Predators Take Aim at the Weakest

With all the predatory skill of vultures, the Islands Trust is poised to attack and destroy one of the few low-income housing developments Salt Spring Island has managed to preserve through years of evolving Trust bureaucracy.

I have to ask, what has gotten into the Trustees that they would suggest that peoples’ access to affordable accommodations have become some kind of a game that can be played against an Islands Trust with a budget of over 3.5 million dollars a year?

David Essig and our local Trustees ought to realize that the cost and futile pursuit of changing Islands Trust policy has been expensive enough for Salt Springers let alone those who can ill-afford to challenge this massive document we have come to know as the great Community Plan.

Furthermore the heart of Salt Spring’s grassroots culture, still happily alive and well in the south end, has always allowed for and accommodated unconventional lifestyles that often deviate from typical suburban models. To watch the predatory nature of the Islands Trust in its first strike of aggression under the new Community Plan towards the weakest of advesaries, vindicates much of what I warned against when I ran for the Islands Trust.

It appears clear now that the current elected Trustees, staging a highly propagandized election, used Bullock Lake to redirect peoples’ attention away from the main issue which was the power the Community Plan was to give the Trust to do the kinds of things we are now seeing coming to pass.

Finally, islanders should not make the mistake of letting the Islands Trust co-ordinate our incorporation study unless it is prepared to consider its own redundancy should incorporation proceed. More layers of taxation and regulation is not what we should be dreaming up for ourselves and playing the ‘game’ only furthers its development and influence in on our lives. Good luck to the Y-Camp, it will be a tough battle.

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