Trust Censorship on the Upswing - Alcyonenews

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Islands Trust

Posted October 14, 2015

Trust Censorship on the Upswing

On May 21, 2015, Islands Trust Chairman General addressed the following letter to Tom Varzeliotis:

“Dear Dr. Varzeliotis:

Re: Correspondence and Delegation Submissions to the Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee

As I believe you are aware, on July 21, 2014, the Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee resolved:

That public submissions that are deemed not relevant to the jurisdiction of the Local Trust Committee pursuant to Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee Procedures Bylaw No. 391; or that are deemed defamatory, profane or otherwise inappropriate for general circulation pursuant to Trust Council Policy on handling Incoming LTC correspondence, Principle Number 3, will be received in the following manner:

a. Correspondence addressed to Local Trust Committee or to two or more Trustees will be referred to the Trustees and added to the agenda only at the request of a Trustee;

b. Requests for delegation will be referred to Trustees and only added to the agenda at the request of a Trustee; and

c. That this direction is to be pursued unless the submissions are otherwise dealt with by provincial legislation.

Since that time, you have submitted numerous pieces of correspondence and delegation requests for inclusion on agendas of Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee business meetings that contain content deemed defamatory or disrespectful to individuals, including staff, and that address topics not relevant to the land use planning jurisdiction of the Local Trust Committee.

Islands Trust staff have handled your submissions in accordance with the above resolution of the Local Trust Committee, the applicable bylaw and policies. This has been done by acknowledging receipt, advising that your submission has been forwarded to the Local Trust Committee for its review, and notifying you as to whether or not Trustees support your request for inclusion on their business meeting agenda. After our staff have notified you that Trustees did not support your request, we are aware that you have continued to seek a response from staff, and explanations as to why your submissions are not being included in agenda packages.

The Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee is concerned about the extensive amount of our finite staff time that is being spent dealing with your correspondence, even though it frequently addresses matters outside the jurisdiction of the Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee.

The Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee is also concerned about the impacts that your correspondence has on our staff, who we have a responsibility to protect from harassment. Finally we are concerned about the additional staff time spent managing the secondary impacts of your correspondence, all for no productive purpose related to our mandate and jurisdiction.

Please be advised that, in accordance with our concerns, the Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee has now decided to instruct staff in the Salt Spring planning team not to respond to your communications, unless a member of the Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee requests that it be added to our business meeting agenda. Further, we have decided that we will only consider your requests to appear before the Local Trust Committee (as a delegation or to speak during the Town Hall session at a business meeting) if your remarks are relevant to a matter on our agenda for that meeting. You are free to speak at formal public hearings, provided your remarks are related to the subject of the hearing.

As noted above, staff will continue to distribute your submissions to the Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee for their consideration, if you have not already done so. You should not, however, expect our staff to respond to your correspondence, unless a member of the Local Trust Committee asks to have your materials added to a meeting agenda.

We assure you that we carefully considered these decisions, and believe they are important to manage the limited staff time available for our business and to provide an appropriate working environment for our staff

If you wish to pursue the matter further, please contact the BC Ombudsperson Office.

Peter Luckham (signed)

Peter Luckham, Chair,

Salt Spring Islands Local Trust Committee

pc: Trustee Peter Grove Trustee George Grams

Stefan Cermak, Acting Regional Planning Manager"

This letter from Chairman Luckman, was conveyed privately via Canada post to Tom Varzeliotis. The subject matter had not been discussed publicly by the SSI LTC as it ought to have been. And, moreover, Lucham’s letter was not in the maeeting Agenda as it ought to be.

Tom Vaarzelioits sought to air the issue through a delegation to the SSI LTC. The Trust censored the delegation and then disinformed society, once more, by unabashedly stating:

“[Agenda Item] 14. Delegations: – None.”

Read the censored and “None” reported Delegation following:

A DELEGATION

for presentation to the SSI LTC at its meeting

on July 9, 2015

by A. N. T. Varzeliotis

=== o ===

Trust Censorship on the Upswing

On May 27, 2015 I received a letter from Mr. Peter Luckham, Chairman General of the Trust; it is dated May 21; it is printed on Salt Spring Island SSI stationary but mailed on a Victoria Trust headquarters envelope; these manifesting a concerted collective effort by the author’s handlers. He states the subject matter of his letter as being:

Re: Correspondence and Delegation Submissions to the Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee.

The real purpose of his letter is to escalate the censorship program the Trust has launched and operated virtually seamlessly since mid 2013; to hide arbitrary conduct; to discriminate against me; and to prevent or subdue public debate on the fledgling consideration of SSI Governance, to the extend they may.

In recent years the Trust has been fighting back demands for re-evaluation of its mandate, indeed of its raison d’ être, and has decided to proceed by covering up its conduct rather than by mending its ways. The recent outrages appears being part of a desperate effort to cover up facts that would drive the people to abandon the Trust.

The increment of the censorship escalation advanced by Chairman Luckham is:

1. “The Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee has now decided to instruct staff in the Salt Spring planning team not to respond to your [Varzeliotis ] communications, unless a member of the Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee requests that it be added to our business meeting agenda.”

2. “Further, we have decided that we will only consider your requests to appear before the Local Trust Committee (as a delegation or to speak during the Town Hall session at a business meeting) if your remarks are relevant to a matter on our agenda for that meeting.”

3. “You are free to speak at formal public hearings, provided your remarks are related to the subject of the hearing.”

Ya Vol Herr Kommandant!

Having saluted the Kommandant, I will defer analyzing his commands until after a brief look at the evolution of the Censorship apparatus of the Trust.

At the July 25, 2013 LTC meeting, RPM Leah Hartley tabled her “Report on Booth inlet” (sic) ; at the August 22, 2013 LTC meeting I submitted a review of that Hartley Report, under the title: “Groyne-o-Rrhea Non-Scientifica – the Hartley Report on Booth Canal” ; (Groyne-o-Rhea = flow about a groyne, in this instance the groyne that is choking Booth Canal to its death); Hartley and Trustee Peter Grove got the LTC to censor my Review. Then Chair Sheila Malcolmson sought to justify the Censorship as follows:

“Due to the Islands Trust’s obligation to ensure a respectful workplace for its employees, the Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee will not accept any further delegations or correspondence at its meetings that are slanderous to staff and regrets that such material has been published with the agenda. The Trust Committee is also requesting staff not to publish documents that are defamatory or harassing and to exclude them from the agenda in future.” (emphasis added)

The Chair’s pronouncements, as quoted above, appeared in the approved meeting Minutes but their sejour there proved short. After I pointed out the malice and, likely having received legal advice that she could face defamation charges, the Trust deployed it’s “document plumbers” to remove it, surreptitiously, of course, from the Minutes and this they did. Malcolmson did not apologize, nor did she withdraw her defamatory utterances, the elves erased the record of her complicity in the censorship sham and that was all.

At the August 22 LTC meeting I responded to Malcolmson. I cried out loudly against that aberration from propriety and made the LTC visibly uncomfortable, but they remained unwilling to consider the issues. To contain further public exposure, Trustee Grove suggested a private meeting with me, ostensibly to resolve the issues; the meeting materialized on August 26, 2013, at the windowless boardroom of the SSI Trust office by the Hydro Yard; Grove and Hartley lashed out at me, seeking to whip me into the official Trust line of truth; I kept asking simple questions such as “Why is the published Hartley Report immune to review?” and “since you deem “Groyne-o-Rrhea” to be pornographia why did you not black out the single occurrence of the word and leave the Review of the Hartley Report un-censored?”; eventually Trustee Grove became seized with rage and exploded, asking Hartley whether “there is anything we can do to stop people like Dr. Varzeliotis from asking such questions?”

Hartley mumbled something or other about it being difficult; they then showed me the door and continued the meeting, exploring ways and means to silence their critics, as conclusively evidenced by what they did next. The way they proceeded about it is ugly, and the three “Principles” that resulted from the censorship project and on which Luckham based the new escalation of censorship are equally ugly.

I felt I owed to society to make public my aide memoir notes of that August 26 meeting with Grove and Hartley. I submitted the notes as a delegation under the title “In Rage-o-Rrhea Veritas” for the October 3, 2013 LTC meeting. They censored that too, for it would spoil the churlish “legitimization” of censorship plan Grove and Hartley had surreptitiously channeled into the works by then.

Hartley created a boiler-plate type “Guilty as not Charged” verdict against me and anyone else who may irk someone of the Trust. Here it is, in her own words:

“The material that you submitted for inclusion in the October 3, 2013 LTC agenda package was considered to have slanderous (to staff), harassing or defamatory content, when viewed in its entirety.

In preparing the LTC agenda, staff are following the direction given to them by the Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee and are not able to enter into debate or respond to your questions.

If you are not satisfied with the way we have handled this matter, you may wish to contact the BC Ombudsperson to determine if it can assist you.”

Note the gem in that tiara, the line: “when viewed in its entirety”. What this means is that the Trust was preparing to do arbitrary suppression of expression. This, her contribution to jurisprudence, would not have been necessary otherwise, because we have adequate laws to protect us against defamation, obscenities and more, all these laws being readily available to the Trust to address legitimate concerns. But they knew they needed illegitimate “principles” and bylaws to cope with their need to suppress legitimate presentations.

In effect Hartley is seeking the power to censor and to do it by the simple process of pronouncing the subject of their aversion censor-able “when viewed in its entirety” . This appears been inspired by the old method of booting your wife out the front door and making it official through shouting thrice “I divorce you!” Clever eh?

Then she states Staff “are not able to enter into debate or respond to your questions”. This manifests further to Trust posturing to do things that they know are indefensible, it is to cope with deeds that must be hidden because they are abhorrent . She asserts that Staff is not “able to explain” their suppression of citizens’ rights, but this, she insinuates, hardly matters, because upon becoming Staff, they are anointed with infallibility, thereby disposing of the normal obligation of “accountability” .

This goes deeper than that. In effect she seeks to dispose of the Trust statutory obligation to decide matters in front of the Public, which in turn means that the “justification” whatever it may be, is in the public domain, which in turn again, means there ought not be a need for the affected person to ask for explanations. Then that the censored person asks for explanation is due mainly to the Trust doing the censoring illegally, doing privately what they to do publically. In other words, if the Trust processes public input appropriately, the need for the Staff to answer questions should not arise.

But I was unwilling to let the Staff malign propriety and expect me to aid and abate them to hide it. Eventually it dawned on the Staff that they would not frustrate me and otherwise make me cut and run and that they could not get away with maligning democracy. On October 26, 2014 the Staff took the matter to the LTC, seeking to shelter themselves against the consequences from censoring public input to a local government and defaming citizens.

The Trust had been deploying serially the “Three Principles” Luckham refers to, since August 22, 2013, to “justify” censorship. In the interim, until October 26, 2014, it was the Staff who were operating the Trust censorship apparatus, all along washing their hands, Pontius Pilate fashion, by claiming it was the LTC who made them do it. But I kept the pressure on for propriety and they realized that they could not forever pretend ignorance of the law and the prevailing standards of decency.

The members of the LTC, thus aware of the seriousness of being implicated in that censorship operation, and being called to account for suppressing citizens’ rights; and being accordingly anxious to evade accountability themselves, worked with the Staff to make censorship automatic, to manufacture their Deus Ex Machina. They could malign democracy to suppress freedom of speech and then would rape it again to shelter themselves against being called to account.

This is not the first time they do it. When the Staff fearmongered these two Trustees in early 2012 about being liable for what a citizen may tell the LTC if the meetings are videographed, they sought to farm out the videotaping to Driftwood, thereby sheltering themselves, they thought, against being sued. Yes they did ...

It is thus that on July 24, 2014, the LTC went behind closed doors to figure out how they could evade accountability without ceasing and desisting practicing censorship. Their decision was to re-affirm what Malcolmson and Hartley had put on record, and which they, together with Trustee Grove, had written into bylaw #391, a.k.a the Censorship Bylaw. They overhauled the censorship apparatus and re-branded it “Three Principles”, boosted its power and made it “driver-less” like the Google Camera cars.

Flabbergasted by that LTC event, I emailed the Trust asking among other “How is the item to be cited, I. e., “Resolution SSI – xx – 14" , “ Bylaw xxx”, etc”. Hartley emailed me amusing answers to all three questions. To the ne above question she wrote:

“The Local Trust Committee has cited the matter as ‘LTC Correspondence and LTC Submissions’ .

You may wish to cite it as a matter of the SSI LTC in the Rice and Report Session at the Regular Meeting of July 24, 2014.”

It ain’t, a Resolution, it ain’t a Bylaw, it is a new animal in the Trust linguistic zoo. Try to search for it in the Trust Books or the Website!

Chairman Luckham, himself confused he appears, cited it as the “Three Principles”, which is as amusing as Hartley’s versions of the citation.

According to the Three Principles, censorship is the norm in the Trust Republic and happens all by itself. Nobody has to move a finger to have public presentations about Open Government, the state of Booth Canal, the RAR or anything else that may irk the the Trust. However, Trustees can win brownie points by demonstrating personal generosity, love for diversity and dedication to open government by occasionally allowing citizens to talk about issues of such immediacy as the effect of global warming on the penguin mating march.

Look at Luckham’s rendition of the Three Principles:

“As I believe you are aware, on July 21, [ actually it was the 24] 2014, the Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee resolved:

That public submissions that are deemed not relevant to the jurisdiction of the Local Trust Committee pursuant to Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee Procedures Bylaw No. 391; or that are deemed defamatory, profane or otherwise inappropriate for general circulation pursuant to Trust Council Policy on handling incoming LTC correspondence, Principle Number 3, will be received in the following manner:

1. Correspondence addressed to Local Trust Committee or to two or more Trustees will be referred to the Trustees and added to the agenda only at the request of a Trustee;

2. Requests for delegation will be referred to Trustees and only added to the agenda at the request of a Trustee; and

3. That this direction is to be pursued unless the submissions are otherwise dealt with by provincial legislation.”

In the preamble, Chairman Luckham pronounces my presentations as been, indisputably, somehow, by someone, deemed “irrelevant, defamatory, profane and/or otherwise inappropriate for general circulation”. Notably he does not claim to have made the determination himself, lest he invites questions, one presumes; he resorts to hearsay, as he asserts the “deeming” to have been done by person or persons unknown, blah blah blah ...

“Principles 1 and 2" could have been lifted from the book of any overt dictator, bar none! They decree that any submission to the Trust from the public, be it in the form of correspondence or delegation, is to be automatically waste-basket-ed by the Staff, without the Staff having to “deem” it “bad”.

That is to say, unless any member of the Triumvirate LTC wants it in the Agenda. This, due to closeness of the Trio and considerations of reciprocity, virtually locks out any submission that may call on any of the Trio to account for their conduct. It virtually excludes public input on matters of local governance and ensures a Trust stranglehold on the society’s agenda.

A most unprincipled thing they wrote into “principles” is that which absolves the members of the LTC from the elementary obligation of reasoning their conduct. They have cowardly decreed that they do not have to show their cards, they need not request censoring the subject of their aversion – all they have to do is keep silent on it, thereby signaling the Staff to “follow the Principles” and censor it. They are not making “principles” to ban the unreasonable, superfluous as they would be, they are, instead, posturing to censor the truth.

As for “Principles 3", its wording is surely is confusing, however it appears that it resolutely outlaws the Trusts Principles 1, and 2, due to offending, among other law, “provincial legislation” such as the Local Government Act.

There is another aspect of the “Three Principles” that is most worth noting: The members of the LTC are made aware of the “correspondence” or the “delegation” so that that they may ignore it, thereby signaling the Staff to censor it. This “absolves” the Staff from being called to account without really shifting to the Trustees, as does not prevent the message from reaching its addressees. Therefore, the censoring is just that, lying to the society that the message has not happened. It says that nobody “deemed” the document censor-able, it may had only slipped through the minds of the Trustees to support it, that is all. It is also affecting easy exclusion from the Trust’s Records of both the message and the censorship.

Let’s look again at Chairman Luckham’s epistle, where he directly accused me, again, that:

“Since that time, you have submitted numerous pieces of correspondence and delegation requests for inclusion on agendas of Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee business meetings that contain content deemed defamatory or disrespectful to individuals, including staff, and that address topics not relevant to the land use planning jurisdiction of the Local Trust Committee.”

Now, that is the heart of the problem: Chairman Luckham engages in overt calumny, once again. Recklessly, ex cathedra, he makes pronouncements against my person none of which “contain content” that is true.

Indeed, “Since that time, [I] have submitted” dozens of documents. Neither the Staff nor the LTC, nor Chairman Luckham himself, individually or collectively, have ever pointed to anything specific that may construed as inviting the filth the Trust has thrown at me.

Because Luckham was then rather new on the SSI LTC, I thought I would give him a chance to backtrack from his drive to defame me and prevent him from digging himself deeper in that hole. Specifically I challenged him to point to something, anything, in any of my “numerous pieces of correspondence and delegation requests, that would have better been left unsaid”, in the hope that he would realize what they have been made him do and backtrack. He got the missive but missed the meaning, thereby causing me to write the analysis at hand.

Luckham exclaims:

“After our staff have notified you that Trustees did not support your request, we are aware that you have continued to seek a response from staff, and explanations as to why your submissions are not being included in agenda packages.”

I will assign Winston, the man with the big cigar under the black bowler hat, to answer that one and here is what he says:

“Success is not final, defeat is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts.”

Yes, that the Trustees, immersed in conflict of interest as they were and unwilling to recuse themselves, did not support my submissions, is a poor reason for me to quit and a good one to fight. When the Trustees and the Staff unabashedly violate fundamental citizens’ rights, enshrined in the Constitution, such as the right to answer charges, they must not succeed, they must be held accountable.

As for the “Trustees not supporting my submissions” and the Prime Minister not supporting the submissions of the Opposition, I will say that is the essence of Parliamentary Democracy. If the Trustees would support the issues I raise, it would be a waste of my time in bringing it to the LTC. Plain and simple ... I am proud to say thing that must be said ... thing that must not be left un-said ..

The next inaccuracy in that letter I must address is that:

“The Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee is concerned about the extensive amount of our finite staff time that is being spent dealing with your correspondence, even though it frequently addresses matters outside the jurisdiction of the Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee.”

The previous Chair of the LTC tried to pull that one on me. I reasoned my right to bring to the SSI any matters that are the concern the Trust Council. She quickly came around to my position. I will state that I have been always within the Trust jurisdiction, and I will welcome any challenge to it.

As for Chairman Luckham’s assertions that the LTC is “concerned about the extensive amount of our finite staff time that is being spent dealing with your correspondence”, I will suggest as follows: Let the Chairman take a closer look at the amount of time Staff spent to cover up the boondoggle of spending $100 Grand on Kris Nichols to sell the RAR on us. Please do look at it and explain it to the people, for the people have a right to know, for you have no right to hide, for you have the obligation to keep the citizenry inform.

Tom Varzeliotis, citizen