Camp Denman Vs ChatGPT by Keith Porteous (editorial)
Given that all of Camp Denman’s public communications employ so-called Artificial Intelligence (AI), in creating its website, its logo, and its supporting text, I asked ChatGPT AI to compose a critique of the proposal for non-farming uses on the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) protected farmland it occupies. The following is what ChatGPT generated:
The Free Market Will Save Denman Island, Right After It Sells It Off
Tony Aly casts himself as an entrepreneur, and a man impatient with governance that stands between his ideas and their execution. He says he builds “platforms, infrastructure, and real-world operations,” and he describes Camp Denman, a non-farming development on protected ALR lands, as a “creative campus.”
That makes his opposition to the Agricultural Land Reserve and Islands Trust land-use restrictions particularly revealing in relation to his business interests. His argument is familiar. Regulation is red tape, while markets are dynamic and efficient in allocating land to its best use. Remove the bureaucratic obstacles, let owners decide, and the island community will flourish. It is a seductive argument. It is also spectacularly misguided.
The market does not ask what Denman Island should become. It asks what somebody will pay for its lands. Those are not the same questions.
The Agricultural Land Reserve exists precisely because agricultural land is not an ordinary use of land. British Columbia’s ALR designates agricultural land as a priority use and restricts competing non-agricultural uses. The ALR is a public policy response to a basic market failure. Once farmland is converted into non-farming uses, the agricultural capacity that has been lost cannot simply be purchased back when it is needed.
Islands Trust was created in 1974 because the Gulf Islands were already experiencing development pressures that threatened their character and environment. Its statutory mandate is explicitly to preserve and protect the Trust Area and its unique amenities and environment, not to maximize the exchange value of every parcel of land. That distinction matters enormously.
There isn’t a market force that reconstructs agricultural activities in a community after the farmland has been developed for other purposes. Prohibiting development of farmland for non-farming purposes isn’t “red tape” just because the owner of the land can profit more from other uses. The costs of one person’s business development should not be imposed on everybody else.
The question is not whether Denman should employ “the market”, or have land use regulations.” That is a false binary. The real question is what rules should govern a scarce, ecologically constrained place where one person’s development decision can permanently alter everybody else’s environment.
The Islands Trust mandate is not an unfortunate bureaucratic accident. It is the reason it exists. The alternative isn’t simply to “let the market decide”, because the market has already decided what land is worth, and that is precisely the problem.
On a desirable Gulf Island, the highest-value private use of land is not farming, conservation, non-market housing, or community infrastructure. It’s luxury housing, vacation accommodation, or speculative appreciation. If that outcome is allowed to dominate over other considerations, it will produce an island that maximizes the purchasing power of the people who can afford to buy the land.
“Visionaries” are often remarkably bad at seeing the possibilities that their own success eliminates. The great trick in the market-versus-regulation debate is to describe regulation as an artificial intervention and markets as natural. Neither is true. The question is whose interests do they serve, what harms do they prevent, and what kind of future do they imagine?
The ALR and Islands Trust are not substitutes for the market. They are democratic attempts to put boundaries around the market, precisely because markets are powerful enough to destroy things they have no mechanism for valuing. [That isn’t red tape. That’s the whole point!]
