And a bit about the Lands Protection Act review:
Mr. Carver contemplated the issue of where the agriculture industry is today and would increasing the land holding size actually help matters. He also was charged with looking at the “red tape” involved in accounting for the amount of land a farmer (or corporation) owns. The regulations regarding renaming some land as environmentally sensitive (so overall holdings could be increased) were scrutinized. (Once the regulations were modified in 2009, and in 2010, farmers wanting to get some of their lands exempted this way have to play a game of pickleball back and forth between IRAC and the Department of Agriculture to hear if the exemption would be granted.)
from the Prince Edward Island LPA Exemption Regulations (page 22-23):
35. (1) For the purposes of this section, “environmentally significant class of land holding” means any land holding other than a “natural area class of land holding” that
(a) the Department of Agriculture has certified as being (i) agricultural land that is identified in the PEI Sloped Land Inventory that is verified as having been converted from row crops by the owner through tree planting, (ii) land that is being utilized as an erosion control structure approved by the Department of Agriculture,
(iii) land on which there is a hedgerow that meets the Department of Agriculture’s criteria and standards for hedgerows, or (iv) land that is verified to be a permanent grassed headland that does not include any land that is required to be used as a buffer under the Environmental Protection Act Watercourse and Wetland Protection Regulations; or
(b)the Department of Environment, Energy and Forestry has certified as being
(i) land that is identified in the PEI Wetlands Atlas as designated wetlands, (ii) land that is identified in the PEI Corporate Land Use Inventory as forested land, or
(iii) land that is required to be used as a buffer under the Environmental Protection Act Watercourse and Wetland Protection Regulations or land that is required to expand a required buffer onto marginal agricultural land.
(2) All land holdings that are certified to be in the “environmentally significant class of land holding” are eligible for exemption from the section 2 aggregate land holding limits contained in the Act up to a maximum of 40% of current aggregate land holdings, to a maximum of 400 acres for a person and 1200 acres for a corporation, of which no more than 80% (320 acres for a person and 960 acres for a corporation) shall be forested land. (EC645/09)
And without further ado, the first recommendation from the Commission tidies this up:
1. That the provincial government do the following: repeal Section 35 of the Regulations in its entirety; modify Section 2 of the Lands Protection Act to make it clear that the 1,000 and 3,000 acre aggregate land holding limits apply to arable land only; and accept as proof of compliance the farmer’s signed declaration of the acreage of arable land owned and leased.