and it often happens, that if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect
Jonathan Swift
On March 22, 2021, Bowen Island Council unanimously approved a Temporary Use Permit for Riley’s Cidery, removing any municipal obstacle to its opening.
There is a great deal to be said about this meeting, and the February 22 meeting, related to manipulation of process, and perception, to which I will return later. However, for now, I’m attempting to focus on the single thread that led to the water pollution I identified previously.
So – the Council meeting on March 22…
but…Council considers the environment? water? neighbours? surely they did that…
At the Council meeting one councillor indicated that she felt the TUP needed to go back to staff for further information, related to environmental concerns:
I think there’s environmental concerns. Those need to be checked into, I think, if depending on the scale and the kind of activity, I think…
I’ll just say, I’m going to propose a alternative three and also that we later do something different with our TUP process, thank you.
Councillor Sue Ellen Fast
By the end of Council’s discussion, with no attention to any environmental issues at all, not only did she vote unanimously with the rest of Council, she moved the proposal on which they all agreed.
what the…?
All of these large concerns:
- environmental concerns
- water concerns
- that this cidery was a light industry
- immediate neighbours’ concerns
in short, everything intended to be captured in the OCP mandate that
The Municipality may consider issuing temporary land use permits provided the use will not create an unacceptable negative impact upon the natural environment or the character of the neighbourhood.
was minimised, ignored, but most of all, reframed.
The appearance of accommodation to the “character of the neighbourhood” was given by making some ad hoc amendments in the course of the meeting. Those amendments all hung on the characterisation of the concerns of 7 out of 10 immediate neighbours as merely, in Councillor Hocking’s words, a “misunderstanding around the scale” of what Rob Purdy described as “our little project“.
For our purposes now, I’ll just look at the question of unacceptable negative impacts upon the natural environment.
For Council, this was not even a question to be addressed. If, that is, you believe PR and reality are the same thing.
water issues? what water issues…there are no issues
Given Councillor Nicholson’s reference to the prior history with the brewery on Bowen Island, we had some hope that Council and municipal staff would not proceed without some proper due diligence on the issue of water safety.
That, it turns out, was naïve.
On March 22, again, the only explicit discussion of the water issues involved first Rob Purdy, and then Councillor Nicholson.
Rob and Christine spoke in the public comment section of the March 22 meeting; Rob Purdy dismissed any water issues with the reassurance that “there’s no washroom“:
There’s no washrooms at our facility. There’s reference to Blackwater and Wastewater. There’s no washroom. So it’s designed to basically come pick up something and leave.
You can hang around for a little bit if you want. So there is a misunderstanding, I think, amongst some and in the comments.
Councillor Hocking reiterated this reassurance: “there will be no washrooms“.
Councillor Nicholson was also fully onboard, ready to vote yes. She felt she could helpfully share her understanding on water issues with concerned neighbours:
I also went to visit the orchard over the weekend, and I’m fairly familiar with it from the exterior. But
walking through and actually seeing the scale of operation that is proposed was very helpful in
clarifying my thinking around this. As were some of the details around such things as water usage.
So water is apparently not used in the production of cider, which was something I certainly didn’t
know, and perhaps many of the neighbours didn’t know...
And that, ladies and gentleman, was pretty much that.
Along with the discussion cited from the February 22, 2021, meeting, that is the sum total, the definitive conclusion, of the Bowen Island Municipality’s explicit consideration or care about water waste, water pollution, or water safety, and Riley’s Cidery.
We’ll get to why that lack of explicit consideration was illegitimate, just on the limited terrain of the Municipality’s own governing terms. We’ll also get to some further issues.
First, the implicit treatment of the issue of water.
Rob and Christine, Councillors, and Municipal staff consistently (and long after this March 22 meeting) punted this whole issue, speaking reassuringly of regulation.
They effectively, consistently, comprehensively, abdicated all their own actual responsibilities.
don’t worry, Vancouver Coastal Health will take care of it…
And I would like to point out that this is one of the most highly regulated types of businesses you can come across
Councillor Michael Kaile (Mar 22, 2021)
Councillor Kaile’s words appeared reassuring because on March 18, Rob Purdy and Christine Hardie had amplified their TUP application with additional information. Under the the heading “Water Use & Wastewater“, they wrote:
Vancouver Coastal Health is engaged and we are currently working through their approval process. We are required to have their approval in order to be open to the public. They enforce the following regulations:
- The Drinking Water Protection Act
- Sewerage System Regulation
- Food Premises Regulation
We will get to why, very precisely, Vancouver Coastal Health’s involvement was both systemically and actually not just insufficient, it was in fact counter productive.
when is a process just a predetermined outcome…
This “punting” also highlights another issue: the degree to which the proceedings of March 22, 2021, were engineered and managed to produce only one result, the unconsidered passing of the TUP.
The records show that Municipal Council and Staff did not treat this TUP process as a public exercise or process. They did not behave in a manner that showed they understood their accountability and responsibilities to the public, or indeed the OCP. Rather, demonstrably, they treated it as an exercise in pretty much unqualified accommodation to the needs of the applicants.
You’ll recall from my previous post that the concerns of neighbours, or members of the public more generally, were only considered by the planner Daniel Martin for his report and recommendations if they were received by him before noon on March 15.
This was supposedly because the TUP process was one where the applicants developed and submitted an application, in consultation with the planner. That application, containing their full proposal, was made public on February 22. It was then open to a brief window of public comment. Council would then, informed by that public comment, and the revised recommendations of staff, be able to consider and then potentially decide on the TUP at their meeting of March 22.
That is not how this process worked in reality.
more equal than others…
On March 18, Rob and Christine – the applicants – submitted a further document to Council, subject heading Cidery TUP | Additional Information (read it here), quoted from above re water.
On March 22, the day of the meeting, Rob submitted yet another document revising the TUP application; when his first email, at 8:14 am, apparently got an out of office from Daniel Martin, he immediately (8:16 am) sent it again to the planning department (see the whole email chain here):
Hi Daniel,
What a week it’s been.. I’d like to propose an adjustment to the hours in the TUP…
If it’s possible to update this at the 11ᵗʰ hour, please do.…
Thanks!
Rob
This very late email comes up in Council’s discussion of the TUP. It’s clear it has been read by Council, and at the very last minute incorporated into the planning recommendations put forward by Daniel Martin:
Councillor Sue Ellen Fast: …And then looking at an email that we, that came from Rob Purdy today, Cidery TUP hours 11 to seven, seven days a week. Can we…
Mayor Gary Ander: I think that was built in by Daniel.
Councillor Sue Ellen Fast: Well, I’m looking at- It’s not in the draft.
Mayor Gary Ander: It’s an amendment.
Councillor Alison Morse: It’s in his report, I think.
Mayor Gary Ander: Yeah….
But – Daniel Martin hadn’t included this in his report.
Rather, in his verbal presentation to Council that same night, Daniel verbally amended his prior written amendment, and had changed two slides in his PowerPoint. At minute 1:19:08 of the meeting, he said:
And then you saw the letter from the applicant as well, suggesting further reductions to that.
So to restrict the hours of operations from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Sunday. So the staff recommendation is that council amend the TUP to include those maximum hours of operation and issue the TUP as amended.
But – as if the eleventh hour plus wasn’t late enough, how about the eleventh hour plus, plus another couple of hours? In the meeting itself, as Council further amends the application on the misleading issue of scale, at minute 1:51:20 Daniel Martin adds: And I’m just hearing from the applicant that they’re fine with having that restriction.
I’m sure they were more than fine with this. In their March 18 submission, Rob and Christine said they were ok with permission for exactly the square footage they already had on site; this “restriction” doubled the square footage they could have from that existing level. It’s hard to think that anyone would be anything but fine with supposed restrictions that allowed for twice as much as was needed.
games were played, spin was spun
On March 22, four Councillors talked about their visits to the cidery site the weekend immediately preceding this meeting. There are things to be said about that. Not unrelated to those visits, there are also things to be said about the convergence of vocabulary and framing between Council and the applicants in the meeting on March 22.
In the meeting, there was consistency of messaging on the regrettable way neighbours had
- misunderstood the scale of this “little project“
- not registered the reality of just how “tiny” it all was
- not realised that the lack of washrooms and the supposed fact that “water is apparently not used in the production of cider” meant there were no water related issues at all
There is also more to be said about the manner in which Council, led by the Mayor and Councillor Hocking on March 22, appeared to craft a responsive consensus by altering the permissible footprint size of the cidery building and picnic area. Much the same game was played on February 22, when Council in the meeting revised the percentage of “local” fruit required to 25%.
In actuality, they repeatedly crafted and wrote definitions and permissions that erased limits on the production levels of this cidery. And they did that without, ever, considering that the production levels were critical to consider in terms of potential water impacts.
How do I know that? Because Rob Purdy told us.
how about these apples….and red herrings
On February 22, Rob Purdy said that the square footage restrictions were in many ways irrelevant to production levels: “we would like to have enough fruit that our equipment … is maximized” and allowing fruit from off-island would allow this, given the growing conditions on Bowen Island. He “100%” supported Daniel Martin’s square footage restrictions on the building and picnic area, but went on to add that those weren’t actually an issue, as “it’s really hard to tell like the different size cideries like a 20,000 litre versus 50,000 litre cidery when you walk up you, you wouldn’t be able to notice“.
On March 13, my mother and I had written to Rob and Christine, asking them several questions related to precisely the issues about water I’ve been outlining (see those emails here). Their answers were not helpful. They appeared to us highly evasive. We had further communications with them, and ultimately, felt that engaging with Rob and Christine produced nothing useful. In fact, their behaviour and words increasingly undermined any basis on which we felt we could trust them, or any of their assurances.
On February 22, the TUP had been rewritten to allow them to import pretty much as much fruit as they wanted onto Bowen Island. By switching up terminology, they in fact could produce cider on site with not one single apple grown on Bowen Island and they would be just fine in terms of the terms of the TUP. And square footage? Irrelevant to the difference between producing 20,000 litres, to 50,000 litres. As Rob told us, it was volume of fruit, and sales that would determine their production levels.
next time…
There are, as signposted, plenty of issues to return to, and explore in greater detail.
However, in my next post, I will look at the mechanics of the light industrial process of producing cider, how and what wastes that produces, and the Municipality’s responsibilities and knowledge of those facts when this TUP was considered.
