Thanks going out today to David Cyril MacDonald for his submission to the IRAC review.
SUBMISSION TO ALL ISLANDERS
Land use submissions to IRAC. A “From Awayer’s” View
I’m from away. I’m a seasonal resident. I have a vested interest in the land question in PEI. I have reviewed these IRAC submissions from concerned islanders and have this to say:
“Transparency,” “accountability,” “trustworthy,” “public oversight”, these words appear so often in submissions like this that they’ve become wallpaper. Everyone from the Coalition to the NFU uses them, and everyone agrees they’re good, and nobody defines what mechanism produces them.
That’s the tell of a policy vocabulary that’s calcified into ritual. It lets a writer signal virtue without committing to a design.
“We need a trustworthy, independent tribunal” sounds like a conclusion, but it’s just the demand restated as an adjective.
Nobody says how you make a tribunal trustworthy, appointment process, term limits, funding independence, appeal rights. They just insist that it be so.
The other thing worth noting as an outsider: these letters and submissions and the ones endorsing them, spend far more energy establishing moral standing, unceded territory acknowledgment, “the Common Good,” land as spiritual and non-renewable than describing institutional mechanics.
That’s not wrong, exactly; land use is an ethical question on PEI in a way it isn’t in a lot of places.
But a Commission reviewing IRAC’s actual functions needs specifics, not liturgy.
Submissions read more like a homily than a submission to a regulatory review.
Where it’s genuinely right
The core factual complaint is real and specific: land transactions get reviewed by IRAC, then handed to Executive Council for a final decision protected by cabinet confidentiality.
That’s a real structural problem, an arm’s-length regulator whose actual decision point sits behind a door nobody can see through.
“Swiss cheese” is a fair description of a law with that hole in it. That part isn’t buzzword fog; it’s an accurate diagnosis.
What an outsider would propose.
If I were writing this instead of endorsing someone else’s brief, I’d skip the incantations and propose something concrete:
Move the final decision out of cabinet. If IRAC investigates non-resident and corporate land purchases under the Lands Protection Act, IRAC’s recommendation should be the decision, or at minimum Executive Council’s override should require a published, reasoned justification.
Confidentiality should protect commercially sensitive detail, not the existence and rationale of a ruling.
Publish a decision register.
Every application, outcome, and reasoning statement, searchable, going back to when the practice starts.
This is the cheapest, fastest fix and it does more for “transparency” than any amount of language about trust.
Codify beneficial ownership rules with teeth, as the NFU proposes but write the enforcement mechanism into the statute, not just the definition. A definition without an audit and penalty regime is decorative.
Separate the tribunal function from the land-use planning function. Right now, IRAC does both utility regulation and land adjudication under one roof with one governance structure.
An outsider looking at this fresh would ask why a body juggling rental appeals, utility rates, and farmland ownership disputes is expected to be a specialist tribunal in any of them.
Build in a public objector standing rule, a defined, low-barrier way for affected Islanders (not just applicants) to be heard and to appeal, with published timelines. That’s what “public participation” means operationally; right now, it’s aspirational.
The honest version of this letter would say: stop asking for virtues and start asking for a statute.
“Trustworthy” isn’t a design spec. A published decision register and a removed cabinet veto are.
CD MacDonald
Annandale, Little Pond, Howe Bay
