In a sudden press release, I found it a tad disingenuous of Trustee Sheila Malcomson to insinuate that perhaps now that the 'larger' community is showing up at Trust's meetings, that some people felt 'unsafe'. “We did our best to accommodate the large group interested in the proposed bylaw, but after Wednesday night’s meeting we heard two things that changed our minds about re-opening the public hearing on Saturday. We heard that Saturdays in the summer are too busy for residents to attend meetings at short notice. We were also dismayed to hear after the meeting at ArtSpring that some people felt unsafe". I know I felt 'unwanted' and intimidated with the strong police presence they had there.
True enough the majority of the crowd was not on-side with a bylaw that stretched one's nightmare imagination so easily by deleting a simple qualifying couple of words... 'fish bearing' - once they removed that important qualifier from the original Provincial RAR waterways legislation, all bets were off and suddenly they had a 'custom' bylaw regulating ditches as streambeds, bogs and swamps and rivulets and runoff from peoples' roofs and home gardens all catagorized as 'protected watersheds' - totally bogus and absolutely over the top, another 'classic' Islands Trust attempt to expand its "NO land-use planning mandate". Geesh!
But one always likes to hear officials say "cancelled until further notice" when it comes to incessant regulation creation and maybe now residents can get on with enjoying their summer and be refreshed and alert to voting this bunch out in the fall!
I do not remember a group of Trustees who have agitated our community as much as this LTC, from their arrogant approach to our needing their permission for free inter-island dialogue with other Trustees, to admonishing video recording of speakers at publicly funded meetings, to their suspicious post-editing of minutes of meetings and their seeming disregard for public 'content' submitted. Even Trust Council seems perversly ignorant of acknowledging content in submissions in favour of merely counting them as yeas and neys over any given issue. It seems we are not actually heard or listened to, rather 'we the little people' are only counted as agreeing or disagreeing and if we disagree we are of course characterized as rabble-rousers.
Hopefully the over 100% higher pay increases they voted themselves on March 11th will bring on a vast hoard of unemployed islanders to apply for these Trust positions. Afterall, it is one of the few job openings left and it is certainly free for anyone to run for the position, one needs no particular credentials to be 'environmentally minded' as we all know. Maybe we will luck out and vote in some regular rural lifestyle candidates more interested in enabling our community rather than shutting it down. With only 13 inhabited islands in the Trust area and over 100 uninhabited islands why doesn't the Trust focus on those islands?!
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