Sometimes it’s hard to make informed choices when what we “know” is only what we’ve been told by vested interests. In Richmond, B.C., Canada, that has been true in the story of the Garden City Lands, a 136-acre field of prime farmland that has been threatened by dense development and that is still not safe. Like much of British Columbia’s farmland, it is designated as ALR. In other words, it is part of B.C.’s Agricultural Land Reserve, which helps conserve the scarce B.C. land that can be used for food production. Richmond, part of Metro Vancouver, is an island city in the Fraser River delta.
This blog is dedicated to helping everyone, especially Richmond citizens, to find the truth. To learn more, you might start with “Garden City Lands Coalition” and “Intro to Digging Deep.” For the evolution of core thinking, you might read some of the numbered pages, which are columns in a Richmond Review series called Digging Deep. For more depth, draw on blog entries and the “Digging Deep Resources.”
Feel free to comment on blog posts and pages. Everyone communicating in this blog is asked to follow a few guidelines:
1. Be constructive and respectful, accepting that fellow citizens we disagree with are typically trying to do what is right for the community or at least their organizations.
2. Analyze topics and critique ideas, trying to avoid personal criticism, especially conjecture about ignoble intentions.
3. Focus on the Garden City lands issue, although it is sometimes necessary to analyze related topics that provide context for aspects of the issue.
More people seem to prefer to communicate by email, and that is okay too.
Any other guidelines needed?
Natural legacies versus waste 
Hello Everyone and welcome to this informative web site and blog. There is a core group of people who have been working hard to save the Garden City Lands from development.
In my opinion we should be contacting the federal Government to try to lease or buy the land just the same as the City of Vancouver leases Stanely park. I feel this land should stay in the ALR to protect it.
The city centre of Richmond is so overdeveloped that saving the Garden City Lands is critical for the livability of the area.
The current MOU Memorandum of Understanding is available to anyone who wants to read it.
The MOU gives half the land to the Musquem for development, they have the right to break their land into parcels through out the 136 acres.
I feel that this would split the city of Richmonds land into useless small parcels, this deal in my opinion is a bad deal for the people of Richmond.
The ALC (the agricultural land Commission) has to remove the land from the ALR ( agricultural land reserve) in order for the MOU to be active.The ALC has already turned the application down once. I feel they will deny the next application as well, so l think it is time to work for new plans.
Please join us writing your MLA’,your local newspaper, the ALC or just spread the work with your neighbours.
We can save the Garden City lands.
Thanks Carol Day
With the ever increasing pollution and world environmental changes I had always thought that the land at Gardencity could be purchased even with a big ticket price, the land could potentially be turned into an alternative energy source with wind turbines and/or solar panel field to generate electricity which than could be sold by putting it in to the grid.
Thus not all the cost of the purchase has to come from the taxpayers and Richmond could be one of the first city in the world to off set power usage and leave less of a carbon foot print.
Kan Ogata
Fantastic site and nice to see there are lots of other people in the Richmond area who care about our planet.
If everyone worried about the small piece of the planet they have chosen as their home and community we would have a healthier earth.
Please feel free to email me for any volunteering help as I am single Dad and around in the day.
Lee