An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
―
On March 22, 2021, the Temporary Use Permit that would allow the opening of Riley’s Cidery came again before Council.
Daniel Martin, Manager of Planning and Development, put a revised report and presentation before Council. Those were completed by him on March 15, 2021.
The process was that the TUP application went before Council (that was on February 22), there was a public notice period which allowed for the minimum time mandated for public response (10 days), the planner (Daniel) revised his report on the basis of that response, then the revised application went before Council at the first meeting after there had been time for those steps – ie March 22, 2021. Daniel’s report was written by March 10, and then edited again by him on the 15th, at which point it was published as a final summing up on the agenda for the meeting of March 22.
His report for March 22, 2021, set out that Council had four options available to them:
ALTERNATIVES
Council has the following options available:
- Issue TUP-2021-0017 with recommended amendments;
- Issue TUP-2021-0017, unamended;
- Refer TUP-2021-0017 to staff for further questions, and defer consideration of the TUP to a future Council Meeting; or
- Other options as determined by Council.
a TUP taster….
Council, unanimously, went with option 4, and on the back of that issued the TUP.
They, just as in the previous Council consideration of February 22, amended the TUP in the course of their discussion, and voted unanimously for that amended version. From the minutes:
The full minutes here .
The final TUP here.
There are a complex of issues associated with this. First, the specific and particular.
This entire process seemed to proceed in a way that it could only have produced one result. That result was removing any municipal obstacles to the speedy opening of Riley’s Cidery via a Temporary Use Permit.
Second. There are also more general issues, around the TUP process, its history, and its application by both Council and Municipal planning staff. There are real issues related to consistency and adequacy of process, and abuses, that deserve to be explored.
These are all topics I will consider in more detail in later posts.
February 22 to 6:29pm March 22, 2021: bureaucratic blocks
triggers….
This was not an easy time for me.
Given the events of February 22, 2021 related to Raj Hayre, I was at first really reluctant to be involved at all with this TUP. I was very, deeply, distressed by those events, trying to work out what to do, how to deal with just that issue. I was having difficulty sleeping, and already feeling very stressed.
Again, I’ve called what happened gaslighting and it was; the behaviour of Council and senior municipal staff on Feb 22 was a deliberate and public use of power to undermine and deny reality – mathematical fact. They by name attached that denial, that undermining, to me – to my reality – because I had communicated it. I will be returning to this whole topic in more detail later, where and when it chronologically and topically fits the project I’m attempting here.
I had no desire or inclination to engage with Council on anything new.
but …
My mother and other neighbours wanted my help in working through the information, and particularly the water piece. There was such a short timeframe before this TUP might pass, that I did involve myself. And this in a context where I was already in real distress because of the behaviour of the very staff and Council we had to deal with.
This process, and the implications, were very troubling to us and to numbers of our neighbours – many of us were people who had lived together in this neighbourhood for decades, and this all really came out of the blue. People I have long histories with, who I care about, were troubled, and we all increasingly felt very isolated and pressured.
It was an immensely, difficult stressful process for us all. I will look at the particulars of that in more detail in later posts.
where the devil hides..
One thing at the time, which was undoubtedly, and understandably, highly triggering for me, were the administrative mistakes, arbitrary deadlines and decisions, and lack of clarity, by municipal staff on the whole of this process as a public proceeding.
administration of this TUP
- Feb 22: TUP is introduced at Council meeting
- Mar 4: notice in Undercurrent newspaper
- Mar 10: Daniel Martin starts drafting report
- Mar 11: second notice in Undercurrent (third on Mar 18)
- Mar 15: Daniel Martin finalises report and presentation, does not consider any material submitted after noon for his conclusions
- Mar 15: Agenda for Mar 22 meeting published by municipality, including report and presentation
- Mar 19: Revised agenda published, with letters received after noon on Mar 15 included as individual items
- Mar 22: Final revised agenda, now including on-table items received up until 11am that day: Council meeting at 6:15pm, TUP issued 1 hour and 54 minutes later.
Neighbours and general public
Time to consider, respond, and have their response included in Planning report and consideration of decision:
- 20 days from Feb 22
- 10 days from first Undercurrent notice
- 6 days from receipt of mailout to likely impacted neighbours (first received Mar 8)
Municipal staff and Council members
Time with knowledge of this proposal before decision:
- 196 days + from Aug 2020 building permit approval for cidery
- 66 days +/- from Mid January 2021 start of application
- 36 days from receipt of agenda (including full cidery proposal) on Feb 15 (for Feb 22 meeting)
Rob Purdy and Christine Hardie
Time to consider and prepare:
1261 +/- days, 3 years quietly working on this until Oct 9 2020, then up to decision on Mar 22
maximum time for preparation and consideration
neighbours
Council
Rob Purdy and Christine Hardie
20 days
196 days
1261 days
that seems a bit unfair but surely…?
You might believe that, especially with those short timeframes, the process and the stages would be clearly, openly and consistently communicated by municipal staff in order to fully allow for meaningful public participation.
You would be very wrong.
There was no information published by BIM on the timeframes (the reporting schedule, deadlines for submissions to be considered, where and when they would appear) and little clarity for the public around how a TUP worked, and how public comment worked in a TUP. That has not substantively changed. Again, I will address that further later.
And in March 2021, in relation to this TUP, they made mistakes, and arbitrarily changed deadlines, with no advice or communication to the public.
another letter…
You will not be surprised to learn that we wrote to them – in this case because they had missed a letter from one of our neighbours, missed a letter from my mother as the owner of the business at our address, and not included the letter written by both my mother and me. It isn’t clear from their accounting in the letters linked below, but missing those out meant that none of those concerns had to be or were factored into the Planning Manager’s summation and considerations in writing up his revised report. Which report was the basis of his recommendations to Council.
We worked so hard, tried so hard, and submitted our letter at 12:56pm, having been told by the municipality that 1pm was the deadline, only to then be told, oh, we changed it to 12pm.
Two sets of directly impacted neighbours, with very serious and detailed concerns, had those concerns excluded by staff from consideration by the Manager of Planning and Development in his recommendations to Council on March 22.
Reasons given? “honest human error” and arbitrary deadline changes
The chain of correspondence is here.
not quite a source of pride…
If I achieve nothing else in my life, one small accomplishment with which I can comfort myself is that the webpage for Council meetings (https://bowenislandmunicipality.ca/our-government/council/council-meetings/) now has some information on deadlines for submissions and on where submitted items will appear (which agenda, for instance), confusing as it is still is.
None of that was there, or anywhere on any BIM webpage, when we wrote to Hope Dallas and Liam Edwards in March 2022 – they made those changes live to the website in the course of our exchange.
Collectively, as neighbours, 12 of us were concerned enough about the process and the handling of this TUP that we submitted a joint letter to Council – read it here. It received absolutely no attention or response from them.
There can’t be any more? surely…
Well – in the timetable above I record that the first received mailouts were around March 8. Our household didn’t get anything until March 12. When they were mailed, I don’t know. That is not recorded, not specified. It’s supposed to be early enough so that there is sufficient time on receipt to allow the minimum 10 day notice period before the date of the meeting when the subject will be considered.
But the recommendations staff put forward, supposedly informed by public comment, are complete a full week before the meeting date, so 10 days becomes … 3?
There is also the required posting of a physical sign on the property. Information about this is in fact the only information provided on the BIM website if you search for administrative information on the how’s, and why’s, of public notice.
And finally (really) – the actual notice provided by the Planning Department, in terms of the wording around apple orchards and the cider source:
I will look at the whole issue of apples and orchards, the “local” identity of the project, and amendments made, in later posts. Apples and where they came from was the subject of ad hoc amending of the TUP at the February 22 meeting, which was a very confused and convoluted discussion. There is plenty to be untangled here.
in the dark
Just navigating the administrative process was a real challenge in and of itself. It was time consuming and stressful.
But it wasn’t just bureaucratic barriers we faced.
Trying to understand what this proposal might mean, and trying to get information or answers from Rob Purdy and Christine Hardie, was like trying to find a pathway through a swamp, all while surrounded by very deep fog.
It was very distressing to realise that this had all been in train for months, years in fact. The first we all heard of it was when it was potentially going to be decided and approved by Council within days.
And Rob and Christine had been posting, advertising this as a tourist destination in our quiet little backwater neighbourhood, to open in Spring 2021, for months and months, without any of us knowing anything about it.
it felt like this had already been decided
Never having had any reason to think you had to constantly spy on your neighbours to protect yourself, it was a huge shock to then see, when under this pressure, the Instagram and Facebook posts Rob and Christine had been putting up since October of 2020.
They advertised the cidery, with photos of the manufacturing already in place, flagging a Spring 2021 opening date, pushing all this content – #tourismbowenisland #tourismvancouver #bowenisland – to a huge audience far beyond our island.
I screenshotted some of this at the time – images such as the Instagram post’s hashtags above – at the time of the TUP (21 weeks after it was posted on October 9, 2020). We included the content from that notice in our submission to Council March 22, 2021:
What did they say in their post from October 2020?
For those who are just joining us on Facebook, we thought we’d introduce ourselves to you! Thank you for following us on our journey. The orchard boasts over 800 varieties of heritage apple trees which have been growing for decades under the careful stewardship of Mr. John Riley, the cidery’s namesake. We are honoured to continue Riley’s legacy as we take the reins for a future of community growth, connection, and cider drinking! There’s so much to share in the coming weeks about the orchard’s rich past, and our plans for this special new Bowen Island apple cidery! Tasting Room opens for business spring 2021. Thanks for following along. Cheers!
source: Riley’s Cidery Instagram and Facebook post, Oct 20, 2020; retrieved March 2021, retrieved again on Mar 08, 2024
Subsequently, they’ve renamed their account (rileyscider to rileyscidery), kept just a couple of those early posts, and edited out the hashtags. They kept the post from October 9, 2020, “three years in the making”, the project they’d been “quietly working on”:
By mid March, my mother and I had directly engaged with Rob and Christine to ask a series of questions related to water use, the management of water waste, and to specific things they had said at the February 22, 2021, meeting. A number of their remarks at the meeting were concerning, and we found their response to us just as concerning.
There were a lot of things that just didn’t make any sense, didn’t add up.
