After several months of negotiations, Metro Vancouver finally obtained the unanimous support of its member municipalities for a new regional growth strategy, which was adopted on July 29, 2011.
The objective of the strategy is to promote sustainable growth in the Lower Mainland, but concerns were raised by some member municipalities about the amount of planning control that the strategy ceded to Metro Vancouver. Three of the region’s largest business associations, the Business Council of BC, the Urban Development Institute Pacific Region and the BC Chamber of Commerce, also collectively opposed the strategy, citing concerns that it will, among other things, constrain future expansion of the region’s transportation infrastructure and industrial land base.
While the economic concerns raised by the business associations remain, the member municipalities’ concerns have apparently been satisfied, since they have all now thrown their support behind the strategy. The Metro Vancouver 2040 regional growth strategy bylaw passed third reading and has been adopted. The focus will now shift to assessing how implementation of the strategy actually impacts the regional, provincial and national economies.
Metro Vancouver, like B.C.’s 28 other provincially created regional governments, is charged under the Local Government Act RSBC 1996 ch. 323 (formerly the Municipal Act) with drafting and implementing regional growth strategies. Metro Vancouver’s new strategy is supposedly drafted to ensure that future land use is sustainable and environmentally responsible, and it has the following stated goals:
- creating compact urban areas;
- supporting a sustainable economy;
- protecting the environment;
- developing complete communities; and
- supporting sustainable transportation choices.
While the strategy aims to achieve its goals in part by creating fixed land-use designations, which are meant to contain sprawl, protect agricultural and conservation areas, and create compact urban centres, the business community characterizes the new strategy as a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist.
In short, it sees the existing protections of agricultural land reserves and the physical layout of the Lower Mainland, which is already constrained by the ocean, rivers, mountains and the American border, as being sufficient barriers to urban sprawl and encroachment on agricultural and conservation lands.
Those Metro Vancouver member municipalities that expressed pre-adoption concerns about the strategy, primarily the City of Coquitlam, focused largely on maintaining their political autonomy and the strategy’s creation of new bureaucracy in local land-use planning processes.
Since the member municipalities’ support was necessary to adoption, those concerns took priority and have apparently been satisfied. However, the strategy’s impact on the regional, provincial and national economies has arguably been given short shrift, and now that the strategy has been adopted, effecting changes to it will be significantly harder if the business community’s concerns prove to have been warranted.
These concerns may have been partially addressed by the new regional growth strategy “Procedures Bylaw,” which was quickly passed in mid-July, as it contain a high-level mechanism for evaluating, and potentially amending, the strategy as the need arises. However, it remains to be seen whether that mechanism will allow the strategy to evolve smoothly as the future planning needs of the Lower Mainland become clearer.
The procedures bylaw aside, industry opponents of the strategy argue that key contributors to B.C.’s economy were ignored during the drafting of the strategy, such as the region’s port network, which is Canada’s largest and busiest.
Port Metro Vancouver, as the regional port network is known, is the fourth-largest port network in North America (by tonnage), includes 28 major marine cargo terminals and three class 1 railroads. According to statistics published by Port Metro Vancouver, more than 130 million tonnes of cargo move through its gates each year. Further, Port Metro Vancouver reports generating, directly and indirectly, an annual economic output of $22 billion and supports almost 130,000 Canadian jobs.
A huge amount of materials and goods moving between major domestic and Asian markets pass through Metro Vancouver, including new vehicles, consumer products and mining, agricultural and forestry resources.
It is self-evident that the movement of goods between transportation hubs and industrial areas requires an efficient transportation network. Critics of the strategy worry that fixed land-use designations imposed by the strategy will constrain expansion of this transportation infrastructure and the development of the industrial land base, and thus stifle the growth of the regional economy.
If the critics are correct, a broader concern should be the impact of the strategy on the national economy. Critics fear that the adoption of the strategy will make it harder for some existing businesses to grow, and warn that those businesses may elect to relocate to the United States.
Similarly, there are concerns that foreign businesses will avoid moving into B.C. and will, instead, look to American port cities where they may face fewer obstacles to expansion. While some will argue that the strategy’s critics should have been more involved from the outset, the timing of their criticism should not undermine the substance of their concerns.