August 20, 2010

The Comox Valley Regional District is planning our future through the Regional Growth Strategy. A key element in the planning was the public meeting held on August 10, 2010. But that meeting was such a disaster—for reasons obvious to those who attended and those reading about it in the media—that it raises a question.

If the CVRD was unable to anticipate needs and plan a simple public meeting, how can we trust them to plan our future for the next 20 years?

It’s time to take back our future.

To plan our future we need a dialogue—an open, back and forth discussion between ourselves and our elected representatives. We want to talk directly to them—not to consultants—and tell them our needs. We want to hear from them: what they are planning to do, how are they planning to do it, and what the factors are they have to weigh in making their decisions.

We are not going to get this kind of back and forth dialogue with the current process. The CVRD has locked itself in a legal cocoon. It can’t see or hear the complex issues it is dealing with. It can’t get the information it needs from three minute presentation. It can’t get the ongoing discussion it needs when board members sequester themselves and are forbidden to discuss anything about the issues after the public meeting is over. The current process is undemocratic. It is not transparent and there is no accountability.

It is not transparent because we don’t know how decisions are getting made. Case in point: the uproar over the Settlement Expansion Areas (aka Municipal Expansion Areas) at the public meeting. Where did the SEA concept come from?

It didn’t come from the community meetings with the consultants. At those meetings there were not a whole lot of people who wanted to see their rural areas turned into urban areas. It didn’t come from a statistical analysis in the report demonstrating that the current municipal areas were beyond their capacity. This was one of the report’s major failures. It came from somewhere else. There was an elephant in the room that was not named—but we all knew it was there.

In detective stories one of the rules of thumb for solving mysteries is to “follow the money.” If we do that for the RGS we can conclude it probably came from landowners and developers who wish to develop the land in the SEAs. But we don’t know this because of the lack of transparency.

Land owners and developers have the right, like everyone else, to approach the CVRD board with their suggestions. But unlike public meetings where we the public can listen to comments and read presentations submitted to the board, we often don’t know what developers have said to members of the board. Those meetings, for the most part, seem to be off the record—cloaked perhaps in some kind of legal fiction related to proprietary interest. And that is where accountability comes in.

Accountability means being answerable. What the board has to do is say to the public “Here is what we are hearing from landowners and developers. Give us your comments.”

Is there a solution to all of this? Yes there is. But we have to get outside the legal process.

We can create a conference, organized by a number of groups in the community that will take place over part of a weekend, say in October. (The provincial time limits be damned. This is our future.)

We can invite everyone to come, comment on the RGS strategy and have their say: KFN , small business, big business, developers, land owners, labour, farmers, foresters, environmentalist, non –profit groups, home owners, government agencies, etc. It will not be an official CVRD meeting so board members can enter into a dialogue with participants. If that’s “illegal” they can at least come as observers. After the meeting the organizing groups will prepare a report for all participants and send it to the CVRD.

This is not an extraordinary suggestion. Conferences such as the one we are proposing are happening for this very purpose all around the world.

We have a window of opportunity. Let’s take this chance to take back our future and set it on course that will allow for sustainable development without destroying our lifestyles in this valley that means so much to us.


Yours truly,



Mike Bell, Chairperson
Sierra Club Comox Valley
250-890-3671









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