Richmond’s Garden City Lands

In a Richmond News letter of July 3, 2009, and in other ways, I urged citizens to ask Canada Lands Company, the federal land disposer, to keep the Garden City lands green forever. Soon, a stream of people—exactly fifty at last count—had let the Garden City Lands Coalition know (usually via cc) that they’d acted. Excellent!

As well, the coalition put together a Canada Lands Company edition of Save Garden City, our 200-page in-depth analysis of the issue, including the community’s 1,962-name petition. In the July 10–20 period, we sent a July 10 introductory message and a July 15 note to let Canada Lands know it was coming, couriered the highly organized binder (17 tabbed dividers!) to Canada Lands president Mark Laroche, and added a concise follow-up letter and a further letter after hearing from him.

Neither Save Garden City nor the petition has been acknowledged. Nevertheless, Canada Lands now knows how to meet its community-benefit mandate when renegotiating the Garden City Lands agreement. That might include using a land trust and/or covenant to ensure that the 136 acres of Richmond green space will stay in BC’s Agricultural Land Reserve and be used only in ALR-permissible ways.

Justly, the ironclad ALR-use constraint should limit the property price (if there’s a suitable purchaser) to an ALR-land price, which is what Canada Lands paid the federal government for it.

Equally justly, that would allow no ill-gotten profit from the unseemly raid on the land reserve by parties who should have known better. In turn, that would help protect the future of the ALR.

The Garden City Lands is a way for the community to take local action on some of the most important issues of our time. One of them is climate action. We can take action locally to achieve impact provincially, federally, and globally by saving our best-known carbon sink, the Lulu Island Bog. There is both functional and symbolic value to conserving and enhancing the Garden City Lands, an integral part of the main surviving remnant of that bog.

Garden City Lands Coalition director Carol Southgate put a great deal of effort into approach to boosting the province’s climate action efforts through peatland preservation. Since the minister responsible for climate action is also a Richmond MLA, she anticipated a productive partnership. After trying for several weeks, she eventually managed to meet with him, but the results were disappointing. The coalition directors met that evening and issued the following press release in response.

News release, Richmond, July 23, 2009

Hon. John Yap, BC’s Minister of State for Climate Action, is “reluctant to make any public statement” about conserving and enhancing a high-profile carbon sink, Richmond’s Garden City Lands.

Canada Lands Company, the federal land disposer, holds the title to the property and is currently renegotiating its future with the City of Richmond and the Musqueam Indian Band. In February 2009, the previous plans to develop the property were halted by the Agricultural Land Commission’s refusal to exclude it from the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR).

Garden City Lands Coalition director Carol Southgate met with Minister Yap, who is also the MLA for Richmond Steveston, at his constituency office on Thursday, July 23. They agreed on the importance of peatland and discussed the climate-action role of the Garden City lands. Southgate described how the lands, an integral part of the main remnant of the Lulu Island Bog, have largely retained their peatland function as a carbon sink that reduces greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Arzeena Hamir, a Richmond food security activist who is also a director of the coalition, made a written submission. It explained how organic urban agriculture, a proposed use, would enhance the lands’ value as a carbon sink. Hamir cited research showing that local organic food systems could “mitigate nearly thirty percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and save one-sixth of global energy use.”

Garden City Lands Coalition president Jim Wright also participated in the meeting. He referred to Minister Yap’s Climate Change web page, http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/epd/climate/. It states that the two main fronts are adaptation and mitigation, “reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and enhancing carbon sinks . . . that remove carbon dioxide and other GHGs from the atmosphere.”

When asked whether he supported conserving and enhancing the Garden City Lands carbon sink, Minister Yap said that he could not comment until he had heard from the other side.  Wright pointed out that there is no other side, since almost no one would publicly oppose a proven kind of climate action. He said that the minister’s clear support would help because some who appear to favour climate action actually work against it. Mr. Yap said, “I would not be able to go forward on this.”

I sent the following on July 16, 2009, as a Garden City Lands Coalition Society message to the president of Canada Lands Company, cc-ing the usual parties and more, as I had done a few days earlier. (That message is an earlier post in this blog.)

Dear Mark Laroche, President and CEO, Canada Lands Company:

This morning you will receive the couriered Save Garden City, a thorough presentation about the Garden City Lands and legacy benefit to the community. We have expedited its completion and delivery to you because we anticipate that the renegotiations of the Garden City Property Memorandum of Understanding will proceed in earnest soon.

Save Garden City is about two hundred pages long, with the 1,962-name petition accounting for almost half of that. The presentation is somewhat large, but we have designed it with care for convenient use; for example, it is organized with seventeen tabbed dividers. If you prefer an online version, you can find it at www.gardencitylands.ca/clc.html. While Save Garden City includes nothing labeled “executive summary,” the initial letter to you and the “please read first” preface will serve that purpose.

 We gather from some of our members who have written to you recently that they are more encouraged by your replies than other members were in earlier months. That progression is what we anticipated, especially after the Upton Farm win-win outcome in Charlottetown, but we are still pleased about it. Thank you!

 We look forward to hearing more from you.

 Sincerely,
Jim Wright
President, Garden City Lands Coalition Society 

Dear Mark Laroche, President and CEO, Canada Lands Company:

This morning you will receive the couriered Save Garden City, a thorough presentation about the Garden City Lands and legacy benefit to the community. We have expedited its completion and delivery to you because we anticipate that the renegotiations of the Garden City Property Memorandum of Understanding will proceed in earnest soon.

Save Garden City is about two hundred pages long, with the 1,962-name petition accounting for almost half of that. The presentation is somewhat large, but we have designed it with care for convenient use; for example, it is organized with seventeen tabbed dividers. If you prefer an online version, you can find it at www.gardencitylands.ca/clc.html. While Save Garden City includes nothing labeled “executive summary,” the initial letter to you and the “please read first” preface will serve that purpose.

We gather from some of our members who have written to you recently that they are more encouraged by your replies than other members were in earlier months. That progression is what we anticipated, especially after the Upton Farm win-win outcome in Charlottetown, but we are still pleased about it. Thank you!

We look forward to hearing more from you.

Sincerely,
Jim Wright
President, Garden City Lands Coalition Society

Thanks to Michael Wolfe, the minutes of the Garden City Lands Coalition Society’s 2009 annual general meeting are now available.

The minutes tell part of the story, but you really had to be there to fully appreciate it. The Barn at Terra Nova Rural Park was an inspired choice of venue (thanks, Mary Gazetas!). The participation was very good in numbers and phenomenal in interaction. People arrived early for set-up and registration and stayed late for clean-up (thanks Shane McMillan, Bruno Vernier, Jessica Lai, Carol Day, Olga Tkatcheva, Gordon Kibble, and many others), the refreshments were plentiful (thanks, Suzanna Wright), and the Rural Park intro and tour were magical (thanks Arzeena Hamir).

A highlight was the Save Richmond Farmland Society presentation near the end. Marion Smith, Pat Montgomery, and Penny Charlebois of the Save Richmond Farmland Society led a discussion about the Save Terra Nova efforts two decades earlier. There in The Barn, we felt as though we were succeeding on the shoulders of those pioneers, especially since we were gathered on land they had helped save, now called Terra Nova Rural Park. As if that wasn’[t enough, they concluded by presenting a cheque for $500 from their society to the Garden City Lands Coalition Society.

There are about thirty people who should be thanked, so a lot have been left out, but you get the idea. After an experience like that, it’s easy to see how  the Save Garden City campaign retains so much vitality.

I sent the following this morning as a Garden City Lands Coalition Society message to the president of Canada Lands Company, cc-ing the usual parties and more.

Dear Mark Laroche, President and CEO, Canada Lands Company:

You will soon receive a couriered petition from the Garden City Lands Coalition Society. The 1,962 signatories want to keep the Garden City Lands green for community benefit. The petition requests the assistance of the Government of Canada, and we have chosen to send it directly to you because our members have reported that such requests typically get forwarded to you. We hope that this will lead to mutually beneficial results.

After a period of distrust that was not without reason, there has been a surge of awareness here that Canada Lands Company may be genuinely committed to ensuring local community benefit from the disposal of federal crown land. (The good news from Upton Farm on Prince Edward Island has spread.) We would like to obtain that benefit and to ensure that Canada Lands Company receives credit for it.

Since our society exists to save the Garden City Lands, we take care to be in tune with the related sense of community needs. In brief, the lands are seen as Richmond’s Stanley Park, as a linchpin of B.C.’s Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR), and as a carbon sink that is functionally useful and symbolically vital. The community includes the citizens of Richmond but goes well beyond that. People from all around B.C. and northern Washington are interested, and there is involvement especially from citizens of the neighbouring parts of Metro Vancouver.

We gather that your company and/or the Musqueam Indian Band have sought renegotiation of at least one understanding in the Garden City Property Memorandum of Understanding (the MOU) that cannot be met. We are pleased that your company seems committed to following the MOU’s “Contingencies” process: renegotiation, dispute resolution, and, if all else fails, cooperation in making whatever arrangements are necessary to restore the four parties to the position that each was in prior to entering into the MOU.

As you probably know, the MOU divides the Garden City Lands into two halves: the Development Lands (widely thought of as the CLC-Musqueam lands) and the Public Lands (widely thought of as the City of Richmond lands). There is still essentially no impediment to the intended Public Lands uses, but the MOU-specified uses for the Development Lands, which have never been permissible, may never become permissible, and that is certainly cause for renegotiation. We ask Canada Lands, as the party entrusted with the land title, to proactively ensure the negotiation of ALR-permitted uses for the property that are consistent with the community’s needs.

We recognize that in Richmond, as in Charlottetown with Upton Farm, Canada Lands Company should be made whole, recovering its purchase price and expenses, and presumably the same would apply to the Musqueam and City parties if they do not end up with an ownership interest. While minor adjustments will be needed for that purpose, we suggest that any sale price for the Development Lands be basically at the ALR land value, as it already is for the Public Lands. As long as Canada Lands Company ensures (perhaps by means of an unequivocally worded covenant registered against the title) that the property will be limited to ALR-permissible uses forever, the land value is presumably the same, or at least essentially the same, as the fair market value stated in the MOU.

You may wonder why we would get into suggestions about price. Our goal in that is to eliminate the odious kind of land speculation that had unfortunately slipped into the transfer of the Garden City Lands from the federal crown. Parties had become land speculators trying to use their immense power to destroy a community-treasured green space, valued throughout living memory as the people’s lands, for urban sprawl that Smart Growth BC has definitively identified as NOT Smart Growth. From the standpoint of protecting land capable of producing food, any speculative profit from the Garden City Lands would send out the wrong signal. A similar point could be made about protecting peatland serving as an active carbon sink, which is what the lands also happen to be.

Two years ago, the significance of the Garden City Lands was magnified a hundredfold when it became a linchpin of the ALR. That aspect came to public attention when developers’ association head Philip Hochstein wrote “Space Invaders,” an anti-ALR guest column in BC Business magazine (July 2007). Another analogy is that the Garden City Lands became a cleverly chosen battleground where the ALR was pitted against rampant development of agricultural land. The only reason the Garden City Property ALR-exclusion applications might have succeeded was the power of the applicants, and less-powerful speculators were no doubt watching and waiting to demand equal treatment, perhaps fatally weakening the ALR. We are asking you now to turn the tables in a way that strengthens the ALR.

By striving to meet true community need in the disposal of the Garden City Lands, Canada Lands Company will be saving not only a Richmond treasure in the form of the particular 136 acres of peatland green space in Richmond City Centre but also, to at least some extent, a British Columbia treasure in the form of the B.C. Agricultural Land Reserve. For certain, that is corporate social responsibility!

Sincerely,
Jim Wright
President, Garden City Lands Coalition Society