Brad Wall’s government has a resounding mandate to stamp its mark on Saskatchewan. But majorities come and go and history remembers legislation better than the people who passed it.
Failing to reform the Calvert government’s Planning and Development Act (2007) could become an accidental and pernicious legacy of this government.
The act defines how municipalities define property owners’ rights. Compared to the legislation it re-placed, it raises the requirements for municipalities engaging in land use planning. All municipalities must have an official community plan with mandatory minimum content prepared by a professional community planner.
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While it does not directly affect what citizens can do, it changes the way that municipal governments deal with citizens.Over time, this constitutional flavour will make the act pernicious.
Onerous land-use planning disrupts the critical pillar in a modern capitalist society — the balance of risk and responsibility that is inherent in owning property. If you have a higher valued use for a piece of property than the current owner does, then you can pay him enough to surrender it, and try your proposed use.
On the city fringes, developers buy farmland because they think they can get more value from housing than crops. The flipside is that if they get it wrong, they lose money. This balance of risk and reward puts every acre of this province to the best use anyone has for it at any time. It’s what makes countries like Canada rich.
By enforcing mandatory minimum requirements for land-use planning on municipalities, the province has edified a class of people who see only one side of the risk-reward equation.
Professional community planners are able to impose their visions, not only over land they have risked their own money on, but on the entire territory of a municipality.
Saskatoon Speaks and Design Regina is the beginning of municipalities responding to the legislation. For each municipality, the process begins with such high-minded consultations unfolding into official community plans that set out how land in the municipality can be used by the people who own it.
The planners get their way with the land but do not risk losing their own money. Property owners still carry that risk but their freedom to use it as they see fit is further restricted.
All municipalities have plans and restrictions on land use at some level but the Canadian constitution contains the principle of subsidiarity or that decisions should be made at the lowest level of government possible without affecting people in other jurisdictions.
Eventually, the success and failure of each municipality is judged by people and investment voting with their feet.
Anyone who doubts the perniciousness of legislating minimum planning requirements on lower levels of government need only look to New Zealand’s 1991 Resource Management Act. Like the Planning and Development Act, this act was supposed to streamline land-use regulation.
In practice, it has created the conditions for increasingly arduous land use regulation.
The planning profession has grown to fill the role mandated for it by regulation, then grown again as its presence allows it to identify and create further work for itself. Land-use plans get thicker each year and businesspeople complain that they could not build the infrastructure they currently have under today’s rules.
In 20 years, it will be possible to evaluate the success of the Wall government here. One of the most important things it could do now is reduce the mandatory minimum content for municipal land-use planning.
If it does not, it will find itself with an accidental legacy.
Seymour is a senior policy analyst at the Frontier Centre.
