A commentary by a long-time Salt Spring resident and former flutist with the Tafelmusik Orchestra.
Because interpretation is vulnerable to both circumstance and manipulation, it’s possible for politicians to pretend that legal definitions made more than a generation ago actually mean something other than their original intent.
Here’s an example of particular relevance to Gulf Islanders, now that the Islands Trust has — behind closed doors and thus arguably against legal protocol — redefined its mandate.
The original Trust Object states that the object of the Trust is “to preserve and protect the Trust area and its unique amenities and environment for the benefit of the residents of the Trust area and of British Columbia generally.”
In an exercise in spectacular sophistry, our trustees, in a meeting last September, seized upon the phrase “unique amenities and environment” and pronounced it ambiguous.
There’s nothing ambiguous here. But reinterpreting these words will facilitate Trust efforts to introduce policy changes that do not fulfil its legal obligation to make environmental protection the top priority.
The dictionary, a universally accepted resource for grasping what words mean, defines an amenity as something that is amenable, or pleasant. If an amenity is unique, you’re only going to find it in one place.
I think we can assume that the words “unique amenity” were chosen with great care by those who first drafted the Islands Trust object, and that they expected them to be taken in the context of the environment — a word that automatically referred to the natural environment in the 1970s.
The Trust now intends to include among the Islands’ unique amenities “housing, livelihoods, infrastructure and tourism.” Their ubiquity is not, in the Trust’s opinion, a barrier to defining them as unique, let alone uniquely pleasurable.
To be sure, many things are uniquely pleasurable in the Gulf Islands, but infrastructure is not among them.
Spotting an orca pod in a glittering sea from the deck of a ferry might be one example, as would the sight of bald eagles wheeling over massive old firs along the coast or a midden strewn with shells and the knowledge that this once-pristine land was home to First Nations people for thousands of years.
Other amenities are now rare: oystercatchers teaching their young to crack open the shells, or Garry oak meadows full of camas lilies in spring.
But in considering the sum of the Gulf Islands’ amenities, we can say that, taken together, they comprise pleasures that cannot be found elsewhere.
Tourists come to Salt Spring to experience the island’s “unique amenities.” They, themselves, are not unique. Salt Spring has a housing shortage — a worldwide problem, partly a result of tourism — that is certainly not unique. But our natural environment is unique — unique and increasingly fragile.
A functioning legal system is founded on premises that don’t change to suit the personal priorities of elected representatives, including those who push development agendas disguised as “housing solutions.”
To the dismay of islanders who supported Salt Spring’s definitive rejection of incorporation in a recent referendum, our Trust is acting more like a municipal government than a Trust (another word trustees might look up).
Changing the mandate undermines the obligation the trustees vowed to uphold when elected, rather like a doctor rewriting his job description to avoid providing care.
Is it any wonder that many of us feel abandoned by the provincial government, even though the Trust, and the preserve-and-protect mandate, was the inspired, prescient brainchild of its own party?
The province’s wilful absence from the discussion has contributed to false expectations, held by many islanders, that development on the islands can proceed as it does anywhere else.
It’s time for the minister to remind the Trust unequivocally that the original mandate — which is provincial legislation, after all — is the mandate.
The province could then provide the support that would allow the Trust to enforce it properly. Boost funding to attract planners experienced in land use issues in protected areas.
Provide money for bylaw enforcement so the islands can shut down the vacation rentals that have contributed to the housing crisis. Pour money into affordable social housing initiatives instead of fuelling the construction of suites and cottages — not a viable solution in a rural area with severe water shortages — and drop the illusion of a beneficent private sector that’s happy to rent below market rates to workers.
Above all, listen to those who have been calling the Trust to task for years for allowing the ecosystem collapse we now see on all the islands. We don’t need a new mandate. We need to respect the one we have.
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