B.C.’s Agriculture minister is firing back at what she calls opposition “fear mongering” over changes to the legislation governing the Agricultural Land Reserve.

Lana Popham says the accusations of outrageous downloading onto local governments by having ALR exclusion applications funneled through them is absurd.

Popham says says the changes impact exclusion applications only and there simply aren’t very many of those.

“I think they are spreading a lot of mis-truths and probably doing some fear-mongering, which is disappointing. Just for Kamloops for example just take a guess how many exclusion applications there were in 2018? One, there was one. The story they are telling that this is just a massive download on to local governments and that we are taking away people’s rights is just completely untrue.”

Popham says the exclusion application numbers are also low across the province.

“When I go through the list of local governments, I am not kidding, it is between one and three applications a year in every single one of them that I am looking at. So it is not a massive download. The thing that we heard from local governments when we were making these changes including about changing the way the panel system works within the ALC every body was saying we cannot lose regional representation.”

Popham says it makes sense to funnel ALR exclusion requests through local governments in order to streamline the process as a whole.