Salt Spring Extremism at its worst!

I would not have imagined when I started the POSSE blog that we as a community would actually need a POSSE! One that would go after issues that were more than ideological extremism.

This latest fiasco regarding our elected officals appearing to fund their own organizations without declaring their conflict of interest in being members of those same organizations is most egregious. It takes the debate out of the ideological and philosophical disagreements we may have into a terribly legal and ethical divergence. We have never really had to challenge or debate our elected officials on an ethical issue quite as blatantly as what appears to have transpired.

It is a painful community process for a lot of us who at least respected our differences without tending to question the trust we put in our elected representatives' legal and ethical positions or their moral character. We did afterall have a basic trust that our officials were working within legal paramters on our behalf, even if they were a little camera-shy.

Our fundamental trust may unfortunately have been broken with recent revelations. We can either confront the ramifications of not demanding the highest standards for our political representatives or we can take their position, and sweep it under the rug as just an innocent, good samaritan effort made to fund societies with legitimate and beneficial agendas.

I don't think we have the liberty of that kind of choice here. It is a very slippery slope to set any kind of precedent that would endorse such a blatant, conflict of interest modus operendi to prevail. It is just too fraught with all manner of possible consequences for abuse and gaming the system which is why the laws for politicians and organizations are there in the first place.

The problem with just looking at the good works of the Trustees' societies and disregarding the conflict of interest in their decision to self-fund them with tax dollars is that pet projects are often just that, pet projects. And in the case of something still controversial like a "Climate Action Council" one has to acknowledge that some of us simply reject the politically correct notion that the "debate is over" regarding who or what changes the climate on the planet Earth. Notwithstanding, the Federal and Provincial governments already fund 'climate change' research from our taxes which means the Trustees are yet again demonstrating their redundancy in budgeting funds for areas quite outside their land planning mandate.

The bottom line is 'good works' and claiming to have no idea the community had any objections to 'undeclared conflict of interest' voting procedures is more than naive, hardly appears innocent, and when it comes to spending our money, irresponsible to deny the accusation and force expensive legal action.

Any Trustee worthy of the name would have immediately apologised and acknowledged at least the perception of a conflict of interest. They should have rescinded the grants, possibly resigned from the Trust and/or the societies in question and then maybe had the societies re-apply for funding after they were out of office.

The events as depicted, taint both the Island Trust and the societies they helped to found.