Well. Here I am again.

I’ve been busy away from here for a while, other projects, life. Swimming. But I have been working on posts and (if it doesn’t sound too portentous) lines of research. I referred elsewhere to having the stamina to read 400 pages of redacted records – I’ve been reading a great deal more than that, watching hours of meeting footage, reading and annotating journal and news reporting, scientific articles, legislation, and on. Also thinking about microhistory, and my own intellectual hinterland (which sounds more obscene than it ought).

I have two/three posts just about ready to go – high BOD wastewater, what’s wrong at BIM the water edition(s), Vancouver Coastal Health.

Sneak peak visual taster:

today’s business….

But – I’m here today to enter a contest. One I have no hope of winning.

Germane to my contest entry, Rileys’ Cidery posted a tease,

But first things first. From a girl who loves a long letter, for the Bowen Island Conservancy’s Caring For Nature contest, the explanatory note for my entry:

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The Bowen Island Conservancy: Caring for nature?

I have entered 3 pictures into the Bowen Island Conservancy’s “Caring for Nature” photo contest:

Here is what they signify, re biodiversity, and the caring for nature initiative.

Four members of the steering committee for the initiative – Bob Turner, Alan Whitehead, Bonny Brokenshire, and Sue Ellen Fast – have questions to answer re their involvement in the circumstances that inform those images of waste dumped into water by Riley’s Cidery in November of 2021.

Those four members were all, in varied ways, people we approached and asked before November 2021 for help, advice, information and intervention based on two things:

1. their professional and self-professed public advocacy roles.
2. our very real – and it turns out entirely justified – worries about the Cidery’s environmental impact on water and the life systems – biodiversity –supported by that water.

All four did not act, but more than that, deliberately avoided any engagement with the environmental – biodiversity – questions we wanted considered. Two of them had a formal responsibility to act but did not.

We wanted exactly what you claim this initiative represents. We appealed to those four people, and trusted in them, for precisely the reasons put forwards now to identify them as qualified to lead and direct this initiative. We were, and had been for many years, exactly what you are seeking to encourage – informed and concerned Bowen Island members of the Conservancy. People who stewarded their own land carefully and contributed to the community in a myriad of other ways. People who trusted in the expertise and good faith of actors like Bob, Alan, Sue Ellen, Bonny. Among others.

Re the cidery, we expressed profound concern and a desire for public, informed, scientifically and knowledge based, consideration of the potential impacts to both the water we directly consumed as immediate neighbours of the Cidery, dependent on a groundwater well, and to the water that ran through our property, via Murray Creek, into the Grafton Lake watershed.

If you read our submission to Council opposing the TUP, March 15, 2021,you will see those concerns directly communicated, and that our opposition to the TUP rested on the failure of what should have been a transparent, informed process guided by the public interest:

There are so many questions, concerns, and issues that we believed that the OCP, LUB and the processes in place would and should address at the very beginning of a plan for a cidery in a rural residentially zoned neighbourhood…it does not appear that many of those, some of real importance, and with the potential to impact the whole of the community and set precedents that could be relied on far into the future have been properly explored and assessed. If they have, and there is information on record and available, we really feel that in order to give any meaningful public comment, we and the public more widely need to see and hear and have access to that information and record.

I cannot ever know exactly why Bob, Alan, Bonny and Sue Ellen failed in the ways they did.

However, I am quite sure that a significant constitutive part was played by the involvement of Ross Beaty with the cidery. Sadly, his influence pervades the work of the Conservancy and most particularly this initiative, and I cannot feel that this is in the best interests of Bowen Island’s biodiversity or good governance.

This might just be a case where one could be sad about the capture of a small community group by questionable interests, but two factors make it more troubling than that.

First, the MOU that the Conservancy has with BIM formally privileges the Conservancy as a body to guide and advise on development decisions. Second, the Conservancy is intervening in public affairs funded by enormous multimillion dollar donations from single donors, who are not named., and that trajectory has accelerated over time.

That makes questions about managing conflict of interest, the introduction of unaccountable influence into government decision making, and the commitment to open democratic principles in the Conservancy’s practice matters of more than minor significance.

Ross Beaty and Riley’s Cidery

Ross Beaty identified his “joint interest” in the cidery in the letter, dated March 5, 2021, he submitted to Council supporting the issuance of the TUP:

We {Ross Beaty and his wife] were former owners of 620 Laura Road and we are also jointly interested in the proposed cidery operation on the subject property

I bought it …. But I don’t have time or energy to care for the orchard properly, so I found Rob [Purdy} and Christine [Hardie]… and they bought the property from me in 2019 on the understanding that they would care for and protect the heritage orchard and establish a cidery operation to help fund care and maintenance costs for the heritage orchard. They embraced this plan whole heartedly and together we are working hard to realize this vision.

Between October 24, 2021, and December 1, 2021, Ross Beaty’s online profile at the Sitka Foundation was amended. In that profile, published after the opening of the cidery, Ross Beaty lists “cider production” as a hobby.

Among the many PR friendly, down-home, just folks, but non-factual representations made about the cidery, the repeated identification of this as a small family business run by an idealistic couple is misleading. Riley’s Cidery is a Limited Partnership company. Rob Purdy and Christine Hardie are the directors of a subsidiary corporation, which in turn is the General Partner in that Limited Partnership company, but the Cidery can only exist because there are other shareholders and investors, Limited Partners, who do not need to be identified. The TUP application, properly, should have been made in the name of the Company, not two individuals.

I think it’s fair to conclude that Mr Beaty is or certainly was at the time of the TUP a Limited Partner. He may in fact be the only other shareholder in the Cidery besides Rob and Christine.

Apart from his directive role in creating this business, and defining its parameters, clearly identified in his own letter to Council, Mr Beaty further involved himself directly and personally, in a manner entirely inconsistent with democratic values, in assuring the issuing of a Temporary Use Permit to allow the cidery to open in 2021.

Bob Turner was not only aware of, but participated in, those efforts.

That is especially concerning as Bob, himself a former mayor, must be held to a higher standard than most in ensuring the defence and maintenance of democratic principles, dependent as those are on high standards of public accountability and transparency.

Although Bob and Council assured everyone at the time that this TUP was short-term, and that the applicants would very quickly move into a full rezoning for the site, that has not happened. Instead, the Cidery renewed its Temporary Use Permit status in 2023, having made no effort to seek rezoning.

Although, again, a Councillor at the time of renewal (December 2023) made a public assurance that the proponents were going to seek rezoning, in fact they put their property and the business on the market within a week of receiving that renewed TUP. That is not the only evidence that, for whatever reasons, those holding an interest in the Cidery have been seeking exit strategies. And that the biodiversity value of the heritage orchard – again, put forwards by another Councillor as another unequivocal reason for complete support of renewing the TUP – was perhaps not best achieved by the supposed reliance on the cidery as the only way to fund and maintain this resource.

Already in 2021, before the TUP was even issued, Christine had approached UBC’s Botanical Garden to “replicate” the orchard. In October 2022, with the backing of an unnamed donor, the Botanic Garden submitted a development permit application to the university:

for an approximately 0.2 ha orchard to be planted in the area to the east of the existing UBC Botanical Garden parking lot

This orchard would “Reproduce for conservation, research, and display a collection of ~950 varieties of apples currently growing in a private orchard on Bowen Island…“Mirroring” the Bowen Island orchard will be completed in 2025.” It was also proposed that the orchard would involve the expertise of UBC’s Biodiversity Research Centre, aka the Beaty Biodiversity Museum and affiliated Biodiversity Research Centre.

The UBC orchard would be named after the Rileys. The application has ground to a halt, due I’m told to the failure to agree funding between UBC and the unnamed donor for the long-term maintenance of the orchard. The maintenance and long-term viability of the orchard are complex – and presumably costly – not least because the climate of coastal BC promotes bacterial canker and other fungal challenges to growing apple trees. Challenges exacerbated in an active cidery bringing in fruit from outside the region, and also pumping water containing the fungal and bacterial legacy of any apple used into the soil.

Having apparently not found a purchaser, taking the property off the market, Rob and Christine continue to run the Cidery without ever facing the fuller scrutiny rezoning would require.  It continues to operate, as it always has, without any environmental impact assessment ever having been done, and with no public transparency about its environmental practices and impacts.  

Ross Beaty, Bob Turner and the Riley’s Cidery TUP

By March 19, 2021, in the very brief public consultation period before Council were to meet on March 22, 2021, to consider and potentially issue a TUP to Rob Purdy and Christine Hardie permitting the opening of Riley’s Cidery, a significant level of concern was expressed to Council about issuing this TUP. Many were concerned, often on procedural issues, and it was also clear that 7 out of 10 neighbours to the cidery were opposed to issuing the TUP.

We were also signatories, with multiple other immediate neighbours of the proposed Cidery site, of a letter to Council dated March 19, 2021, raising serious questions about process, including questions about the role of Ross Beaty and potential conflict of interest.

Bob and his partner Rosemary Knight both initially wrote to Council unequivocally opposing the issuing of the TUP (letters dated March 19) but in verbal presentation to council three days later, and in a subsequent Undercurrent letter, had modulated their positions considerably. Bob abandoned opposition to the TUP. And, despite her clear statement on March 19:

4) I am an environmental scientist, (a Professor of Geophysics at Stanford University), actively working on water quality issues associated with agricultural practices in California that can so easily lead to contamination of surface water (streams and lakes) and groundwater, thereby impacting neighbouring wells. I am very concerned to see statements made suggesting that a cidery will have no environmental impact without also seeing the supporting environmental impact assessment to prove this.

neither Bob nor Rosemary had anything to say on any environmental questions after that date.

I know of the reasons for this through the account given to me by Bob and his partner Rosemary Knight, with whom I had two conversations, one on March 19, and one circa March 24/25, 2021.

In that latter conversation, after the TUP had passed, both Bob and Rosemary were entirely open about the fact that the interventions of Ross Beaty and David Hocking in the three days leading up to the TUP being issued March 22, 2021, had led them to soften their opposition to the TUP. Indeed, Bob did not oppose it – his verbal representations to Council on March 22 aligned entirely with the faux compromise engineered and steered in that same meeting by Councillor Hocking that Council used to pass the TUP and claim they had been mindful of neighbour’s concerns.

When I (tearfully) said I didn’t know what we were going to do, how we could deal with this, that we’d already spent $1,000 on having baseline water testing done, we were very scared and worried about our water, Rosemary very angrily said to me that she and Bob had already spent too much time on our little neighbourhood problem.

Bob and Rosemary detailed to me that they were phoned by Ross Beaty on the Saturday, March 20, objecting strenuously to their letters to Council opposing the issuing of this TUP. They quoted Ross Beaty as saying that this (the TUP) had been a “done deal”, but that as they had considerable influence, he was angered by their letters of opposition. Both represented to me that Bob did not want to lose any more friends (referring to events around the National Park referendum and Cape Roger Curtis during his mayoralty) with explicit reference to Councillor Hocking, but most particularly and emphatically to Ross Beaty.

They also referred to the meetings and discussions held in various formats, including up at the site of the Cidery that weekend, involving Rob Purdy, Christine Hardie, themselves, various Councillors they did not directly name, and Mr. Beaty. They explicitly identified that it was Mr Beaty, not Rob and Christine, who had shown Councillors around the site, and discussed the proposal with them.

In the meeting to decide the TUP, four Councillors (Hocking, Kaile, Morse and Nicholson) clearly identified themselves as having visited the Cidery site.

I was also aware (from an email from Ms Knight, March 21) that Councillors had not only been given an entirely false account by Rob Purdy and Christine Hardie of their engagement with concerned neighbours. but were insistent on the truth of this false narrative. We were asked to account for ourselves – like being asked to give an alibi – to counter this story.

It was at this point, the night before the TUP meeting, that both my mother and I realized that the decision had already been made and that collectively a narrative was being constructed to make us and our concerns invisible. As Councillor Hocking had said re the cidery back in February,

Let’s help this thing happen, and not throw spanners in the works, so yeah, whatever’s needed, let’s make it happen

Compromised leadership

Bob is free to have any friendships he wants, but….he cannot with integrity claim to possess the authority to lead and advocate on environmental issues, resting that authority and his privileged access to discourse on his mayoral past and supposed unwavering commitment to environmental protections, while betraying both those principles because it suits a friend’s interests. If he wants to make that claim, he forfeits his integrity.

It is at the very least highly problematic (I would say disqualifying) for him to claim a directive and  leadership role in a project to protect Bowen Island’s natural resources and biodiversity, on the basis of good science and knowledge based decision making, when that project is funded by Ross Beaty.

Bob has shown himself willing to prioritise Mr Beaty’s friendship, and participate in what has to be considered conduct undermining democratic good government, in actively enabling a development on Bowen Island that threatens biodiversity and the integrity of drinking water.

I will omit lengthy consideration of Sue Ellen’s role, at Council and later when we wrote to the Islands Trust, of Bonny’s role as then BIM Manager of both Bylaws and Environment and Park Planning, and of Alan’s (we discovered) disingenuous reasons for not being able to do a survey for us, as he had done in the past.

We sought a survey before the TUP was even issued not to oppose the cidery necessarily, but just to understand and ground the issues we felt should have been covered in an environmental assessment by the proponents. An assessment that never happened. We asked Alan to recommend someone else to do this work; that person also said they weren’t able to do this, again, for reasons we later found out to be disingenuous. No-one would do this work for us, all pushed us on to someone else, who wouldn’t do it – work we were going to pay for – we wanted informed, expert knowledge – but it was just depressingly obvious that no-one on Bowen would do this work.

By the time we discovered the pollution of our pond, and watched Rob Purdy get out of his car to go down and look at it himself, we were painfully aware of how isolated and defenceless we were to do anything about this.

It had become very clear that the Bowen Island environmental “establishment”, and its supposed public defenders and guardians, were not willing to involve themselves at all in anything related to Riley’s Cidery other than its promotion. Our trust and belief in the probity of any of those people was destroyed.

Our other neighbours opposed to the TUP for Riley’s Cidery had entered into legal action, which we had not joined. We didn’t join because we had very limited financial resources (less than $5,000) and were very concerned about how we could navigate the water and environmental threat posed by the cidery long-term with such limited finances. We supported their action and have tremendous care and respect for the majority of those neighbours, and a shared trauma memory of the whole TUP process. But the legal action was initiated and directed by someone who was dismissive of the environmental issues, and the group was directed to not speak to or interact with us in any way. While some neighbours (who’d known us for decades) found it impossible to completely blank us, sneakily talking to us while telling us that they weren’t really supposed to be doing so, we were also aware that we were on our own in terms of taking any action or speaking out about the pollution.

We couldn’t face a renewed onslaught of the partisan, personal and highly manipulated public debate on Bowen Island around the cidery and had absolutely no confidence that Rob Purdy or Christine Hardie would tell the truth or engage in anything other than the destructive way they already had, either with us or with environmental questions. We had no confidence left, or trust, that people we thought were friends, or cared for or even minimally respected us, would give us any support at all.

And $5,000 wouldn’t, realistically, accomplish anything. One water test had already cost us $1,000. The small amount of money we had would be swallowed before anything could even begin to happen. We had sought help from the Environmental Dispute Resolution Fund (EDRF), the only environmentally focussed legal aid fund in BC, operated by the West Coast Environmental Law Association (WCEL). Our situation passed the initial screening criteria, and I was directed to start the formal application process with them, and ask Chrisopher Harvey, QC, an emeritus Director of the WCEL, for advice on finding a lawyer to represent us if the WCEL agreed funding. He went beyond that, and agreed to represent us himself, at a rate less than half his professional standard, when I spoke with him. Mr Harvey was unfailingly kind and incredibly generous to me in terms of his time, attention and support.

However, the process for deciding funding was inexplicably, repeatedly, drawn out, and ultimately, once I informed them that our neighbours were taking legal action against the TUP, I was told there was no hope of getting any aid from them.

We were also, throughout that time, increasingly aware of just how omnipresent Ross Beaty was, and the range of his influence and power. Just before the WCEL told us we would get no help, I discovered that their legal research program was and had been for years heavily funded by his Sitka Foundation, and that the Chair of their Board, who would have made the ultimate decision re funding, historically and currently was the lead executive in charities also heavily funded by Sitka. One of Mr Beaty’s daughters now works for the WCEL.

And salt was most definitely ground into the wound by the immediate ease with which campaigners against the Ecclestone Beach dock variance were provided with a supporting letter from the WCEL.

Ultimately, we knew that we could only choose between remaining silent and living forever with the constant anxiety we felt about the safety of our water, and the threat we knew there was to the larger waterscape of the island, or being destroyed, financially, socially and psychologically. And that was both no way to live, and most decidedly, not a community or place we could feel at home in any longer.

The brutality, essentially the inhumanity, of the indifference of so many people to our very real, visceral, and inescapable anxiety about the absolutely fundamental, basic question of whether our water was safe is unforgiveable. There was (is still, but I’m not willing to engage with it anymore) a claim made, by some of the people I’ve named here, an implicit push, that we ought to sacrifice ourselves, willingly, that because they were “nice” people who’d known us for years, we should just let this pass, go along to get along. That is grotesque.

Ross Beaty and the Bowen Conservancy

Mr. Beaty stands behind the biodiversity initiative. It has multi-year funding already through his Sitka Foundation.

However, his influence extends further than that. Two further members of the steering committee – Sheree Johnson and Edward Wachtman– lead an organisation given massive, transformative funding in the last two years from the Sitka Foundation. Mr Beaty’s money also helps pay the wages of Erica Olsen. He is also the subject of what can fairly be described as a highly glowing and laudatory – indeed, purple prosed – profile written by another member of the Committee, Louise Loik, published in the National Observer in 2018.

So, with a thirteen member steering committee with two additional Council Iiaison members, eight out of fifteen are connected to Mr Beaty in ways that are concerning.

The concentration and balance of the committee is also concerning – it is exceptionally insular and restricted in its base. There are two married couples –  Will Husby and Sue Ellen Fast, and Sheree Johson and Edward Wachtman – and John Dowler and Alan Whitehead are connected by their mutual professional involvement with the Grafton Lake Lands project.

While the public has no access to knowledge or information about the source of the ca $10 Million donation to the Conservancy to previously purchase land in Cape Roger Curtis, and the promise of approximately $30 million available now in relation to the Cape Roger Curtis land purchase at the centre of the MetroVan park proposal, I think Mr Beaty has to be a fairly strong contender as the source of that money. That is a guess, more of a suggested possibility, but a not uneducated or groundless guess.

And whether or not he is the source of those funds, it is beyond doubt that senior Conservancy figures know where the money is coming from.

With the history of Bob Turner and Ross Beaty’s entanglement in the Riley’s Cidery TUP process, and a MOU that privileges Bowen Conservancy in development planning on Bowen Island, there are very substantial reasons for grave concern about the possibilities for the corruption and undermining of democratic governance and the entrenching of vested, conflicted, interests in supposedly accountable decision making presented by the current operations of the Bowen Conservancy and particularly the caring for nature biodiversity initiative.

At the very least, our direct personal experience ought to provoke at least some unease about ongoing and future threats to the watershed, and how this group would defend against those, as well as unease about the sort of society and community this points to. Similarly, acts that weaken and undermine regulatory power, even the very compromised and supine regulatory power we discovered covers water safety in BC, should provoke some thought in an organisation that ultimately needs robust, courageous, independent regulators to achieve the goals that organisation exists to promote.

Ross Beaty, the environment and the source of his money

The Sitka foundation provides millions of dollars in funding to scores of BC based environmental groups. If you analysed it as an ownership stake, you would say that Mr Beaty has a pervasive, high profile, and blanketing presence in BC’s environmental sector. Heightened further by his chairing of the BC Parks Foundation, giving him a quasi-governmental role.

But there are serious tensions in his self -identity as a philanthropist, leading conservationist and environmental activist, because of the source – the ongoing source – of the money that funds those donations, and, essentially, buys him influence, flattering media coverage, and power.  

Mining. That’s where the money comes from. And primarily mining in Latin America.

Those tensions are smoothed and massaged away by his money and influence. Sometimes, as with the prevalent tendency in Canadian government, environmental and media references to Mr Beaty – and in his own self descriptions – identifying him solely and only as a “resource entrepreneur”, the circle is squared with manipulative language use.  

Sometimes, there is the strongly encouraged implication that he has “retired” from mining. There is also an unduly heavy emphasis on his investments in renewable energy, positioning him as a CEO and active entrepreneur in that field –positions he has long since cashed out from. His residual shareholding interest in that sector does heavy duty in defining his primary entrepreneurial identity – which is now, once again, in mining.

That retirement narrative and turn to renewable energy underlay the decision in 2013/14 by the David Suzuki Foundation to accept money from him, overturning their longstanding and total ban on taking money from extractive industry.

He also has privileged access to media, who supply numerous exculpatory, flattering and self-scripted opportunities for Mr Beaty and his family to dismiss or discount any lingering hesitations about where this money comes from. His dualism – miner and environmentalist – is treated as a fascinating enigma, an opportunity to almost bathe in the vast amounts of money involved, and as an existential and symbolic struggle for Mr Beaty himself.

Meanwhile in the real world…This isn’t the place for a full examination of the many contradictions in Mr Beaty’s philanthropic identity. However, I’ll point to a couple that ought to interest anyone who takes the Conservancy’s stated goals seriously, has any interest in the politics of water, or is concerned by the human impacts of extractive profit making.

Ross Beaty is the founder and Chair of the Board of Directors of Equinox Gold. On March 25, 2021, a dam at Equinox Gold’s Aurizona mine, in Brazil, was breached. The ensuing flood of mud, sediment and contaminated water entered rivers and water sources, and 4,000 people (coincidentally, roughly the population of Bowen Island) were left without potable water. The water shortages and restrictions were still in place a year later. Although Equinox Gold denies any responsibility, names the source of the flood as a “freshwater pond” and claims the flooding was caused by once in 10,000 year levels of rain causing the pond to overflow, the “pond” was/is a redundant mine pit, repurposed to hold sediment drained from other open pit mining areas, and rainwater. It had been turned into a reservoir and sediment catchment area with an earthen dam which appears to have failed. The dam was not recorded or inspected in accordance with Brazilian legislation prior to its failure.  There is no supporting meteorological evidence for the claim about levels of rain, indeed a credible investigation found that “based on precipitation records from the surrounding weather stations, the return period of the storm was less than one year. The root cause of the dam failure was the lack of any inspection and maintenance.”

In May 2023, the Mexican government passed two constitutional reforms and a new mining law, described by a hostile international mining press and investors as a “shock”, blindsiding them, etc. They were not really a shock. The Canadian Ministry of Commerce and Minister Mary Ng was campaigning against the possibility of such legislation before its passage, and the legislative action was part of a lengthy political history going back to well before 2012, when Mexico enshrined a constitutional guarantee of the human right to water. Mexico has an ongoing, serious, existential water crisis. The politics of Mexico are complex, and the legislation is part of that complex and contentious tangle. But it is undeniable that the central impetus of the 2023 reforms and law centred on seeking controls on above all else water extraction by mines, but also ensuring some mining profits went back to local communities, and related social goods like pre-consultation, impact assessments, environmental bonds being in place for mining concessions, etc (many of which are actively being sought in Canada as well). Critics describe these measures as reducing Mexico’s “attractiveness” with such “burdens”. Mining journalists sought comment from Ross Beaty in late May 2023:

Mining entrepreneur Ross Beaty, who’s made a career of investing in high-risk jurisdictions across Latin America, including Mexico, tells The Northern Miner the “aggressive” move by the government is “extremely damaging” to Mexico’s mining industry. “It’s a very significant negative to Mexico’s previously good investment climate for mining,” he says…Beaty argues that future investments are at risk. He explains that due to investment capital being mobile, he can’t see any Mexican or international companies wanting to invest new risk capital in the jurisdiction’s exploration and mining industries because of these new laws.

“They are hostile to the industry and utterly uncompetitive with other mining jurisdictions,” Beaty said. “It’s a real shock.”

Ross Beaty’s Equinox Gold has one mine in Mexico, and Pan American Silver, which he founded and where he now serves as emeritus Chair, has two.

With hope (still) that there is good worth working for, and a dented but constant belief that truth matters,

Yours Sincerely,

Heather Miller