Toxic Political Environment Impacts Our Lives on Cortes Island

Amanda and I have now been Cortes residents for over a decade. Sadly, we seriously question whether our decision to move to Cortes Island was so wise. In the time that we have been here we have witnessed almost continuous political conflict. We might not have noticed except that we have chosen to participate in community happenings. We genuinely tried to be good citizens and to integrate into the community. Among other things we became involved with the efforts to organize the annual cleanup of Gorge Harbour now in its eleventh year. We also became involved with the ESS which required numerous meetings and JIBC courses. In May 2017 we organized the Chili Cookoff which included a competition among ten volunteer chefs to raise the funds for an island emergency protection event. In addition, Amanda volunteered with the Cortes Island Harbour Authority and I became involved with Cortes Radio, CKTZ, serving as its treasurer and being active on its Board and we both undertook to work on the station’s emergency response capacity over several years.

Perhaps three years ago we realized that emergency communications was practically non-existent on this island. Since Amanda and I have practical experience with emergency communications from our time at sea, we decided that this was an area to which we could contribute in a unique fashion. We started by teaching ham radio on Cortes. After training perhaps, a dozen people on Cortes we discovered that there was insufficient infrastructure in Campbell River to establish the necessary emergency links within the SRD region and realized that we would have to start training operators beyond Cortes Island. We thus started to train people in Campbell River and beyond. Ultimately, we expanded our training to the SRD including groups in Thasis, Gold River, Zeballos, and Sayward. This often involved teaching full HAM radio courses in remote environments. In the beginning there was no financial support and many courses were taught on our own dollar. Eventually sufficient numbers were trained as to create volunteer emergency communication teams within the SRD and eventually sufficient funding was attracted to support some of our expenses and to provide emergency equipment to diverse groups in the region. To get to this situation Amanda and I each volunteered over 2000 hours each year. To give an example, in the first two weeks of this February we each volunteered more than 7 days in Sooke, Ladysmith, Courtney and Campbell River working on course material and communication teams.

While we have clearly worked many thousands of hours and have achieved some measure of success, the recent deposition of a petition with the Supreme Court of British Columbia has struck us a terrible blow. The accusations of fraud are clearly baseless yet 14 fellow islanders have chosen to sign this petition. Amanda and I know without doubt that the accusations are groundless. Slander is a poor reward for our volunteer efforts. This is a behavior that should not happen without consequences. This toxic environment makes it extremely difficult to recruit volunteers which has far-reaching consequences for the community. In addition, several persons who recently moved to the island question, as we do, whether the choice to settle on Cortes was wise considering how entrenched political conflicts cripple our community. We state emphatically that the prevailing toxic environment is extremely damaging.
In addition, those of us who tend to be involved must ask themselves why bother. We must consider the reality that we could end up involved in expensive legal combat. In our case, we have had to waste both time and money consulting about the launching a counter suit which might be the best approach to imodify life on Cortes while it would simultaneously expand the current political toxicity. We need to take a step back and understand the extraordinary consequences and deeply selfish effects of the toxicity that poisons our community.