ALR in BC

I was looking through the report of the Agricultural Land Commission of BC - it is the sort of thing that I need to do from time to time in relation to my work. The stats in the report are interesting.

BC has 4.7 million hectares of land in the Agricultural Land Reserve. The ALR has been around in BC since the early 1970s and in 34 years the amount of land in the ALR has stayed close to 4.7 million hectares. There has not been a net loss of agricultural land in BC over the last generation.

The system is generally working very well, but that is not what you would think if you hear the cries of the Cassandras that believe we are running out of agricultural land. The net change in ALR in 2007 was a loss of 626 hectares of agricultural land in BC. This is a tiny amount, this is an amount that is almost unmeasurable when compared to the amount of land that is in the ALR.

Most people are focused on a few small areas when it comes to ALR - the south Island, Metro Vancouver and the Okanagan. Yes, there seems to be drop in ALR in those areas, but the worries about these areas ignores the bigger picture in the province. For a start, the Capital Regional District has very little land I would want to farm, it is marginal. Secondly, these areas are where the population is growing. Agriculture and suburbanites do not mix well - look at the problems farmers have in Delta with a council that seems opposed to active farming, or the actions of Saanich against the proposed blueberry farm on Panama flats.

4.7 million hectares of land is a large area - this is 47 000 square kilometres! This is an area bigger than Switzerland or Denmark. This is an area only 15% smaller than Nova Scotia.

Most of this land is not being used to produce much at all. We have a huge reserve of land sitting there if we ever need it to produce food. In theory one could produce 47 million tonnes of food from this land - more than a tonne of food per Canadian.

The ALC has done a very good job in protecting lands within the ALR. The changes that happen each year are tiny and not something to be worried about. At the rate we are going, we will have a lot of agricultural land for generations and generations into the future.

Insite makes the Economist

The safe injection site has made the Economist. News from Canada makes the Economist only about a dozen times per year because the Economist only covers the most important news of the world each week. I have been reading this newspaper each and every week for 20 years now and I recommend it to everyone because there is no better newspaper in the world.

The fact that Insite made the Economist is important for us in BC to take note of, the problem is that the news within the article is not good. I am generally a supporter of harm reduction, but it has to be something that makes sense and improves things. The article points out that that a study of Insite only shows a minimal improvement. Only 500 adicts use the site daily and only 50 seem to make use of it for all of their shooting up. The study says that only one life per year has been saved from drug overdoses.

There are five people alive today that would not have been were it not for Insite. If we assign an lifetime economic value to them of $2 000 000 to each one of them - a conservative estimate of the potential of economic value they are to society - there is a case to be made that the program does more good than harm, but this assumes the study was accurate. The value to society is $10 000 000 over the next 35 years, but what is the cost of the program each year?

I have no idea what the best solution is, but the loss of 8000 people to addiction in Vancouver is an annual economic cost of close to a quarter billion. This value is what they would be contributing to the society in creation of wealth by working. The additional taxes to government from these people would be about $50 000 000 a year.

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Drugs in Canada

Needle match

Aug 7th 2008 | VANCOUVER
From The Economist print edition

Harm reduction, or abstinence?

BACK in 2003 many residents of Vancouver reckoned that an answer had finally been found to the worsening hard-drug problem in the liberal-minded city’s Downtown Eastside district. A reformist city council, borrowing a European idea, opened the first supervised heroin-injection clinic in North America. It was set up as a research experiment, with a three-year remit (since twice extended). The idea was that giving addicts a safe place to inject themselves would remove them from crime, disease and other risks, and make them more amenable to treatment. The Liberals who were then running the federal government agreed, and blessed Insite, as the project is called, with C$1.5m (then worth $1.1m) and a vital exemption from drug laws.

Five years on, Insite has proved a disappointment to many in Vancouver. It has also become the object of partisan conflict. The Conservative federal government of Stephen Harper dislikes the project. A committee set up to advise it on the issue found that only about 500 of Vancouver’s 8,000 addicts use Insite each day, and fewer than 10% of those use it for all their injections. It found no clear evidence of any increase in treatment, nor of any fall in HIV cases. It did estimate that the project might have saved one life per year but found that overdose deaths were still about 50 a year among addicts. Crime continues unabated as addicts steal to feed their habits, something which frustrates the local police. The government therefore proposed to allow Insite’s legal exemption to lapse when it expired in June.

Many health workers thereupon sprang to Insite’s defence. They are convinced that the project’s “harm-reduction” approach can work. In May they gained an order from a justice of British Columbia’s Supreme Court to stop the federal government from closing the clinic. In a radical ruling Justice Ian Pitfield found the federal law prohibiting the possession and trafficking of drugs to be unconstitutional and said that closing Insite would deny addicts access to a “health-care facility”. Allowing the clinic to stay open, he gave the federal government a year to amend its anti-drug law. The federal government promptly appealed against the ruling.

Health care in Canada is a provincial matter. Last month Quebec stepped into the drug debate. Its public-health director announced that he was considering plans for supervised injection sites in Montreal and Quebec City. This seems to have made things even stickier for the federal health minister, Tony Clement.

This week Mr Clement restated his opposition to Insite. “Allowing and/or encouraging people to inject heroin into their veins is not harm reduction, it is the opposite,” he said while attending an international conference on AIDS in Mexico City. He wants to focus instead on treatment and prevention. But he has remained silent as to whether the government would grant any request from Quebec for exemption from drug-prohibition laws. Mr Harper’s hopes of turning his government’s minority status into a majority at the next election depend on winning seats in Quebec. So the future of drug policy in Canada may turn on a political calculation.

Oil and Gas in BC

A lot of people are worrying about offshore oil and gas in BC, but that potential is only one part of the uptapped potential for oil and gas in BC.

The offshore holds about 10 000 000 000 barrels of oil, but on land the Nechako basin holds about 5 100 000 000 barrels of oil. The Bowser - Sustut basin holds another 2 600 000 000 barrels. We are more likely to see oil drilling from Williams Lake to Burns Lake than off shore.

The two uptapped basins on land should eventually lead to a 1 000 000 a day production for 23 years. These fields would add more than one percent to the global daily production.

Neither basin has been very well explored and the numbers are very conservative estimates, there is a potential for a much larger amount as drilling starts and extraction technologies improve.

The oil from these two basins will add several billion dollars more income to the provincial government each year for the life of the fields.

These basins also have gas potential. Another 16 trillion cubic feet.