DidTheyHearTheDevelopersCallTheirName?Treaties'RUs
Mary has an interesting take on the Tsawwassen Treaty Deal:
"On December 7, 2006, a critical step in the sale of BCRail was celebrated because it was made to look like a Treaty settlement. The Campbell government has given 207 hectares of prime Delta farmland, situated beside the Roberts Bank port, to the Tsawwassen First Nations.
The Tsawwassens have agreed to give up their Reserve status and to begin paying property taxes. How are they going to do that? Well ... the Campbell government has removed this land from the Agricultural Land Reserve making it OK to pave the richest, blackest soil in B.C. (Only 4% of BC land is arable.)
And for what? So that the Tsawwassens will be forced to make deals with industrial developers, even selling the land to industry if they so decide.
And for what? So that the industrial developers (who probably would like to buy Deltaport and Roberts Bank someday) can build warehouses for the shipping containers arriving and departing via the adjoining port facilities.
In other words: the farmlands will become a functioning part of the port facility ... the BCRail port facility ... making it all the more pricey (in cash terms) when a future government again puts Roberts Bank up for sale."
Which is an interesting way of looking at things, indeed. And if Mary is right in her assessment this certainly would be a mighty creative, some might suggest anti-democratic, way of fusing the "Treaty" and the "P3" processes.
Me, I'm not yet entirely sure what to think about all of this.
But there is one thing I do know, from personal experience.
And that is this.
When there are previously protected public* lands involved that have the potential to become hugely lucrative once liberated, the vultures/developers are rarely far from the scene.
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*How's that for a flipside definition of 'P3', eh?
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