The Week - April 22

Pressing the issue

We’d love to tell you what happened at last Friday’s press conference hosted by Community Marine Concepts, the proponents of the planned Victoria International Marina project. Alas, Monday was told by project partner Bob “Bulldozer” Evans to leave the Songhees suite at the Delta Ocean Pointe Hotel before the event began.

We arrived sans invitation, assuming—incorrectly it would seem—that a press conference would actually be open to the press, so while we don’t know much about what was said concerning the marina (presumably, that it is a really, really good idea), we did obtain a transcript of what Evans had to say about us after our ejection.

Among other things, Evans said, “I witnessed Monday Magazine criticizing most of the rest of the press because of the way they cover our project. I looked at the representative and thought, ‘I could buy him a bottle of gin or give him a trip around the planet or give him a house and it wouldn’t make any difference.’ No matter what we said today it would still come out negative. It didn’t matter whether he was here or not.”

Remarkably, even without Monday’s attendance, it still came out negative.

The Community Marina Concepts press event was intended as a preemptive strike against a Saturday rally by those opposed to the luxury marina plan. Hundreds of people gathered on the Songhees waterfront that day to voice their displeasure for the scheme.

Meanwhile, perhaps fearing an NDP backroom job or covert support from Big Kayak, “open process” advocate John Mullane has criticized what he says are “aggressive lobby groups, that appear to be well funded by unidentified backers.”

Monday asked Save Victoria Harbour member Audrey Whittall where the opposition is getting its financial support. She suggested that with hundreds of citizens across greater Victoria concerned about the future of the harbour and technology that allows easy printing of petitions and brochures, coming up with enough small donations to fund the campaign hasn’t been too hard. Whittall, however, declined to reveal how much the Save Victoria Harbour group has spent on in its efforts.

A modest proposal

Evans suggestion of a bottle of gin to change the tone of our VIM coverage brings to mind another suggestion Evans made by way of Chatwin Engineering senior biologist Chris Zamora, who compiled the ostensibly independent environmental assessment of the proposed marina.

In a July, 2008, exchange with Dave Lutes and Doug Berry of the province’s Integrated Lands Management Bureau—which holds the key to leasing Evans & Co. a Crown-owned water lot for the yacht compound to go ahead—Zamora writes, “Hi Doug and Dave, I need to find out ASAP what Approvals we have with ILMB for the Victoria Marina Project. Due [sic] we have a License of Occupation for the site? Transport Canada wants to know. I[f] you have the time, Bob Evans would like to have lunch with you tomorrow to talk about this.”

According to the records, Evans request for an out-of-office meeting may have been rebuffed, though not because of the potentially poor optics. "I'm sorry but I have another lunch engagement on Friday,” Berry replied.

Poking along

Several dozen concerned citizens showed up at Victoria City Hall last Thursday to demand municipal action to establish a fixed-site needle exchange and, ideally, a supervised consumption site for hard drug users. Monday asked Harm Reduction Victoria representative Kim Toombs why the group took its concerns to city council, and not the Vancouver Island Health Authority, under whose mandate such health services would fall.

“[VIHA] certainly are the ones that have caused the problem, quite frankly. And certainly they are the ones that should be doing this work,” says Toombs. “However, it also takes the willingness of all levels of government to make this happen. Clearly the health authority is not going to do this—they haven’t made any move forward to finding a location for a fixed site needle exchange or anything like that, and so the City made harm reduction one of their top five priorities, and I think that’s where we’re coming in, saying now’s the time for the City to take this leadership role on the issue.”

The City has long endorsed both fixed-site needle exchange and safe consumption services.

Oversight lacking

B.C.’s environment ministry released its compliance and enforcement summary for the fourth quarter of 2009. Little to report from the list of environmental scofflaws, except for the fact Saanich resident Raymond Robinson was given one month “ineligibility to renew trapping license.” That disciplinary decision stemmed from an earlier guilty plea in provincial court after Raymond set a connibear trap in his residential neighbourhood and snared a nearby family’s pet cat. Robinson was ordered to pay the family's veterinary bills of $3,200 to have the cat put down and was given a $500 fine.

Meanwhile, West Coast Environmental Law released a statement shortly after the compliance summary was published indicating that enforcement of environmental laws in British Columbia continues to plumb new depths. According the WCEL, 2009 saw the lowest level of environmental convictions under environmental statutes since 1990, and that 2009 also saw the "third lowest level of tickets and combined tickets and convictions issued since 1990 (after 2004 and 2005)."

Convictions under environmental statutes have fallen from a high of 621 in 1991 to around 40 in 2009.

As WCEL lawyer Andrew Gage noted in the firm’s response to the provincial numbers, “Changes to B.C.’s environmental laws have made them more difficult to enforce at a time when the ministry has less resources to do so.”