Harold Steves at his farm in Richmond, B.C., on Nov. 2. Steves, who was first elected as a councillor in Richmond, B.C., in 1968, is retiring and will attend his final council meeting on Thursday.Taehoon Kim/The Globe and Mail
Harold Steves might be in the middle of wrapping up a 51-year career as a politician, and as one of British Columbia’s greatest champions of agriculture and local food, but as of Monday he still had cows. And so, that morning, he was busy doing the usual.
“I still have to clean the barn. They don’t hold back,” said Mr. Steves, 85, who will go to Richmond city hall Thursday to mark his last day there as a city councillor.
It’s a job he has held almost continuously since 1968, except during a break in the 1970s that included a three-year stint as a provincial MLA. During that time, he helped shepherd in legislation that created B.C.’s unique Agricultural Land Reserve, which has protected vast swaths of land from development, including half of Richmond and a good chunk of Metro Vancouver.
His conservation and environmental work has earned him praise – sometimes reluctantly and years later – from both former opponents and long-time admirers.
“He made a lot of us mad at times because he was so persistent and a bit militant,” said Bob Ransford, a real estate developer who is a third-generation resident of the Richmond neighbourhood of Steveston. Richmond’s city council, with Mr. Steves’s support, expropriated Mr. Ransford’s grandfather’s property to add it to a public park.
“But he’s been the conscience of all the issues we now care about today. He was talking about all of those 40 years ago. He moved the agenda because he stopped things and he got things done.”
There are 4.6 million hectares of prime farmland in the reserve, or about 5 per cent of the province’s total land base. That land is protected from development and other non-farm uses. The Agricultural Land Commission fields applications to remove areas from the reserve or approve non-farming activities.
The law, which Mr. Steves ushered into existence with Dave Stupich, who was agricultural minister at the time, and then-premier Dave Barrett, continues to breed tension in the province. There is often immense pressure put on the commission to turn land over to industrial or residential development.
Mr. Steves has remained a champion of the reserve. In recent years, he has advocated for the commission to ensure agricultural land is not used for megamansions or concrete-floored cannabis-production facilities.
Before he returned to Richmond city council in the 1970s, he spent a year suing Richmond over its decision to grant development approval for a piece of land at Garry Point Park. He and his allies won that battle, which is why the hugely popular park at the southwestern point of Lulu Island remains as big as it is.
He is also renowned as a early champion of the idea of local food. He was among the first to warn B.C. not to rely on California and other places around the world for its produce.
He has won many other fights. He got park space included in the controversial 1990s Terra Nova development in northwest Richmond. He preserved Japanese boat-building sheds on the Fraser River at what is now the location of the Britannia Shipyards National Historic Site. He worked to create an agricultural school at what was then Kwantlen College. And he was instrumental in preserving the Garden City Lands, a vast area of green space in the middle of west-side Richmond.
Former Vision Vancouver city councillor Andrea Reimer, who started her political career with the Green Party, called Mr. Steves “the ongoing protector.”
She said she admired the way Mr. Steves, who was also a Metro Vancouver director for most of the years he was on Richmond’s council, was willing to work with anyone and use any tactics to achieve what he thought were the right goals.
“Harold is as down to earth as you can get, and he kind of disarms people. He understood intuitively that he needed to reach out broadly.”
Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie, who has served alongside Mr. Steves since 1996, said the councillor had always been a pragmatist who would try his best to communicate with everyone, whether they agreed with him or not.
Mr. Steves didn’t start out intending to be a crusader.
In 1959, when he was a graduate student in the agriculture school at the University of British Columbia, his father called and said that their farm – an operation started by Mr. Steves’s grandparents, Manoah and Martha Steves, for whom Steveston is named – was under threat because the city had rezoned the land for residential use. The rezoning meant the family no longer had the ability to expand buildings or change equipment to keep up with new dairy-farming requirements.
The farm later lost its standing as agricultural land for land-assessment purposes, which meant heavy new taxes that had to be paid.
Even as Mr. Steves spent a lifetime pushing to preserve farmland and protect the ability of the province to produce its own food, he continued to run a beef-cattle operation on his family’s land. He said on Twitter that his Belted Galloway cows went to his son’s ranch earlier this week.
Mr. Steves still frets over the 19,000 hectares of farmland in B.C. that is instead being used for golf courses, megamansions and horse estates.
But he said he feels as though he has accomplished most of what he set out to do, including two projects he made progress on just this month: an estuarium at Garry Point Park and an effort to open up one of the sloughs at Terra Nova for spawning salmon.
Those were ideas that he had almost half a century ago, but other things got in the way.
“Some things take 50 years to get done,” he said.