Crown lands mismanaged, says auditor general in stinging report — and minister agrees

Newfoundland and Labrador's auditor general calls the provincial government's administration of Crown lands weak, citing numerous systemic issues that haven't changed in decades.

"After completing this audit, I'm left with serious concerns about the government's ability to effectively manage this program," Auditor General Denise Hanrahan told reporters on Tuesday.

The investigation into the management of provincial Crown lands — which make up almost 36 million hectares or roughly 88 per cent of the province — covers a period between April 2020 to December 2023. The audit looked specifically into how the Department of Fisheries, Forestry, and Agriculture managed the program, specifically through tracking land, following legislation, as well as monitoring, enforcing and oversight.

Hanrahan said she found numerous inefficiencies.

The department's policies were "severely outdated," she said, with the average age of policy documents being 20 years old.

The government doesn't have a unified land title system or a mandatory registration system, so the audit faced incomplete land inventory and missing records, she said. As many as 17,000 titles were missing, with 2,000 of them lost in the Great Fire of 1892 and never recovered.

Application times greatly exceeded the department's 90-business day processing time. Hanrahan says 62 per cent of the cases they sampled did not meet that time, and the average process time where the government had control was as long as 172 business days. The longest case was over two years.

There is no formal policy or guidelines to manage complaints from the public, Hanrahan says. Two out of the three complaints in the audit sample had no evidence of any action taken by the government for resolution. Similar audits were done on the department in 2021, 2015 and 2009, with the same issues still in place.

"I wasn't expecting to find recommendations that we thought were fully implemented from 2009," she said.

Hanrahan also noted a lack of oversight for land appraisals and unauthorized approvals. She says the weakness of the administrative system could have been fertile ground for cases of fraud and conflicts of interest in decision making. However, she stressed the audit didn't find any evidence of such incidents.

"My concern is I don't know what I don't know," she said. "We were unable to identify records or processes or procedures in such a way to be able to state that there was appropriate controls on processes."

Minister in charge response 

CBC News asked Hanrahan if the audit found that the department was doing the job it was mandated to do.

"Sadly, no," she said.

In response to the audit, Fisheries, Forestry, and Agriculture Minister Gerry Byrne said Hanrahan was right.

"Everything that's in this auditor general report, I'm very grateful for," he told CBC News.

He said he'll announce "very bold, very progressive" reforms to the management of Crown lands that will be largely in favour of applicants.

One change, for example, is in regard to application processing time, which tends to take longer when applications need to be referred between government departments.

Byrne says his department will put in place a time limit of five weeks for the government to reply to applicants, otherwise the application will be deemed accepted.

Regarding the department's decades-long issues, Byrne says it isn't the fault of Crown lands officers or the staff. 

"They needed leadership, and I'm providing that leadership," he said.

Issues uncovered are only "the tip of the iceberg," says lawyer

Greg French, a real estate agent in Clarenville, says his initial reaction to the audit was positive and it puts to paper the issues he and other legal professionals have seen on the ground for many years.

He says the biggest problem he sees is a lack of organization of records, enforcement and consolidations of various government departments.

He calls the minister courageous for trying to make changes in the department, but ultimately thinks the changes are not enough to uproot issues that have been growing for decades.

"The problems identified here are really the tip of the iceberg," he said.

"We have policies that are 40 years old and are completely out of touch with the reality of the situation on the ground."

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