Working with Ministries and Other Agencies

Policies and Planning

The Agricultural Land Commission (ALC) is mandated to encourage local governments, First Nations, and the provincial government and its agents, to take the interests of the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) and agriculture into account when developing or updating policies, plans, bylaws, laws, and regulation.

Governments and their agents can have considerable impact on agricultural land through such things as transportation & infrastructure planning, wildlife habitat management and conservation, forestry management, water & wastewater management, resource extraction, and energy planning.

Accordingly, the ALC works to be proactive and collaborative in its engagement with local governments, first nations, and government ministries on the development of their plans, bylaws and policies to enable and accommodate farm use of the agriculture land reserve.

Delegation of Decision Making to Agencies

The ALC Act empowers the ALC to delegate some or all of the Commission’s authority to decide non-farm use and subdivision applications to a First Nation government on First Nation’s Settlement Lands or to “an agent of government, a public body or public officer other than a local government” on lands within their jurisdictions. A decision to enter into a delegation agreement is voluntary and imparts to the delegate the authority to uphold the ALC Act

The ALC Act, Section 26 (5), stipulates that once a delegation agreement has been struck, the First Nation, government, public body or public officer must apply Section 6 to their decision-making and their decision is treated as a decision of the Commission for the purposes of the Act.

The goal, in these situations, is to take advantage of an external agency’s capacity to help reduce duplication of application requirements and to streamline processing while ensuring ALR lands are preserved and protected.

While a delegation agreement is entered into voluntarily by both parties, the ALC must carefully weigh the ability of delegate agencies to fully honour the ALC’s statutory obligations. Contents of a delegation agreement can include: principles, criteria or policies related to the decisions being delegated and clearly communicated expectations related to information requirements, application processes, form and content of decisions, timelines, communication policy, reviews, audits and evaluations, addressing conflicts, and when changes to the agreement are necessary and how they are to be made. Considerable training may be required for an authority to assume the delegated authority and properly execute the statutory role under the ALC Act.

The ALC retains the right to withdraw a delegation agreement if the terms of the agreement are abrogated in any way. Local governments will be consulted during the negotiation of a delegation agreement with an external authority.