During the 3-year term of the expiring SSI LTC, I reported specifically on the LTC, its performance and especially on that of the two Local Trustees by the Delegations:
1. “Looking up the kilt of a term-inally middle aged LTC” (May 23, 2013); and
2 “The SSI LTC at its Second Anniversary – A Report to Society”. (November 14, 2013).
My purpose in doing these was to help the Trustees acquire some “gnothi s’ afton” (= know thyself) for it was becoming patent that it was increasingly lacking. On both occasions the two Trustees followed my reports with their own, thereby demonstrating a serious lack of awareness of their rapid metamorphosis from the “Warriors for Change” we had elected into extensions of what they were supposed to change.
My November 14, 2013 delegation paper is a comprehensive 10 page long document containing an introduction, 10 “chapters”, numerous “sub-chapters” and an epilogue. The Trustees and the Staff quick as a wink censored it for the following “reasons” conveyed to me by Pauline Brazier on November 6, 2013:
“The material that you submitted to support your delegation request is still [sic] considered to contain defamatory content to staff and trustees when viewed in its entirety. It contains numerous personal remarks and personal opinions directed at a named staff person, as well as aspersions about their motives. Therefore, in keeping with the direction given to staff by the Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee, the document will not be included in the November 14, 2013 LTC agenda.
Please be advised that your material has been circulated to the Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee and delegation time has been allotted for you on the agenda for the November 14, 2013 LTC meeting. Delegations are usually received shortly after 12:00 noon after the meeting is reconvened following the lunch break.
If you wish to pursue the matter further, please contact the BC Ombudsperson Office.
Sincerely,
Pauline Brazier ”
Censorship is alien to a free society and when Czarismatic “civil servants” do it, becomes a matter for serious concern. That the Trust censors have been deploying serially the above boilerplate-type “justification” for their “book-burning” manifests that things have gone awfully wrong. When civil servants, appointed and elected, team up to incinerate papers because they are “considered to contain defamatory content” one has to laugh and cry simultaneously.
On the heel of Pauline Brazier Trustee Grove, who was instrumental in more than one way in the ongoing censorship orgy, weighed in with the following message:
“Hi Tom
Have received a copy of your Delegation.
You make valid comments. But I do wish, as I have said to you many times, that you could write in a way which shows some respect for your fellow islanders who are working hard and doing their best to serve the community. Attacks on Trust staff I do not think are warranted. Nothing wrong with criticism if done respectfully.
You should know that I have spent considerable time on the matters you raise including the Canal and the ideas bank, neither of which received support from other islanders. There is only so much one can do to satisfy individual members of the community.
My pleas that you change your approach to style of communicating seem to have fallen on deaf ears...I wish it were otherwise
P”
Peter’s message invites comments.
* I do appreciate Trustee Grove’s recognition of the validity of my assessment of the LTC performance;
* It is sad that he would deny himself and the society the benefits from “my “valid comments”.
* It is sad that the Trustee would discard my “valid comments” simply because he does no like my linguistic style or glossary. More so after my numerous reminders to him, that by having offered to serve the society he undertook to listen to all people, without discriminating on their style of expression.
* The Trustee has, since his first LTC meeting, been insulting me publically and privately about my style of expression and attacking me the messenger, so as to “justify” whatever unlawful conduct of the Trust I am exposing in that message.
* Grove’s assertion that I have made “Attacks on Trust staff I [he] do not think are warranted” is unjustified. Other than his mistaking “Groyne-o-Rrhea” for “Pornographia”, the Trustee has never identified any occurrence of what he accuses me of, and this despite frequent challenges to do so.
* It is highly ironic that Trustee Grove claims that I have not “received support from other islanders” and then moves on to sensor my messages to the LTC and the islanders. This manifests his awareness that what I say is supported by many islanders and it would be supported by many more, if made known – it is to dampen such support that Grove leads the Trust to censor me.
* And having thus “chastised” me, he breaks the law and breaches principles of fair procedure by censoring my delegation paper instead of defending my right to express myself and to contribute to the public affairs of the society.
Grove appears oblivious to Voltaire’s magnificent urging
to defend to death my right to say what I have to say and with which he, Trustee Peter Grove, may not agree”!
The Trustees did not discuss either of my “Report Cards”, but they wrote their own reviews of their own past conduct and future plans and they published them in the Driftwood. In parallel with my May 23, 2013 report card, Grove and Grams published a joint one, in the May25, 2013 issue of the Driftwood. In line with my November 14, 2013 delegation, which they censored, Trustee Grams gave his own report card in the January 1, 2024 issue of the Driftwood and Grove did his own report card in the January 15, 2014 issue.
I invite comparison.
The Latest
Now we are at the final meeting of the November 1011 to November 2014 LTC. The Trustees, having chosen to seek re-election will, I presume, report on their conduct to the electorate. I pray they are reasonably frank.
I must report myself, too. I have made a substantial contribution to the Trust, working hard to mitigate the lack of the “opposition” within the LTC and the Trust Council micro-parliaments and I have acquired first hand knowledge to speak authoritatively about the Trust. The quality and the extent of my knowledge is conclusively attested to by the fierce censoring of my writings and defamation to my person which the Trust has been and is perpetrating against me seamlessly since August 2013.
I know much about how the LTC conducted the affairs of the society and I feel that I will betray the people if I do not do a final review of this LTC.
To that end I took a look at my Mid-term and Second Anniversary reviews and I concluded that they remain current. , It would be honest on the part of the Trust to “un-sensor” my November 14, 2013 delegation “The SSI LTC at its Second Anniversary – A Report to the People” and let the people see it.
The most important update that I would like to make it, is the following:
UPDATE 2014: Open Government: The Hub of the Local Trustees’ failures
After the August 22-26 great leap downward to Censorship Bylaw 473, the Trust went into an orgy of censorship which is still in full swing. If you are unaware of it, it could be due to the Trust having succeeded in their determined efforts to hide it from public eye. This the Trust pursues by the “method of Surreptitious Censorship”, to wit, censoring the document and then censoring the information about having censored the document.
In a delegation I sought to present at the June 24, 2013 LTC meeting, I suggested three options that would make easier a court resolution of issues. “They” censored that Delegation, too, again without talking to me, which breached fundamental principles of justice and the Law of the Land, up to and including the Constitution of Canada. So much for the Trust’s sense of “fair process”.
The insinuation of court action, caused the Trust Staff to panic and rushed to pass the censorship mantle on to the LTC. At the July 24 LTC meeting, they locked out the public and disgused, illegally privately, the matter. The Trustees relieved the Staff, but not the society from the censorship devil. Thereafter, the Trustees, in their new role of absolute Censors, moved the suppression of expression to new deep lows.
On or about the anniversary of the August 22-26, 2013 conception of the censorship Bylaw 473, at the July 24 LTC they moved further, or rather ”lower”, by adding a tentacle to Bylaw 473. It enables the Trustees to, among other, suppress information that would affect adversely their campaign for re-election.
Tom Varzeliotis