Land Act firestorm

The BC government is proposing changes to the Land Act that will affect how Crown land tenures are administered, but they have provided very little information on what those amendments will look like and that has cattlemen extremely concerned.

In early January, the BC Ministry of Water Land and Resource Stewardship (WLRS) began contacting stakeholders to offer online engagement sessions regarding proposed changes as to how Crown land would be managed in the province.

The government says its objective is, “a legislative amendment to the Land Act to enable agreements with Indigenous Governing Bodies to share decision-making about public land use.”

Crown land makes up 95% of BC’s land base, and management – including land leases and tenure, the cornerstone of ranching in BC – is governed by the Land Act.

Currently, those decisions are made solely by the provincial government in consultation with First Nations. The amendments would see decision-making shared with First Nations.

But what the changes are and how they will be developed is anyone’s guess. There has been neither a formal press release on the consultation nor an intentions paper as with other public consultations.

“The engagement session I attended on January 11 left me with far more questions than answers,” says Elaine Stovin, assistant general manager of the BC Cattlemen’s Association. “The government shared a short slide deck that provided no detail on the actual amendments proposed, or how shared decision-making would take place.”

That lack of information and how it might affect grazing tenures has sparked a firestorm across the ranching community.

“This is one of the biggest issues that has woken everybody up, and it’s a hill to die on for us,” says BCCA president Brian Thomas, a rancher in Okanagan Falls. “We have members contacting us constantly, but unfortunately we cannot give them any real information.”

Despite the fact that WLRS minister Nathan Cullen, spoke with BCCA general manager Kevin Boon by phone on the evening of February 2, and hosted a 90-minute Zoom call with the BCCA executive on February 6, ranchers remain in the dark.

“We are not really any farther ahead,” says Thomas. “The minister assured us that this would not affect our current tenures and more or less that there would not be a First Nations veto, but other than that we don’t have any more details.”

Cattlemen have called for a reset.

“I told Minister Cullen that the BCCA and our membership are against the amendments and anything pertaining to it, as there was no information on it,” Thomas says. “We stated that it is the wrong approach for the government to be taking and they should cancel it and rethink it.”