By Frants Attorp
Salt Spring trustees recently announced that work on our new Official Community Plan (OCP) will continue until the Trust elections in October. This is surprising, given that the consultant hired to do the project — and now the senior planner put in charge of it — have both suddenly departed.
A major concern is that our trustees directed the McElhanney consulting firm, by contract, to use a public engagement process called “Beyond Inclusion” — a strategy that has resulted in the exclusion of unwelcome facts and voices.
Adopted by our Local Trust Committee (LTC) in 2023 at the behest of trustee Laura Patrick, Beyond Inclusion has been used to restrict information, cherry-pick input and justify holding no open public meetings on a radical remake of our OCP that could unleash runaway development for decades.
Another telling example is the fate of the 2024 Complete Communities Assessment, a detailed external study that our trustees commissioned for their Plan review at a cost of $140,000. It found that 84 per cent of survey respondents wanted “a strong emphasis on environmental considerations.” Trustees promptly withdrew it from the whole OCP process. Also excluded was Positively Forward’s petition, now with 1900 signatures, upholding our current OCP’s density limits and supporting truly affordable housing sheltered from market forces.
It seems the McElhanney consultant was never told that Salt Spring is a protected area under BC’s Islands Trust Act, with an ecological mandate to limit mass development throughout these islands. In January, I revealed that a key McElhanney report recommending major OCP changes contained errors that were in line with Salt Spring trustees’ agenda, but contrary to provincial legislation exempting the Islands Trust from Bill 44 and other housing requirements.
McElhanney submitted a revised version with corrections in February, and then final documents in March with this disclaimer: “McElhanney accepts no responsibility for any deficiency, misstatements or inaccuracy contained in this report as a result of omissions or errors in information provided by third parties or for omissions, misstatements or fraudulent acts of persons interviewed.”Is this wording standard boilerplate, or an indication of why the consultant refused to renew their contract with Salt Spring’s LTC?
At a May 14 meeting, when the citizen advisory committee asked trustees for “any and all information related to the motivation behind the decision of McElhanney not to renew their contract,” the LTC chose not to ask staff to pursue the matter with the consultant.
With Trust staff now moving the project forward, trustee Patrick encouraged them to “stand strong” and not abandon the Beyond Inclusion approach: “We can’t have engagement processes where we just engage who shows up.”
But showing up is a crucial part of how democracy works in Canada. Much will be at stake during the Trust elections this fall — above all, open government, fair process and the Islands Trust Act’s mandate to preserve and protect our islands.