Cortes residents may have noticed a petition available in paper form at our post offices and grocery stores, or received an email update from our Regional Director inviting them to consider signing the online version. The petition mentions governance and incorporation: what’s it all about? I interviewed Regional Director Mark Vonesch to get a better understanding of the issues and why he’s chosen this moment to launch a petition regarding our governance model.
[This article is a condensed version of our interview. The full version is available in podcast form in the links below. Inset quotes in this article are comments made by Cortes residents who have signed the online petition.]
The two key issues in this election are the need for the people to make Canada’s important decisions and Indigenous affairs, said Carla Neale, the Marxist Leninist Party candidate for North Island-Powell River.
Folk U Radio – With a high stakes election in the U.S., a sudden BC election called amidst a pandemic, and numerous local elections across Canada, the role of democracy is on many people’s minds. What works? What doesn’t? How is it that democracies can be used for personal gain and it can seem so hard to change things even when they seem to so obviously go wrong.
About forty Cortes Islanders attended a public meeting on February 15th at Manson’s Hall, to discuss local governance models and alternatives. The meeting was announced in Regional Director Noba Anderson’s article “Seeding Community Council: Hornby and Cortes” which appeared in Tideline on February 2nd; it was co-hosted (with introductory remarks) by Director Anderson and moderator Kristen Scholfield-Sweet. Folk U co-sponsored the event. While some were disappointed in their expectations of a much larger turnout (“I thought the hall would be full!”) others pointed out that many people are still engaged in the ongoing search for missing island youth Miles Meester.
We have a regional district system that, by its very nature, regardless of the people involved, leaves decisions off-island with a group of people that know little about our community.
— Regional Director for Cortes Island, Noba Anderson
