VANCOUVER—For at least 15 years, British Columbia apple farmer Jill Swartz has owned an orchard of about 100 trees protected under the province’s Agricultural Land Reserve. A new bill would make it harder for her to remove that protection to add buildings or sell to a developer, if she so desired.

While some landowners might find it inconvenient, Swartz said the bill is not, as a politician suggested this week, analogous to the Holocaust.

“People have said it’s offensive but quite honestly it goes beyond offensive,” said the 67-year-old Saanich resident, who is Jewish. “It goes into something that’s so sickening to the bone.”

The B.C. Legislature grew heated on Thursday, which was Yom Hashoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day. The province’s former deputy premier, Rich Coleman, called it outrageous that a piece of NDP legislation would strip landowners of their rights “particularly on a day like today. On a day like today when we witnessed people whose rights were taken apart and away from them in the 1940s.”

Coleman, a longtime Langley East MLA in the fertile Fraser Valley, apologized for his remarks shortly afterward.

“Because of the emotion of today, I drew an analogy that was insensitive. I apologize to anyone who took offence,” Coleman wrote on Twitter at around 6:30 p.m. Thursday.

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Two hours later, BC Liberal opposition leader Andrew Wilkinson said on Facebook that “drawing parallels between discriminatory legislation and the Holocaust is absolutely inappropriate and on behalf of the BC Liberal caucus we reject any comparisons.”

But Swartz said Friday she doesn’t buy the apology, saying Coleman’s remark triggers long-standing feelings of mistrust.

“It’s not just in the past. For me being Jewish, we’re all being re-triggered. There’s such hatred now; there were just two more killings in synagogues,” she said.

Jewish advocacy organization B’nai Brith released a report last week showing incidents of anti-Semitism more than doubled to 374 last year, up from 165 in 2017. The report singled out NDP Premier John Horgan for giving and then revoking a citizenship award for an imam who had expressed antisemitic views.

B.C.’s municipal affairs minister Selina Robinson also expressed outrage.

“On Yom Hashoah … Rich Coleman compared legislation meant to protect farmland with the murder of Jews,” Minister Selina Robinson said. “I have no words.”

Legislators had been debating the second reading of the NDP government’s bill, which Coleman said would take away farmers’ rights “as persons” altogether. He said Thursday afternoon he had “never seen a more bigoted piece of legislation come before this House.”

The ALR, which was created to protect food producers from development or real-estate speculation, has come under pressure, as some landowners want to remove the protected status of their land for housing or other commercial redevelopment. Critics say the ALR rules are too inflexible to make farming economically feasible and can cause hardship for families.

Currently, landowners can file a request to the province to remove their land from its protected ALR status. If passed, the NDP bill would require property owners to apply to their local municipality to make the request on their behalf — giving municipalities an effective veto. The proposal has angered some farmers and rural MLAs such as Coleman, whose Langley East riding holds some of B.C.’s most fertile farmland.

Thursday wasn’t the first time a BC Liberal compared the farmland bill to historic abuses.

On April 10, former finance minister Michael de Jong said the legislation was akin to Canada sending passengers aboard the Komagata Maru back to India in 1914, some to their deaths. He said the farm bill was a type of “camouflaged discrimination,” similar to what Indigenous Peoples have suffered, and also compared it to denying women the right to vote.

Neither De Jong nor his party apologized for those remarks.

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Speaking to the Star from her five-acre property on Vancouver Island, orchardist Swartz said she hasn’t accepted the apologies from Coleman or the BC Liberals.

“The apology is just bullsh-t, quite honestly,” Swartz said. “How can you trust somebody who on that day, Yom Hashoah, was so insensitive?

“It’s OK to have disagreements about land policy, but it’s not a human-rights issue; it’s about preserving our farmland from speculation. Who doesn’t understand why comparing that to the Holocaust is repulsive?”

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