The Trust is Clamming up on Booth Canal - Alcyonenews

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Islands Trust

Posted July 26, 2019

The Trust is Clamming up on Booth Canal

On December 14, 2018, and July 12 , 2019 I wrote about the lurking “final solution” to Booth Canal. I have to write again because the issue has become a matter of life or death for Booth Canal and is crucial to preventing the industrialization of a mile and half of prime SaltSpring shoreline adjacent to and outside of the Canal, comprising 33 Acres of beach area. The Trust, if true to its mandate, should have reacted instinctively to resolutely halt this attack on what we love and cherish and which the Trust exists to protect and preserve for us.

But the watchdogs are asleep, or pretend to be. That is on the surface because the Trust is hyperactive behind the scenes, labouring to facilitate this destruction by causing surreptitiously a fait accompli that we would have to grin and lump it. This, if it succeeds, would allow the Trust to do something that flies in the face of why the Trust exists. We need impress upon the Trust that the government is ours, we are the masters and they are the servants.

It falls upon us to foil the objective they seek by doing a Trojan Horse. The silence of the Trust and the smokesreening of their doings manifests their determination to subvert the public will. They move underground to avert raising the public ire by means other than doing the right thing. They hide like submarines in their pursuit of a disaster fait accompli, seeking to make it happen all of sudden when least expected. But we, the people, are not the “enemy” and the Trust needs to understand that it exists to serve us, and its mission is to protect rather than destroy what we have and enjoy.

I emailed copies of the July 12 column, kind of an open letter plea, to: Colonial Overseer Peter Luckham and to our elected representatives, Peter Grove, Laura Patrick, Gary Holman, Adam Olsen and Elizabeth May, covering the whole stack of governments we carry on our shoulders.

Peter Grove responded, informing me that he forwarded my message “to staff, for the record” . I followed it up, gingerly asking: “ Am I correct interpreting your message to mean that you are instructing staff to enter, (if it is not already) in the Agenda of the next LTC, the issue of Booth Canal?” Grove came back as follows: “It will form a part of the LTC package as part of correspondence for the public record”. This lacks clarity but I interpreted it’ the optimist that I am, to mean that Booth Canal will be on the agenda of the July 23 SSI LTC Meeting.

I should have been less enthusiastic except that hope springs eternal. I had been forewarned: In 2012, then commander of the SSI Trust troops Leah Hartley, was training Grove and Grams, then puppy- Trustees, and taught them to utter “Received” on any Correspondence, so that “they need never do anything about it.” She did that at an open LTC meeting – neither of the puppies growled.

Well, in this instance they would not risk uttering “Received”, they could not fight in the open, and instead of doing the right thing they chose to move underground. Intransigent minds prevailed and Booth Canal appears nowhere in the July 23 SSI agenda and, of course, it was gone AWOL from the Agenda Package. There is no mention therein of Booth Canal, there is not even a whisper about it.

That is what is happening, and this, we, the people must halt. We need to push the Trust to act, we need to force them to surface from their bunker, to come out and do what they must do to fulfil their mandate which compels them to protect and preserve.

I am writing now to jolt them out of their belief that they can fool the people, or at least enough of the people, that nothing untoward is happening, that the governance they provide is that which we deserve. They seem to hold the misconception, that many of us are inept or disinterested enough to live with misconceptions such as that the Trust offers “banking services” (“Be the Change” survey, commissioned by the Trust).

In a democracy, the Demos, us the populace, is the boss and if they do not like it, they better take a pensive stroll on the harbour boardwalk. So that while they are out of the way doing that, we rise up to protect and preserve with our hands our societal home so that we may avert what the Trust is trying to surreptitiously usher into our midst.

I am calling for an immediate SSI LTC Resolution declaring that the Trust would not rezone any intertidal foreshore for Aquaculture; And, if this does not stop the attack, let the Trust true to its calling, lead us to “fight on the beaches”. Heeding the words of the Brit with the big cigar. It is not that difficult really, all the Trust has to do is call for public input on the Canal to culminate in a public hearing to happen on a sunny day, on the Beach, not on a dark and stormy night in the Fritz cinema, no more of that, please.

Tom V.