Salt Spring’s miniature “election season” this month is a little less crowded than this time last year.
It was about now in 2023 when we learned there would be 15 candidates for the four positions on the then-all-new Local Community Commission, and the level of political chatter reached a fever pitch practically before the ink had dried on their nomination paperwork.
This year, we were just one candidate beyond acclamation in both upcoming contests.
We have heard it suggested that the reason might lie in there being less “excitement,” compared a new CRD commission, in serving on a board of trustees for an improvement district, even when it’s the two largest ones on the island.
Setting aside the unsupported idea that there are no thrills to stir the blood at the North Salt Spring Waterworks District (new infrastructure! Paths to ending the connection moratorium!) or at the Salt Spring Island Fire Protection District (a new fire hall!), we would note the work-to-renumeration ratio for those trustees, and humbly propose the relative drought of candidates may be yet another reflection of Salt Spring’s most rapidly dwindling resource: volunteerism.
Time and again we hear calls for help from the volunteer groups that work to make Salt Spring the vibrant community we all want it to be; time and again, we hear the services those groups used to offer with aplomb are now found wanting. The connection is obvious, the solution perhaps less so — but the distress signal can be seen across the horizon.
This weekend, as one of our most recently-elected community members Ben Corno notes elsewhere in this edition, Salt Spring is sending up its biggest flare yet. The list of volunteer groups coming to SIMS on Saturday for the inaugural 2024 Salt Spring Island Volunteer Fair seems to grow every time we check it — many of them operating on the human resource equivalent of “driving on fumes.”
Islanders cherish a collective independence from those “across the water” that cannot thrive without a robust local volunteer force.
We look forward to Salt Spring rising to the challenge.