Sometime soon, every man, woman and child on Salt Spring is going to receive $100 in the mail from the provincial government. It’s a kind of tax rebate in exchange for the “carbon tax” that’s going to be collected at the pumps, also starting soon.
The finance minister’s promise was that the carbon tax is not going to be a “government tax grab,” rather a revenue-neutral way of starting to put a price on carbon use. This is her way of making good on that promise.
So, by my arithmetic, over $1,000,000 is going to arrive in the mail on Salt Spring. One million bucks! That’s enough money to make a real difference. Some people no doubt really need the cash to offset the tax at the pump, and that’s fine. But for those of us with a little flexibility and a bad feeling about the future, let’s spend that $1,000,000 to further offset climate change.
Let’s invest in protecting land — forested land and wetlands come to mind as high priorities for direct, measurable impacts in defence of the planet in the face of global overheating. There are organizations on Salt Spring doing some of that work — the Salt Spring Island Conservancy, the Water Preservation Society, the Earth Festival Society, others you know about. And there are provincial organizations like TLC (The Land Conservancy of B.C.) and many others all doing really really important work.
Send them your $100. Better yet, get the whole family to choose an organization you really like and send them everybody’s $100.
If most of us do it, that would be like giving a million dollars to our grandchildren and to all the living beings whose future depends on our choices.
JUDI STEVENSON,
Mount Belcher

Gary, Gary, Gary — such paranoia. Surely telling the public how the pool fees were arrived at is hardly “an unwarranted attack.” (“Holman responds” letter in the June 4 Driftwood.) We have all supported looking at all cost issues throughout the process; you did not have to “insist.”
I would be happy talk to the issue of taxes. As dDirector Holman full well knows, the commission did not ask for the initially outrageous tax increase for the 2008 budget. Local staff prepared that budget without input from the commission.
I apologized to the commission and staff at our February retreat for not doing my volunteer job in finance as diligently as I might have due to the deaths of my father and sister last year. In truth, the only amount, in addition to the $50,000 increase approved by Holman that the commission requested was to cover increased CRD fees.
This was rejected by Holman, so increased wages and CRD fees will be taken directly from monies for such items as trail maintenance.
No, Gary, I do not intend to run for public office. However, I do support democracy, not one-man rule. It is no secret that I have always supported incorporation.
As CRD Bylaw 3492 has now been rewritten with Holman’s support so that he alone may appoint PARC commissioners if he wishes, soon he will not have to deal with the “wrong people” being chosen by the community interview process.
I find it curious that the commission that annually spends hundreds of volunteer hours working for the betterment of this community is so consistently attacked by the director. In Gary’s world, everything right is due to his efforts and everything wrong is someone else’s fault.
The only positive word he has ever said about PARC was to rightfully praise Peter Lake for the work he did on the pool project. C’mon Gary, surely somebody does something worth a good word or two.
CAROL DODD,
North Beach Road

Peter Vincent’s June 4 “Intervention needed to wrest car keys from octogenarians” column may panic Salt Spring citizens. 
Will they cower in their basements lest demented 80-year-olds hurtle through the picture windows in their Buicks? His solution to this pending mayhem is simple: Send “unsolicited driver fitness reports” to the Superintendent of Motor Vehicles, it being inconceivable that they would be sent maliciously or improperly.
Whoa! Sure, we are all mortal beings, and we age, but why this octogenarian hang-up? Dangerous driving has no age — what is crucial is the physical and mental condition of the driver. A senior driving too carefully is not dangerous, but the tantrum-afflicted road-rager shouting from his muscle-truck definitely is.
There are too many variables for Peter Vincent’s simple scenario. Some of us may be temperamentally unfit to drive at all, at any age; Alzheimer’s can afflict people not yet in their ‘60s, while others are fully competent at 90-plus.
Memory, concentration, eyesight, hearing and physical condition are all measurable, and tests should be a condition of a licence. But older drivers should not be measured on any Procrustean bed of octogenetics.
ANDREW GIBSON,
Salt Spring

Hey! I’m an octogenarian and I took a driver’s refresher lesson last fall, during which I was told I was a very good driver. 
I also passed the medical test with flying colours, so I resent the headline on Peter Vincent’s column in the June 4 paper, which states “Intervention needed to wrest car keys from octogenarians.” How about “from incompetent drivers” instead of an ageist generalization?
JILL EVANS,
Salt Spring

As a former Salt Spring resident and current reader of the Driftwood, I have followed with interest the recent debate regarding “temporary foreign workers.”
Although I currently reside in the United States, I am a Canadian citizen who, along with various family members, became so as a result of the immigration process.
Having lived and worked in the U.S. for the past dozen years, I am acutely aware of the type of sub-culture and underground economy that become possible when laws are changed or simply ignored in deference to the mood of the economy.
Illegal immigration began to become the problem that it is today with the onset of the union-busting “right to work” laws in many states in the 1980s.
(British Columbians were also availed of these new-found “rights” thanks to the Vander Zalm and Bill Bennett governments).
While in the ensuing years millions of Americans have lost their good-paying jobs, countless un-documented workers have flooded into the country to take the jobs that (according to many politicians and corporate spokesmen) they “were no longer willing to fill.”
In many areas, for example, union and otherwise established construction workers find themselves having to compete for jobs with others willing to work for a fraction of the wages, no benefits and few, if any, safety measures.  
Anything less than landed immigrant status with its rights and responsibilities is a slippery slope and the importation of temporary workers to provide cheap labour is a serious threat to Canadian families already struggling to make ends meet.
ED ARMSTRONG,
Bothell, Washington

On June 3, all three opposition parties supported a motion that would allow U.S. war resisters to remain in Canada and obtain permanent residency.
The vote passed by a narrow margin, 137 to 110 and is non-binding, so the Harper government can ignore the will of the people if they so choose.
Corey Glass, who is slated to be the first war resister deported from Canada, has had his deportation date extended from June 12 to July 10 so he has sufficient time to get his affairs in order. When he returns to the U.S., he will face jail time and the prospect of a life with a felony on his record. What that means is he will have serious difficulties finding employment, and will never be able to participate as a voter again. This — a result of heeding his conscience and refusing to participate in an illegal and immoral war.
Glass’ deportation order is an opportunity for peace-loving Canadians to speak out — to pressure the Conservative government of Stephen Harper to follow the will of the people and the Parliament, and let war resisters remain in Canada. We urge you to call the Prime Minister’s Office, the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration (Diane Finley) and our MP, Gary Lunn, and implore them to follow the motion passed last week.
For comprehensive information on war resisters, visit www.resisters.ca.
CAROL AND DICK GRIER,
Salt Spring Way

Two more trustees for Salt Spring Island seems redundant and fraught with long-term ramifications for local governance options we may want to pursue in the future.
Surely Trust Council with its existing pool of 26 Trustees can intelligently balance the workload among all the islands as issues and circumstances require. Given that all the trustees represent, on council, all the islands, it seems ludicrous that representatives from less populated islands cannot be made available, from time to time, to shoulder some of the burdens of trustees from more populated islands.
After all, trustees routinely vote on other island issues and break deadlocks in local Trust committees and everyone can easily network now through the internet.
The far more pressing issue is this stranglehold already confronting us with two trustees (and our current Capital Regional District director) not willing to empower us to explore a broader-based system of island governance.
Additional trustees are not going to change the fundamental modus operandus of the Islands Trust. How can it? The object of the Trust Act is limited to “preserve and protect for the benefit of the residents and the people of British Columbia.”
It is simply too ideological and non-inclusive to form a stable governance. Although one wonders that if the mandate truly is for the “benefit of all British Columbians,” why only islanders have been taxed for this declared benefit to the province?
How receptive has the Islands Trust become when only one person shows up at a recent official community plan meeting?
Does this not speak volumes about an island exhausted by the Trust’s provocative regulatory agenda?
When we consider the close to $1.5-million budget administered by “volunteers” at the PARC, along with the Islands Trust’s ballooning $6.15-million budget and the potential for further taxation to support two more trustees, could it be any clearer that we urgently need an alternate electoral system of governance?
We certainly require one that is more representative of the social and economic needs of the community than what we have now.
Incorporate if we must but not as another layer of governing taxation. Better to replace the current patchwork quilt of PARC,CRD and Trust inefficiency with intelligent and inclusive representation.
PAUL MARCANO,
Elizabeth Drive

The May 28 letter from Maxine Leichter (“Greenwashing”) about the mine that has been applied for in the Fulford Valley may mislead people about the authority of the Islands Trust and begs for a clarification.
She writes that “Neither the mine proponent nor our local elected trustees could give me any evidence that a new source of rock and gravel was needed on island.”
I don’t remember her asking me (maybe she did), but this implies that somehow the Islands Trust has a role to play in determining “need” for a mine and that “need” has an influence on whether or not a proposed mine goes forward.
The province has not given local governments the authority to approve mines. Even when it established the Islands Trust and gave it a special environmental mandate, the province did not give the Trust any special powers to prohibit the extraction of rock or gravel. (The Trust Policy Statement does say that peat, metals, minerals, coal or petroleum resources should not be extracted in the Trust Area.)
So even if the Trust determined there was no “need” for a mine, we have no authority to prevent one. If landowners think they can make money operating a mine on Salt Spring Island, they have a right to apply to the province for one. Besides that, we no more determine the need for a mine than we do the need for more grocery stores, lawyers, consultants or astrologists. That’s not our job.
Mines operate under provincial authority, and their location is without regard to local zoning. Like any local government, the best the Trust can do in this respect is regulate the processing of material that comes out of the ground — essentially, the crushing of the rock. To do that, the land needs the appropriate zoning.
In the present case, the Trust asked the Ministry of Mines to hold a public meeting about the proposed mine and ministry personnel have done that.
We asked that an environmental assessment be done, and that the Ministry of Mines defer issuing the permit until our soil removal and deposit bylaw has been adopted.
I hope both of those will be done soon.
GEORGE EHRING,
Local trustee

I am so incensed by the ignorant lout who picked (or worse, dug up) the lone trillium lily that I asked the highways maintenance crew to save when they were ditching the North Beach Road on April 15.
This lout surely deserves a huge bunch of stinging nettles from me. Better still: a giant bundle of stinging nettles to be spread carefully between this ignoramus’ bed sheets!
Everyone knows that trillium lilies are protected plants. They are rare. Each flower has only one set of three leaves, so if the flower is picked, then the set of leaves goes with it. The rootstock, what’s left in the ground, is just a woody mass of rhizomes which will die from lack of nutrients made by the leaves. The flower, if left alone, would develop a capsule in midsummer which attracts ants for its seed dispersal. Hence, trillium lilies grow together as ants don’t move very far afield. A seed takes two years to germinate and five to eight years to bloom!
Trilliums are highly collectible and not easy to come by. Do not ever purchase a trillium from an unreliable source.
LING WESTON,
North Beach Road

It seems that since her resignation from the Parks and Rec Commission (PARC) has met with resounding public indifference, Carol Dodd is looking to find another way to create a tempest in a teapot. (“Pool fees” letter, May 28 Driftwood.)
Regarding her claim that I considered higher pool fees, I stand guilty as charged. In fact, I insisted that other cost issues such as operating hours also be reviewed. I don’t apologize for this, not for a facility with an operating deficit (i.e., taxpayer subsidy) of $400,000 per year, excluding debt-carrying charges.
Since I was ultimately persuaded to support PARC’s recommendation on pool fees, the motivation for Ms. Dodd’s unwarranted attack is puzzling. Perhaps she is considering running for political office, a path taken previously by disgruntled PARC commissioners, in which case we can look forward to more of her thoughtful contributions to the public discourse.
If so, as a former commissioner, she can explain PARC’s proposals to increase taxes, by at least $300,000 per year, in each of the last three years. These tax increases were proposed despite the huge increase in PARC’s requisition to pay for the pool, substantial recurring surplus carryovers (i.e., unspent funds) and tennis-related taxpayer losses. Since she is so anxious to set the record straight, perhaps Ms. Dodd can also confirm that I rejected all of these proposed tax increases and supported only those directly related to the construction and operation of the pool, as approved by referendum.
Ms. Dodd resigned from the commission on the curious principle that the elected CRD director should automatically support recommendations made by PARC, an appointed advisory body. I therefore assume that as CRD director, Ms. Dodd would simply rubber stamp any tax increase, or for that matter, any other decision by PARC.
GARY HOLMAN,
CRD Director