Pleading Stupidity to Hide Malice - Alcyonenews

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Islands Trust

Posted February 24, 2021

Pleading Stupidity to Hide Malice

At the December 2020 Trust Council meeting, a group of 8 “rebel” Trustees swung a decision to review the Trust and readily got $75,000 to do that. This is seriously suspect because the Trust has spared neither effort nor public money to suppress the “Consensus” to Change made subsequent to the 2017 SSI referendum on urbanization. But the Consensus would not die and this “Review” is suspected of being crafted to be a “final solution”, to put the lid on the Consensus. This prompted me to address the SSI “LTC3" (Luckham, Patrick and Grove) on January 5, 2021 as follows:

“The way things are now, a majority of Trustees adroitly did what you three individually, and as the SSI LTC, ought to have fiercely pursued to realization, i.e., the implementation of the post 2017 Consensus to Change the governance meted out by the Trust ...

Please hurry up: Retain a “trust” firm (e.g. Canada Trust) or, preferably, a Chartered Accountant from within the Trust Republic to:

Proclaim the opening of an ad hoc “Ideas Bank” to receive, showcase and facilitate debate and development of ideas and information pertaining to implementation of the Consensus to Change the Trust.

This should specifically invite the Trust and Trustistas to make and debate submissions by others on equal terms with “ordinary” citizens.

Having myself originated and studied the Ideas Bank concept, I hereby offer to advise the “contractor-firm” and do it pro bono. ...”

Grove and Luckham fell silent. Patrick responded, remarking:

“You [Varzeliotis] do bring up an interesting question, how can Salt Spring, which was neither consulted on the development of the terms of reference nor represented on the steering committee, provide input to the review?

I have copied staff so that we can discuss this further.”

Patrick does not inform how the SSI Trustees, representing 40 % of the Republic’s populace, missed that point and why they did not prevent the Council making such a clearly bad decision, ostensibly swayed by the “8 rebels”, at the December meeting. Publically the LTC trio faked objection to the “8 rebels” and immediately retracted in their “neutrality” vis a vis the woes of SSI, to let them do that to the people of SSI.

On January 18, 2021 the “8 Rebels” became the “Governance & Management Committee”, “GMC”. The rebels’ boss Lee Middleton having publically expressed regrets for his group “blindly screwing SaltSpring”, took the Chair of the GMC and welcomed into the fold Peter Luckham who “defected” from Reason to partake in the suppression of the Consensus. Now the GMC carry on “blindly screwing SaltSpring”.

My “Correspondence”, came up at the January 19 SSI LTC meeting. The LTC three, without discussion, without evaluation, bare of recommendations or explanations, tossed the “Correspondence” into the lap of the GMC. It landed on the February 16 GMC meeting Agenda, near the bottom, ready situated to be “done in, after the ‘attending’ members of the Publicwill have gone out”.

When its time came, Middleton mumbled about the “Correspondence”, uttering not a single word on what it was about, saying nothing about it being a proposed answer to the question the GMC was instituted to investigate, nothing of that sort. Instead, Middleton remarked that the “Correspondence” had arrived “without instructions” on what to do with it and declared his personal ineptitude to figure that out. Then, the GMC discovered that they too, collectively could not understand what the Ideas Bank is, what “let the people speak”, means. They all, including Luckham, joined Middleton in-perplexity about the “Correspondence”. How magnificent a tableau this sad assembly was.

The GMC had spent one hour and 18 minutes bickering, trying to come up with questions (Terms of Reference) for the consultant that would result in the “right Change” to the Trust. But it took them a mere 2 minutes, yes “two” minutes to process that “piece of correspondence”. Middleton adroitly led the GMC to swiftly navigate clear of the rocks and the hard place, in this instance the “Ideas Bank” and “Tom Varzeliotis”. Ok, yes indeed, they did worse than that really – they sung “glory to the messenger” to express their gratitude to the Trust’s mighty ExCom for bouncing to GMC the hot-potato item of Correspondence Patrick and the others of the SSI LTC had thrown to the ExCom. It is like erecting a statue for a pharmacist who sell Penicillin instead of one for Dr. Fleming who invented it ...

Evidently, the whole thing was “orchestrated” and turned out to yield all one could expect from this, to wit, something stupid.

When “leaders” would rather pretend to be stupid rather than doing things that would let them stand proud, it is time to take notice.