Gerry's Lands Act Charade
Gerry's Lands Act Charade
Friends don't let friends do bad magic
Boom!
Right out of nowhere.
Middle of October.
And if the universe did not produce the appropriate clap of thunder to accompany there was Gerry Boyle… err… Byrne telling us he’d be introducing changes to the provincial Lands Act when the House of Assembly next sits that were out of this world, unprecedented in the history of humanity, and just fantasmagorical, dontchya know.
By the gods, these would be “of the boldest and most progressive the province's Crown lands administration system has experienced in decades.” Those are CBC’s words but they really came out of Gerry’s gob.
Lots of people have been calling for major change to the out-of-date Lands Act. They had no idea this was coming. After a huge public embarrassment a couple of years ago and a hasty attempt to fix the problem that didn’t do anything at all, the government dropped the issue. Then Byrne popped up with this surprise.
There’s a huge problem in the Act as it reads now. Hundreds if not thousands of people are sitting on land they think is theirs but the way the law reads and the way the courts interpret it, the land might not be. They’ll only find out when they sell it. That’s when a title search will show up a problem. Maybe. And owners will be faced with a set of choices:
Buy the land from the government at current market prices,
Find people who can swear you have owned and occupied the land and used it for the 20 years between 1957 and 1977, or
Take the government to court.
Byrne’s proposed changes won’t fix that problem. Folks will still have to fight the government over land they own in court. Byrne just wants to shorten the time from 20 years to the 10 between 1967 and 1977.
What will be different is a process in which the Crown can give the land owners a “quitclaim” deed to the land at a lower cost than market value. Slightly cheaper but they'll still have to buy land they already own. Byrne says it will be cheaper but that’s only a wee bit cheaper - there are other costs involved in documenting the land parcel - but there is a possibility that under changes Byrne will bring, the government could take the slightly cheaper route.
So a small bit of hope. Maybe. But nothing bold or progressive. Just tweaks, really. Nice tweaks but still just tweaks. And the introduction of an online portal - another bit part of Byrne’s announcement - was really something that was big when Byrne was first elected to the House of Commons almost 30 years ago. These days, making a big deal of it would be like Gerry telling his grandkids he just figured out how to wire up the VCR.
Still, that didn’t the uncommunciations crowd in Byrne’s shop from calling his plan “Bold and Aggressive Action” with initial capitals for all just to make sure you got it. That was in a release last week about something else and by the looks of things, it managed to fool some of the local conventional media crowd that his hyperbolic self-praise of Danny Williams onanistic proportions fixed what the Auditor General found in her fourth audit of the Crown Lands Office in the past 20 years.
Former finance deputy minister Denise Hanrahan’s report found - unsurprisingly - that there is no "lands title system.” We know this. It’s actually part of the Premier’s economic advisors’ report from 2021, along with solutions, the one he tossed in the dirt right away.
People don’t have to register title in part because - as Hanrahan’s audit found, Crown Lands has no idea what it owns and what it doesn’t own. Records lost in the Great Fire of 1892 have never replaced. We’ll come back to this one on Wednesday with another tale of a Crown Lands giveaway, by the way.
Hanrahan reported that “registries across government were not reconciled with each other and often contained different information about land ownership. The Department of Fisheries, Forestry and Agriculture had not implemented the 2015 recommendation of the Lands Act Review.”
There was no complete list, or mapping inventory, of all available Crown lands. Additionally, mapping information in the Land Use Atlas was outdated and contained inconsistencies compared to the records management system. The records management system was missing approximately 17,000 titles - approximately 15,000 titles that existed in physical copies were not digitalized and approximately 2,000 titles destroyed by fire in 1892, and not yet recovered.
It gets better:
“Most departmental policies were severely outdated. The average age of policy documents was 20 years.
“The application referral process and related drafted guidelines were incomplete and inconsistent across regions.
“Land survey spot checks were done for large projects (cottage planning areas and large agriculture projects), but rarely done otherwise. There were also inconsistent processes across regions and subjectivity within how process steps were completed and documented.
“33 of 53 samples (62%) did not meet the department’s internal 90-business day processing standard for routine applications as noted on their website. The average processing time for these samples was 172 business days, with the longest being 615 business days.
“When compared to the official 2002 delegation policy, 16 of 54 applications (30%) had not been approved by the appropriate person.
“We found two of three samples classified as commercial applications (67%) had no support indicating the company having a status of good standing, yet the applications had been approved.
“We found the check for good standing in the registry of companies and deeds online was the only due diligence performed to verify the commercial applicant.
“Government Transfers 13 transfer applications (37%) took over 150 business days to be processed.
“There was no internal standard regarding processing times or survey response time for government to government transfers.”
This is such a horror show that even if the House rushes these minor amendments Gerry’s proposing, the Crown Lands Office will still not be able to deal with claims any better since the entire administration is outdated and, by the looks of things, jaw-droppingly incompetent.
All of this affects not only Nan and Pop trying to sell their house to move into smaller digs. It affects businesses as well. And it’s not new. The Auditor General’s office has done four audits of Crown Lands in the last 20 years. Politicians and bureaucrats just ignored the issues highlighted.
No surprise. “The department has no formal policies or procedures for handling public complaints or transferring them. In 23 of the 36 complaints sampled (64%), there was no evidence of any action taken by the department. The department did not enforce removal of illegal structures when the occupier did not comply; In four of eight samples (50%) there was nothing to indicate follow-up had been completed to see if the structure had been removed. Illegal occupancy of Crown lands continues to be an issue due to the lack of proactive monitoring, inspections and enforcement. There were no formalized enforcement policies, procedures, or processes and minimal enforcement was performed during our scope period.”
Not only has the AG told Byrne about this but groups representing municipalities, the province’s real estate industry, the Canadian Bar Association (NL Chapter), and others told the review of the abortive changes two years ago, they’d support actual bold moves of the sort proposed by the Moya Greene team even though they’d be costly and, in the case of the title system, would take a decade to finish. The end result would be fair and would provide an enormous economic boost to the whole province.
If Gerry Byrne wants to be bold, aggressive, and progressive, he will have tons of support, including from this corner. No doubt. But this game he’s been playing for the past two weeks is a sad joke. It’s beneath him. And no one who is genuinely his friend would let him settle for less than the best he can do.
Even the Pea Seas would be right to call him out on it and do everything in their power to halt the proposed changes simply because they would do nothing, at best. That’s not because the changes are not potentially good. They are. It’s just that passing Gerry’s bill would be a waste of time.
The AG’s report makes it clear the Crown Lands Office cannot handle their current responsibilities. They’d never be able to deal with even the modest changes he announced two weeks ago. At worst, letting Byrne slide this bill through in the usual unaccountable way of things these days would give Byrne and his colleagues the excuse to go back to sleep.
Gerry Byrne knew about the AG report when he held his quickie newser and announced his splendiferously showy changes. The rest of us didn’t. The over-the-top self-praise should tell you that it was Furey-esque jabber, not real change. A dodge. A distraction. Gerry just wanted to get everyone not to look at a damning AG report he knew would be released in a few weeks time. And if they did, he’d claim what he proposed would take care of all of the AGs faults she’d found.
Gerry can do better that this clumsy sleight of hand. It’s a shame this experienced, capable politician is reduced to the cheap parlour tricks of a washed-up hack rather than the deft political magic he *is* capable of. He’s just going to need some encouragement to do the right thing.
So whaddya say, Gerry?
Let’s do the right thing, not the dodgy thing.
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