A legislative standing committee and the Coalition for the Protection of P.E.I. Lands are both calling on the province’s Minister of Land Steven Myers to order a new investigation looking into Buddhist land holdings in the province.
On Thursday the Standing Committee on Natural Resources and Environmental Sustainability passed a motion calling on Myers to order a new investigation.
The committee passed a second motion demanding the Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission provide the committee with a copy of the investigation it conducted in 2018.
“I’m continuing to be concerned with respect to what we are seeing in the community down east with the lands of the monks and the community organizations affiliated with the monks,” said Green MLA Matt MacFarlane during the debate. MacFarlane introduced both motions.
Members of Three Rivers council have faced a barrage of criticism on social media and been confronted at public council meetings over the issue of Buddhist land holdings in the community.
Some councillors have said that criticism crossed a line recently, with unfounded accusations council members have been “bought and paid for” by GEBIS, the Great Enlightenment Buddhist Institute Society.
Council members have also noted enforcement of P.E.I.’s Lands Protection Act, which sets limits on how much land individuals and corporations can own, falls to the province.
A new investigation “would help lower the temperature of the rhetoric, what we are seeing down east in that community, some of the challenges that the municipality of Three Rivers is dealing with,” MacFarlane said, adding that results of all investigations should be available to the public.
During the fall 2024 sitting of the legislature Myers and Premier Dennis King spoke of the need for more transparency around how P.E.I.’s Lands Protection Act is enforced, and Myers said he would ask IRAC for a copy of its 2018 investigation.
There was no response from the department of land this week to questions from CBC about the release of that report.
A spokesperson for IRAC said the commission responded to Myers’ request with a letter in November, and has no further information to add at this time.
The committee’s request follows an open letter from the Coalition for the Protection of P.E.I. Land to King asking for much the same thing.
The letter from the coalition also references the Brendel Farms report, an IRAC investigation completed in 2020 looking at land acquired by a member of the Irving family that did not receive cabinet approval as normally required for corporate land transactions.
CBC has filed freedom of information requests for both the Brendel Farms report and the report looking at Buddhist land holdings, but to date neither report has been made public.
“It is time for a thorough investigation into these matters with a comprehensive public report on the findings,” the coalition said in its letter.
Boyd Allan, a member of the coalition, said there isn’t a point of investigating if the result won’t be made public.
“I think that that is the only manner that this could be dealt with that provides any clarity at all,” Allan said.
“We owe it to the generations that follow that we protect the land that we have.”
In the interim government should stall sales on agricultural land, Allan said.
GEBIS responded to the coalition’s call for an investigation with its own statement to the media.
In it, the group acknowledged there are ongoing concerns regarding land ownership and loss of agricultural land in P.E.I.
But the group took issue with claims it controls far more land than allowed under the LPA, saying that “does not align with the facts as we know them. The claim that GEBIS owns between 15,000 and 17,000 acres of land on P.E.I. has been repeatedly cited and widely accepted as fact—yet no actual evidence has been presented to support it,” the statement said.
“The overly inflated figure has caused fear and division within our community.”
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