EXPLORATION ’95 — Regional and community planning —

One of the key planks in the New Democratic Party campaign in the 1991 provincial election was a promise to develop a “land-use strategy” that would end the “valley-by-valley” conflicts in British Columbia, while doubling park land to 12%.

In July, 1992, the Commissioner on Resources and Environment (CORE) Act provided “for the creation of a sustainable provincial land-use strategy, at the heart of which would be the development of comprehensive land-use and resource-management plans throughout the province, at the regional and community levels.” Regional plans were to deal with broad land-use allocations, while community based planning was to address land use and related resource and environmental issues.

Priority was given to three areas of the province with a history of land-use conflicts: Vancouver Island, the Cariboo-Chilcotin and the Kootenays. At the same time, the government engaged in an ambitious array of parallel initiatives, including new waste, water management and environmental legislation and a new comprehensive Forest Practices Code which will govern all activities in the forest.

Four “round tables” (the Kootenays were given two tables), including representatives from all recognized stakeholder groups, were established by the CORE commissioner, Steven Owen. These tables were to reach compromise agreements for their region using interest-based bargaining to gain consensus. After more than 18 months of intense mediated negotiations, none of the four tables was able to reach consensus.

Bruce McKnight, a mining negotiator at the Vancouver Island table, feels that half of the representatives at the tables had views shared by only 10% of the population. McKnight contends that the mediated dispute resolution technique (mandated by the CORE Act) was designed for labor negotiations where disputes have a limited number of parties and issues, and where the parties have the power to bind themselves to an agreement.

“It is theoretically dubious whether the process is an appropriate one for our purpose,” he says.

The tables averaged more than 20 sectors representing vastly disparate interests. Often, participants had no technical background to equip them to deal with the issues. In addition, the uncertainty of the regulatory framework — caused by changing legislation and new initiatives such as the new Forest Practices Code — within which negotiations proceeded, made consensus very unlikely.

In the absence of agreement, Owen made his own recommendations. The provincial government has used his recommendations to make decisions on the Vancouver Island and the Cariboo-Chilcotin land-use plans, and is about to announce a decision for the East and West Kootenays

The government is favoring a 5-category system of province-wide zoning. While the labels vary from region to region, the broad designations are “protected areas,” “high-intensity” areas, “low-intensity” areas, “integrated” areas and private land.

The high-intensity areas are intended to emphasize resource use and development, while ensuring maintenance of basic environmental quality by adhering to the Forest Practices Code and other standards.

The integrated areas emphasize sustained land and resource use “under responsible stewardship.”

The low-intensity areas recognize the sensitive nature of certain lands outside protected areas. They are often established as buffers to protected areas, and to preserve biodiversity by establishing corridors between protected areas. Management intent will be to conserve the special values while allowing compatible human use and development. Resource development will be subject to specific management regulations, guidelines and mitigation, much of which will be determined at lower levels of planning. Clearly, resource use in these areas will be restricted, and massive uncertainty is being created over large areas of land.

The Vancouver Island plan calls for protection of 13% of the land base, with a further 8% in low-intensity zones, for a total of 21%. In the Cariboo, the plan calls for 12% protected and 26% low intensity (for a total of 38%). The East Kootenay proposal calls for 16% protected and 12.3% low intensity (for a total of 28.3%). The West Kootenay proposal calls for 11.3% protected and 18.9% low intensity (for a total of 30.2%). The foregoing implies a massive withdrawal of land from exploration.

The proposal for the Kootenays (not yet adopted by the government) goes further than in the other regions by sub-dividing the region into more than 300 “polygons”, each with its own land-use designation and its own unique set of management guidelines.

In each polygon, 16 different values– ranging from wildlife-access management to biodiversity to fisheries to mining — are to be managed (where they exist) at one of three levels of intensity. Included in this list of values to be considered are recreation/sense of solitude and spiritual/aesthetics.

The sheer complexity of this system is of concern to the mining industry. Many claim blocks will straddle more than one polygon (and possibly three or four), with different rules applying in each polygon. Moreover, numerous polygons labelled “integrated” have more restrictive management guidelines than “special management” (or low-intensity) polygons.

The Chamber of Mines of eastern British Columbia is concerned that relying on sub-regional and local planning boards (particularly community resource boards as recommended by the commissioner) not only will perpetuate and institutionalize uncertainty, but has the potential to create conflict between regions, different planning levels, and established elected regional and local governments.

Mining, not having a defined resource inventory, does not readily lend itself to this type of land-use planning. McKnight cautions that “miners shouldn’t get involved in a free-for-all between environmentalists and loggers. It makes no sense to bar mining from areas we have decided not to log. Mining needs a separate, mineral-specific land-use planning process.” In this he has the support of at least one environmentalist. Anne Sherrod, wilderness sector negotiator in the Slocan Valley, writes in a memo that “it is no more appropriate to manage the forest industry with guidelines acceptable to the mining industry than it is to tie the mining industry to guidelines tied to the forest industry.” Sherrod proposes another planning stage for mining.

— The author is a west-coast geologist.