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Bill 19 – Land Assembly Project Act

Ms Blakeman: Well, thank you very much. This is one of these bills that I wanted to see the principle of succeed because I think the government does need to plan, and they do need to prepare. I’m one of those people that has urged the government all the way along to carefully lay these sorts of things out. As a citizen in this province I look around at too many projects where I think: that should have happened, and it should have happened a long time ago. But because there was a lack of planning around it and a lack of consultation, projects got derailed and delayed by quite a bit. So I was looking forward to some mechanism that the government could bring forward that would allow it to move some of these larger projects along.

For example, I would really like to see a high-speed rail plan start to come into place. Clearly, we’re not going to pay for it now. We’re not going to pay for it this year or next year or probably the year after. But I’m also thinking that those are huge projects, and if you don’t start planning them and implementing them and getting all your ducks in a row on those kinds of things, we’ll be here 10 years from now and we still won’t even have started into this. So I wanted to see those processes start to move forward.

I think what we needed and what the public wanted to see was a secure, transparent model that could be used to assemble, acquire land for these kinds of large projects. Expropriation is and should be a last-ditch, a last – what’s the word I’m looking for?

An Hon. Member: Last resort.

Ms Blakeman: A last resort – thank you – for dealing with these kinds of projects. Clearly, I don’t think anybody enjoys that process. Certainly, the government doesn’t, the taxpayers that have to pay for the court bills don’t, and the landowners don’t. We need a process that works better than that. Expropriation is still there for a reason. If government needs to move ahead with it, and we’ve got a landowner holding a project hostage, the government needs the tools to be able to move forward, and they certainly have that.

But I think the government got itself in a bit of trouble with this one. What I’ve seen is a long progression – and I’ve talked about it lots of time in this Assembly – of the government bringing forward shell bills in which essentially it says: the minister can decide to do whatever they want, and everything else will be decided under regulations. Thank you very much. On it goes. We complained at the time, and we raised the issues at the time. We said, “This is where you’re going to get into trouble on this.” “No, no, no,” said the government. “Just trust us.” Well, it got you into trouble this time because people that thought they would have a direct interest in this looked at this bill and said: “I don’t think I’m going to be well served by this. The truth is that I can’t tell if I’m going to be well served or not because there are no details in this bill.” I think it overreached itself and got a lot of people very upset about what the government was capable of doing. With more detail, more transparency, more accountability the government wouldn’t have dug the hole they’re in quite so deep, but they did, so we ended up with an amendment.

Okay. Well, points to the minister for going: I’ve got to stop digging here and do something, build a ladder to climb out of this one. I think he’s made some wise moves in making the idea of the amendments available, although he couldn’t make the specific amendments available some time ago, to try and deal with this. Goodo.

When I look at these amendments, I think: “Okay. Is this going to solve the problems that have been identified?” On the surface, on the face of it, on the first skim reading you go: “Well, yeah.” It’s addressing a lot of the areas that were brought up over and over again: lack of consultation, lack of a timeline, the definition of acquiring that land and holding it to one side, which I have just lost the exact terminology for. But when you start to get into it and go, “Okay; really, what does this mean?” once again we’re looking at – and almost every single phrase has this.

Under section A, for example, subsection (2) is “for the purpose of this Act and the regulations,” and then it goes on setting it out; section B, “the Lieutenant Governor in Council” yada yada “in accordance with the regulations, of the proposed project.” You keep going on to the next section, (b), “has made the plan of the proposed project available to the public in accordance with the regulations,” and to (c), “has provided the registered owners of land within the proposed Project Area with notice of the proposed project in accordance with the regulations.”

Well, guess what? We don’t have the regulations. There’s an ancient saying about buying a pig in a poke, which I think was about buying livestock in a bag. Basically, you couldn’t see what you were purchasing. That’s what’s in these regulations, so the government has made the same mistake again. It is borne largely out of this being a one-party state, out of the government having so many members and being able to get its way so easily in almost everything so that it doesn’t have those built-in checks and balances, and the same mistake is made here. People cannot see the specifics of what’s in here. To say to people, “We’re going to consult with you,” the first thing I do is say: “How? How are you going to consult with me? What are the specifics of that consultation?”

That’s going to lead me into something that I am seeing, themes that I’m seeing repeated several times in important legislation that’s before this Assembly this spring. I’m starting to call it the 3Cs. We’ve got control, compensation, and consultation. I just want to talk about consultation right now. This government has tried very hard over the years to try and perfect the system of consulting under a very controlled situation. Some years back we had the round-tables when the government was sort of trying to reorganize itself. Interestingly, those round-tables, which were sector specific, actually excluded professionals that worked in the field. So when we had health round-tables, no doctors and nurses were allowed to sit at the table. It was a very interesting choice.

Then we moved into the summits, so we had the growth summit and the justice summit, and I went to a gambling summit in Medicine Hat at one point. Then we ended up with the Future Summit, which was, I think, supposed to be the be-all and end-all of consultation. But people catch on to all of these different very controlled consultations, and they know when they go to these things what’s pinned up on the board, what everybody has discussed. When they look at what the government actually starts to implement and say: “But this isn’t what we talked about. Where’s the thing that was up on the board that was so important to me?” they say: “Oh, well, yes. That’s number 79 on the list, and we’re picking other things.”

It puts that whole idea of consultation – people question it and say: “Well, then you really didn’t consult with us. You really didn’t listen to what was going on.” I argue that the government has embarked on yet another round – maybe this is the new millennium version – of consultation. What I’m seeing the government do is consult very widely but very generally and very vaguely on a concept, and then once they implement the final version of what the government wants to do, there is no consultation on the specifics because everyone just refers back to that big general consultation and says: “That was it. You had your chance. Why didn’t you tell us what you were worried about then? Now we’ve made our decision. We’ve passed the act. No more consultation.” I think that is what this government is up to and what we will see roll out over the next three to five years.

I know that my colleague is eager to get back up again, so I will cede the floor to him and look for another opportunity to speak at another occasion.