Welcome – if that is the appropriate greeting for a return from silence to an active public voice.
I get regular updates showing me the numbers of visits to this site month after month – in the hundreds – even while I have posted nothing for some time. Visitors, incidentally, coming primarily from Canada, the United States, and China.
There are reasons for this long silence, related to my previous posts, to which I will return. But for this re-breaking of the ice, I will keep it, by my standards, brief.
I am letting the previous posts stand as they point to a terrible series of experiences, and a truly brutal period of time, I endured, and, as is probably entirely apparent, which caused me suffering. I am not someone comfortable ever with feeling that I am a victim, even and maybe especially when I am – it pisses me off. That seems to me an entirely healthy response.
It might not be clear from the previous posts, but there was a pivotal event – the Bowen Island Municipal Council meeting of February 22, 2021, during which both Raj Hayre’s gaslighting – for that is what it was – took place, and at which the proposal first went public for a Temporary Use Permit (TUP) for Riley’s Cidery. With the worst possible coincidental bad luck, I lived next door to Rob Purdy and Christine Hardie, the applicants.
I am going to use this space to look at a series of facts, events, and consequences related to both those things that are important both to me personally, and to the story of Bowen Island, and what it may become.
Among the things I will explore:
- the development and practice of municipal government on Bowen Island
- the dysfunctional staff culture of Bowen Island Municipality (BIM)
- a corrupted TUP process
- drinking water safety on Bowen Island
- biodiversity and conservation
- elites and their antidemocratic influence
There may also be brief excursions into gentrification, colonialism, BC as a polity, growing inequality, housing, and on.
And I will not be turning on the comments. This is not about silencing anyone else – there are endless venues and ways in which we can all choose to speak and participate – but for three prime reasons:
- To protect myself from hurt at a very immediate and personal level
- A sense that online comments are as often about trolling, misinformation, manipulation, and displays of ignorance as they are valuable contributions to discourse
- And for a reason that it will take me time to explicate – the treatment I received breaks the basis of any meaningful social contract, or trust, or potential zone of constructive, even if contentious, engagement. Those that are responsible for that want silence, passive acceptance, for others simply not to exist as a thing (not even a person) to take account of. So I take them at their practice, but refuse to accept their terms.
See you soon,
Heather
