Agriculture didn’t get a lot of airtime during the recent election, except at events hosted by the Association of Manitoba Municipalities or the Manitoba Farm Writers and Broadcasters Association.
However, one burning issue got a surprising lack of play, given its heat over the course of the outgoing government’s last term.
There were very few mentions of Crown lands.
Read Also
Farming still has digital walls to scale
Canadian farms still face the same obstacles to adopting digital agriculture technology, despite the years industry and policy makers have had to break them down.
On the Progressive Conservative side, the party promised permanent relief on rents — still a major thorn in the side of leaseholders despite other sweeping changes to the system that were met with cautious optimism earlier this year.
The NDP said the PCs were trying to gain political capital from fixing an issue that they had created in the first place. Other than that exchange, it was silence.
The issue did appear in the NDP’s platform, however. The party promised, in general terms, to reverse the changes the PCs made to the system.
With the NDP victory Oct. 3 the question now becomes, what will that look like?
There’s no doubt the modernized Crown land system has been — to put it mildly — unpopular with forage leaseholders.
At the same time, the latest round of changes, finalized only a few months ago, appeared to re-instate transfers, make gains on land improvement valuation and bring the whole issue back to a simmer after four years spent at a rolling boil.
Whether the end result is a step forward or as problem-strewn as the 2019 changes, another system-wide overhaul would inevitably mean months or years of regulatory limbo as the slow wheels of government turn.
It would be hard not to sympathize if Crown land leaseholders feel a little conflict fatigue or have mixed feelings between hope for change and general wariness of government.
It would not be the first time leaseholders were promised something that sounded positive, only for it to turn into something else altogether.
Crown land changes were initially supposed to be good news story for producers. At the time, the old points-based allocation system was under fire for being hard to understand and lacking transparency. The province was also in the process of joining the New West Partnership trade agreement, and Crown land eligibility had to be opened up for Manitoba to be compliant.
The Manitoba Beef Producers suggested the promised auction system would be useful for price discovery and easier to understand, but hedged that no one would really know until the system’s new regulations went into effect.
When they did, they hit like an atom bomb.
The changes didn’t stop at auction allocation and eligibility. They gutted the system. The new market-based rent calculation would multiply payments several times over. Leases were 15 years, down from 50. Unit transfers, without which many producers later said their ranches were unsellable, were on the way out.
Outcries were immediate, loud, and filled every town hall meeting wall to wall in the following weeks.
Faced with backlash on the 15-year terms, the province agreed to add a first right of renewal for existing leases. When that amendment came out, however, ranchers noticed another, until that point unmentioned, change — a transitory unit transfer, a kind of grandfather clause that had initially promised an exit plan for those who pinned their future plans or retirements on the unit transfer, was gone.
Farmers accused the province of being underhanded. The now-governing NDP panned the changes in question period. And leaseholders considered taking the province to court.
The NDP has now promised to reverse the PC changes. Does that mean a return to the points system of old, the same points system that was criticized as opaque and convoluted?
And if it does, can the industry take it? Leaseholders have already faced years of turmoil and uncertainty during the new system’s snail’s-pace development and the resulting years of hardship – not at all helped by recent drought years.
And if the NDP does decide to reinstate the points system, it will have to also address the complaints that led to its downfall. Otherwise, the industry is right back where it started, just with a few extra years of trauma piled on.
