people.

With this Bill 47, we’re changing all that. We’re reversing all of that. What Bill 47 does is it says to all the working people of this province that this government respects workers, that this government values the work that they do, that this government obeys the law of the land. The constitutional rights that the workers have in this province and this country are being preserved once again.

Eight thousand of those workers — most of them were immigrants and visible minorities — were fired with the stroke of a pen by the then government. Over what? It wasn’t about saving money. It was an ideologically and politically driven decision so that some of their friends, the internationals, can come in and make profits on the back of our health care, on the backs of the workers, on the backs of those who need those services. That was wrong then. It is wrong now. That’s why this Bill 47 addresses those wrongs.

I just want to say that not only did it profoundly negatively affect those thousands of workers and their families; it also impacted the services that they provided to our seniors. Those long-term care facilities, the seniors…. For many of them, the workers that provide them care and service, many times, are the only family that they know.

[8:50 p.m.]

Those are the people they have developed intimate relationships with over the years. When you fire them over and over through contract flipping, what you are doing is you are basically telling those seniors that they don’t matter, that the bottom line is what has driven their decisions. That was that government. But there’s a new day, there’s a new government, and we’re saying every worker matters, those seniors matter, and that’s what we’re doing: restoring the rights for the working people in this province through this bill and restoring the services that those seniors deserve and need.

I know that time is running out. The Minister of Health would like to, I’m sure, finish this debate. But I just want to say how proud I am to participate in this debate, how proud those families and those workers are now, and all workers in this province. Finally, they see that there is a government that actually cares about working people in this province, that cares about their rights, that cares about health and safety.

This day, this province, in this House, I just can’t say thank you enough to all those workers who never relent, that continue with their advocacy, continue with their struggle. They never gave up. That’s what gave us the inspiration. That’s what gave me the inspiration to continue to fight for what is right. That’s who we are. We should never forget. You know, decisions that we make here today — we will be judged in 50, 40, 100 years down the road, and the decisions of the previous government 16 years ago clearly were wrong.

You don’t have to wait 50 years to make that decision. The Supreme Court of Canada said those decisions were illegal. It took 20 minutes for all the judges to take a look at it and say: “Government, you were wrong. That decision was illegal. Go fix it.” How could a government do that to its own citizens? It’s hard to believe, but it happened. That’s why who the government is matters. It matters in the life of the people of the province. That’s why this government made a decision that people should come first and foremost when we are developing our policies — not some selective groups, the people that only support us, that those are the only people we are going to support, those who have funded our campaigns.

That’s not how you run governments. We have seen in the federal government, we have seen in this House, apologies for past government mistakes. And this one will be in the history of this province — the wrongs committed by a government 16 years ago — and also it will be in the history of this province that the wrong was righted in this House by the current government.

With that, I just want to take my space. I know the minister is waiting to finish the debate. I really, really feel so proud to be part of this debate. I want to say thank you to the thousands of those workers, and I want to say thank you to the Minister of Mental Health and the Minister of Health for showing the leadership and taking this struggle and the fight so that we are at this stage to make the right decision.

Deputy Speaker: Seeing no further speakers, the minister closes debate.

Hon. A. Dix: Thank you to my colleagues on both sides of the House for participating in the debate. It’s an important moment for health care workers.

I want to say just a couple of things briefly. It’s a small correction to what my colleague from Coquitlam–Burke Mountain said. I think she said the B.C. Liberals gave $500 million to seniors care. Of course, $285 million of that was from the federal government, so it didn’t come from the government, and only $30 million was actually in the budget. I don’t say that to be…. I continue to say this is what we have to do together now. The issue of whether we have enough care is something that all of us contribute to and have to contribute to, and it involves really hard decisions.

[8:55 p.m.]

We have a plan for seniors care that in total will be $1.048 billion. It addresses a historic underfunding of this sector at a time when the number of seniors is growing.

My point and the point of this legislation is not that it solves every problem in seniors care, but it corrects a fundamental injustice, and it brings us all together as part of the conversation. You cannot have one group of workers not have the same rights as everyone else and have a society that works well and works together to deal with what is a fundamental problem with coming together and providing seniors care in the future.

I think that the legislation that was passed in 2002 and 2003 wasn’t the right path, and we’re trying to build a different one. When we said we were adding care aides and supports to seniors care, you should understand what that is, because sometimes people get confused between public care and non-profit care and private care.

An overwhelming amount of that care and that money will go to private and non-profit care homes, from our government — private and non-profit care homes, because it was those care homes that were, by a decision of the previous government, understaffed. It was health care–owned and –operated ones that were at the 3.36 or close to it and the others that weren’t.

[Mr. Speaker in the chair.]

My point is that we have to get past these old fights, but we can only do so by restoring justice to health care workers, justice in society, so that we can all go forward together on all sides to build a better health care system.

With that, I look forward to the questions from my colleagues at committee stage, and I move second reading.

Second reading of Bill 47 approved unanimously on a division. [See Votes and Proceedings.]

[9:00 p.m.]

Hon. A. Dix: I move that the bill be referred to the Committee of the Whole House at the next sitting of the House after today.

Bill 47, Health Sector Statutes Repeal Act, read a second time and referred to a Committee of the Whole House for consideration at the next sitting of the House after today.

The Committee of the Whole (Section A), having reported progress, was granted leave to sit again.

Hon. M. Farnworth moved adjournment of the House.

Motion approved.

Mr. Speaker: This House stands adjourned until 10 a.m. tomorrow morning.

The House adjourned at 9:03 p.m.