Like Moths to the Flame

There are a lot of ideas floating around out there about strategies for changing the composition of the Islands Trust with fresh and thoughtful new candidates this fall. I liked the TAG team's book idea that might be used to explain the Islands Trust in layman's terms to the general voting public. If you are part of the non-voting majority who are not 'into' politics, believe me, you would hardly know the role of the CRD, who your MLA is, your MP or what Trustee goes with which bureaucracy, so maybe at least an in-the-mailbox pamphlet of some kind might not be a bad idea.

The hierarchy of governance and the idea that Salt Spring is different and creative enough to come up with something unique is now seen as an almost impossible task without legislative changes at the Provincial level. Despite what former Bowen Island mayor Lisa Barret floated to us during our last incorporation study, the Province's ministers are pretty adament that if we want local change we have to work within the existing Trust/CRD structure.

So what is the best approach? Personally I think ALL ideas should remain on the table since we are now a multi-tasking society. We can accomplish in shorter order any number of things through the existing technological network and in that we are indeed unified.

As the panorama of blogs increase exponetially it is clear that self-expression and networking presents us with the challenging concept that 'disunity can be a force that unifies us', Expressing and sharing what we are thinking and feeling individually benefits an increasing community awareness that reflects on itself. This will result in change for the better simply due to a broader sampling and exposure to diverse opinions.

Afterall, Look at recent events on the island of Iceland!

Oddly enough our 'unified disunity' has inadvertently caused a rethink of important changes to the RAR bylaw 449. It has also observably changed the way our Trustees treat 'we' the rest of the community and exposed deficiencies in a Trust mandate that cannot represent all our needs and services requirements. Neverthless we should still make every attempt to elect candidates who will be onboard with a better balance of environmental, economic and social priorities.

In our particularly rural perspective, from the extreme notion that "you can just get offa ma property' to the more expensive thrust of recent court challenges, we have made it clear that we are not amused by what is happening to our property rights!

Across the spectrum of our intellectual understanding of what we think is needed in governance, sadly bureaucracies epitomize the eternal fight with 'city hall'. I still don't really buy that incorporation would change this dynamic or the cost but a broader mandate of representation is critical at this point.

So be careful all you moths who might choose to fly close to the flame of power, assimulation seems the better part of valour once you are in the driver's seat as an elected representative. The fickle public who thought you were so great to vote in, inevitably will turn and toss you out with barely a thank you. See Obama Optimism 101.

That said I wish to thank our local Trustees for their public service and wish them well in their retirement this fall. I am sure they did the best they could under the circumstances of our broken governance structure, a structure that as yet has no mandate to speak for the economic and social problems we face in the future. No matter who we vote in, we cannot give our Trust representatives powers they don't have, they already presume erroneously to expand their mandate. It's a mandate that needs legislative updating or we need to become a municipality.