A Salt Spring elected official no longer living on the island says the law is on his side, as this week could mark his sixth consecutive Local Trust Committee (LTC) meeting participating remotely.
It has been nearly nine months since trustee Jamie Harris took part in-person in an Islands Trust meeting, last attending Salt Spring’s LTC in July 2024 and participating in subsequent meetings via Zoom. Harris, elected in 2022 on a campaign to address Salt Spring’s housing crisis, has said he lost his own living situation and was forced to move away — citing a potential threefold rent increase for “something comparable” on-island.
Harris did not respond to Driftwood requests for comment and has declined public invitations to elaborate on his intentions or whereabouts.
While “Zooming in” to meetings is commonplace — LTCs met remotely from April 2020 until October 2021 due to Covid — Salt Spring’s meeting procedures bylaw prohibits trustees from attending two consecutive regular LTC meetings remotely if the meetings themselves are held in-person.
Harris’ last in-person attendance at a regular monthly LTC meeting was July 11, 2024. But since there was no meeting that August and an all-online meeting was called in October, the policy’s limit wasn’t reached until the December meeting — when the two trustees attending in-person, as permitted upon unanimous vote by that policy, waived the restriction for that meeting.
With no LTC meeting scheduled in January, a unanimous vote permitting Harris to attend and participate remotely was repeated in February and again in March.
Fellow Salt Spring trustee Laura Patrick has said that October meeting went fully remote in an effort to retain quorum so the meeting could take place at all. Notably, Salt Spring’s meeting procedure bylaws only allow one trustee at a time to attend remotely, meaning when either of the other two trustees cannot be in-person, the LTC meeting either changes to fully remote or must be cancelled.
At the March 20 LTC meeting, when a member of the public asked why Harris was not attending meetings in person, LTC chair Tim Peterson recommended that people contact Harris personally. Patrick has also declined to comment on the situation.
During the most recent Islands Trust Council meeting in March, Harris did speak up during discussion of a Trust-wide meetings procedure bylaw –– which among its prescriptions would set a maximum number of consecutive LTC meetings trustees could attend remotely. As drafted for that meeting, local trustees could still vote to set that limit aside in the moment, as is happening on Salt Spring.
But as trustees discussed the policy, Harris argued March 13 that many people were losing their homes due to the “workforce housing crisis we have going on,” and that additional flexibility to attend remotely was “great.”
“To be clear, the Local Government Act states clearly what the requirements are for somebody to hold office,” said Harris, “and it isn’t a law that somebody needs to reside on the island.”
The act specifies eligibility for all local government candidates, and includes requirements for Canadian citizenship, age and at least six months’ residence in B.C.; there are indeed no enumerated requirements that trustees reside in the community they represent.
“The law is what it is,” said Harris, who attended all three days of Trust Council remotely, wearing a T-shirt with the word “TEXAS” across the chest for the first two.
“I was forced to move, so clearly flexibility is a good thing,” he continued. “And you know, you want to hold my feet to the fire, then give ‘er.”