The following was read at the closing ceremonies of Hands Across the Water in Centennial Park on Sunday, Sept. 21 by Justin Paulsen, San Juan County Council member, District #2.

On behalf of the Orcas Island community, it is my honour to recognize the Hands Across the Water cross-border event — a coming together of the Orcas Island and Salt Spring Island communities.

While we occupy lands divided by a national border, this event is a recognition of our shared values, a celebration of our unique cultures and an acknowledgment of the struggles — past and present — that our communities face together.  We acknowledge the long history of injustices that our occupation of these lands has inflicted upon our Indigenous residents and recognize that it is our obligation and responsibility to continue to not only honour their fundamental, traditional rights but to continually strive to repair and protect this place for future generations.

This event, born from a shared vision of a “meeting of communities,” offers the residents of our islands an opportunity to gather together in the spirit of cooperation, free from broader political distractions, to share, learn and establish friendships that transcend artificial boundaries.  As neighbours on the Salish Sea, this is one small step in expanding our understanding of one another and the importance of the place in which we live.     

 The Orcas Island community recognizes the tremendous time, energy and resources that have been invested in creating this event and wish to thank the organizers for their efforts.  I wish to personally thank my counterparts with the Salt Spring Island Local Community Commission for their support of this event and for allowing this opportunity for engagement. It is with thanks and appreciation that I affirm and support the values of this event:

“We choose to become the best versions of ourselves — as neighbours, as friends, as people moved by care, community and reconciliation.” 

“We declare our intention to strengthen this cross-border friendship, to steer away from division and sail toward the true north of unity and engagement.”

Let me be honest right off the top. I am not a big fan of tattoos. I love colour and I admire art. I believe people have the right to do as they choose with their own bodies. But I guess I just don’t appreciate people using their bodies as their canvas. Let’s call it my little hang up.

Similarly, you won’t find me drooling over body piercings, staplings or brandings. If you add to these, neck hoops to elongate the space between head and shoulders and lip discs to make the lower lip protrude farther than the shnoz, then you are entering the realm of “just plain weird.” Self-immolation is out of the question when it comes to options for what you can do to your body.

It’s virtually impossible to go anywhere on Salt Spring without having your visual senses hijacked by the myriad of tats out there. They come in all shapes, forms and colours. They may be delicate, intricate line drawings or giant, full-spectrum painted murals that can expand across an entire body. They can spell out the name of a first love such as Rosie, or place Mom inside a heart with an arrow through it. Tattoos are able to visually represent spiritual and meditative concepts like a Mandala or Om. Politically and philosophically, they can express beliefs and sentiments such as “arrest is good for a change” or ‘imagine whirled peas.” I once saw a Hell’s Angel biker who had tattooed across his back “If I wanted your opinion, I’d beat it out of you.”

I come by my unease with tattoos honestly. You see, my mother had a tattoo. It was on her left forearm. It wasn’t the name of an old boyfriend or a drawing of a unicorn. It was a number; 56128 to be specific. From that moment when the German SS gave her the tattoo in 1942 until the end of the war, she no longer had a name but only the number. Below the number was a small downward pointing equilateral triangle which represented half of a Star of David. This signified that she was a Jew.

She had been transported by cattle car from her home in a small town in Poland to the Auschwitz concentration camp, infamous for the German phrase on the sign on the front gate “Arbeit Macht Frei” which translates to “Work Shall Set You Free.” For the next three years she worked as slave labour sewing Nazi soldier uniforms or manufacturing munitions on an assembly line. The plan they had for her was to work her until she was too weak or sick, in which case she would be exterminated like the rest of her family who had been eliminated earlier in the war.

However, she did not die. She was liberated in early 1945 by Soviet forces, met and married my father (who had been interned in another concentration camp, Buchenwald, where they just executed humans without bothering to document and tattoo them) in a post-war camp for displaced people, gave birth to my sister and me, and seven years later immigrated to Canada.

Let me get back to my mother’s tattoo. When I was still young, I was shielded from the harsh reality of its origin. I just knew that when my parents hosted the weekly Saturday night card game, almost all the other adults, friends from the Old Country who had also survived the genocide, sported similar numbered tats on their arms. I naturally assumed that the tattoo was some kind of rite of adulthood. They showed that a person had reached some level of maturity and was now permitted to gamble dimes and quarters at games of poker and gin rummy.

As I aged a bit, I let my imagination take me to more mysterious and exotic explanations. Perhaps my mother and her gambling associates were part of a very exclusive club, no, a secret society, bent on world domination right from the kitchen table of our house. What if the numbers were covert codes which, like secret handshakes, revealed to insiders who could be trusted and who not? Maybe the numbers allowed you to connect to top-secret phone lines or acted as passwords to hidden Swiss bank accounts.

Eventually, I learned the truth about my mother’s tattoo. Although I must admit I felt a little disappointed that it was just the result of a Nazi bookkeeping perversion in human flesh, I accepted the situation stoically as my mother had done all those years earlier. I am not lying when I say that she used to play different combinations of the numerals in 56128 when she bought Lotto 649 tickets.

Maybe that explains my emotional response to tats. Maybe I need to chill. After all, in the not-too-distant future there may be no more need for needle-pricking tattoos at all. Technologies utilizing biofeedback and microchip implants in the brain could possibly recreate processes similar to what a chameleon does when it changes colour. Signals could convey images to nerve endings found in and between layers of the skin which would allow the body to become a projection screen. Essentially, you would become your own screen saver. There is no theoretical reason why these images could not be 3-D or in the form of holograms. Who’s to stop you from renting yourself out as a billboard?

Nobody asked me, but tats are becoming as commonplace here as Scotch broom growing along the roadside. Whereas there was a time when you could only find them on sailors and bikers, you would be hard-pressed today to find anyone over the age of 15 who hasn’t been inked at least once.

I’m not saying I would never consider getting a tat for myself. At my age and with the sum total of my wrinkles, I don’t think I would make a pretty sight. Nevertheless, I suppose I could follow in my mother’s footsteps and use the tat pragmatically. This way, I won’t always be forgetting that secret code password number that allows me into my offshore anonymous Swiss bank account.

The amount of affordable housing built,or not, in recent years to address Salt Spring’s housing crisis has been a subject of disagreement in these pages and elsewhere.

And we would agree that it’s been too little — far too late — to prevent widespread stress and an erosion of community diversity and services as much-valued working people leave the island due to lack of safe and secure accommodation.

But a sudden flurry of activity has relit the flame of hope and possibility on the housing front, and we applaud everyone involved in trying to make things happen.

Thirty-two units of supportive housing (with a staff person on site) and four affordable rentals will open imminently on Drake Road, with 18 healthcare worker units at the Lady Minto Hospital Foundation’s Bittancourt Road property not far behind.

In recent weeks we’ve learned about Island Community Services’ aspirations to create at least 30 units of affordable housing on 10 acres of land the society owns on Brinkworthy Road, and Islanders Working Against Violence’s accepted conditional offer to purchase 210 Norton Rd., already zoned for 26 units through a previous owner’s efforts. Donations will be needed to make the latter project fly; people should watch for upcoming communications about a fundraising campaign.

Just last week, Islands Trust Council agreed to waive the development application fees for a 50-unit proposal on Kings Lane property owned by the Gulf Islands Seniors Residence Association, which owns and operates Meadowbrook.

So 54 units are on the cusp of being opened. More than 100 could be created by the other three proponents, and that’s not to mention the potential for another 50 to 80 units on Drake Road, should the Capital Regional District make its presence known there.

But wait, there’s more: A meeting set for this Friday, Sept. 26 at Lions Hall at 2 p.m. will discuss a potential cohousing initiative for seniors on the island.

Even if all of the articulated projects could open their doors tomorrow, Salt Spring’s problems caused by a lack of housing would not vanish. Still, the number of developments being contemplated proves that our community has not given up on the dream of rekindling housing and resident diversity.

By Frants Attorp

Watching the Islands Trust’s online “town hall” on Sept. 10 regarding the draft new Trust Policy Statement (TPS) was an exercise in frustration. My pre-submitted question on population growth was read aloud by the moderator, but the answers provided by two trustees defied logic — and there was no opportunity to respond.

For half a century, population growth on the islands has been a major concern. From the history section of our existing TPS: “Sustainability of the region’s physical environment, native species and quality of life are threatened by low density urban sprawl and rapid population growth . . . Approximately five million people presently live in the areas surrounding the Trust Area . . . The Trust Area continues to experience extreme pressure from population growth and tourism.”

Given Trust Council’s recent closed-door reinterpretation of the mandate to include everything from soup to nuts, is it any surprise the entire history section of the TPS, outlining how and why the Trust was established, and emphasizing the threat of population growth, has now been deleted? Poof — gone!

Regarding population, trustee Laura Patrick argued that “people live differently than they did 30 years ago.” She spoke of ways “to minimize the impacts of future development,” but made no mention of the need to limit the number of dwellings or ensure new units are for local needs only — even though 5,000 more people are already expected on Salt Spring under existing zoning.

Gabriola trustee Tobi Elliott tried to blur the connection between “density” and “population” and rewrite the book on conservation: “Limiting density is certainly one way to counter the harmful impacts of growth. Limiting human population, however, does not appear to limit the degrading impact of humans . . . Population control is not a tool for a land-use planning agency to do . . . So I think it’s most effective to regulate how humans live and direct where they live, rather than how many.”

The fact that population can be controlled by limiting the number of dwellings — as required by Salt Spring’s Official Community Plan — seemed to be lost on the trustees, as was MLA Rob Botterell’s message that “development and population growth in the Islands Trust Area is not inevitable; it’s a choice.”

Trustee Elliott’s creative solution to population growth, increased pressure on infrastructure and precious resources, damage to ecosystems and a general loss of rural character, reflects the word games being played in the draft new Policy Statement which offers two definitions of density: “number of dwellings” or “floor area ratio.” One can be used to limit population, the other opens the door to massive densification and population growth.

The only way to stop this nonsense is to tell trustees that we support the ecological interpretation of the mandate, and want growth to be truly limited, not just “managed” as in municipalities. There must be clearly-defined limits on the number of dwellings, along with solid guarantees that all new units will be affordable and go to workers and other local residents.

Two petitions, one by Friends of the Gulf Islands, the other by Positively Forward, recognize the need to limit development and population growth. Please consider signing.