The planned extinction of Cherryville and Rural Lumby?

Don Quixote Note: The Other Beaver is the source for this story below. This website covers Online Community News for Lumby, Cherryville, Rural Coldstream and Highway 6 .
From time to time I poach articles from this site, acknowledge source and post for the benefit of my blogreaders if I feel that the material is of interest to them.
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November 14, 2007 By Don Elzer The Other Beaver

Where will Cherryville and Rural Lumby be governed from? The City of Vernon, Village of Lumby or a new Rural Municipality with its core at Silver Star? One thing might be certain; things won’t stay as they have been.Rural autonomy within Electoral Areas such as Area D and Area E may disappear as the region considers a new governance model that includes one big super regional district for the entire Okanagan Valley.

This past week the Township of Spallumcheen announced that it wants the North Okanagan Regional District (NORD) scrapped and electoral areas annexed by neighboring municipalities or incorporated themselves. Mayor Will Hansma said people are fed up with bickering at the regional district and the best solution would see the whole enterprise scrapped. “We need to overcome the issues around the functions. We’re spending such an incredible amount of money on reviews of this and reviews of that.”Mayor Hansma, careful what you wish for.

The present regional district structure that you and others so quickly describe as unworkable actually is a product of the Canadian idea of confederation.As a confederation we know all to well that maintaining a system that bridges geography, sustainable development and population issues remains a difficult challenge.This same idea of governance is reflected within our regional district model and with Electoral Areas being the element that seeks to apply equal representation to local government from areas that have sparse populations and which are very connected to the land base. Whatever formula is devised that removes electoral areas submits rural voters into a “representation by population” formula and one that will place the decision making into the hands of urban or suburban voters.Rural residents in sparsely populated areas who farm or depend on the land-base will certainly be outnumbered on voting day, and this will result in no representation for their unique interests.

The reason why, NORD has not worked, is because we have an unhealthy relationship between urban and rural interests, and these problems surface within a political forum, for everyone to see, causing ongoing bickering and the inability to get things done if we don’t find a common ground on issues.It’s a blessing of sorts since it allows us to witness this real conflict and to quote former Manitoba premier Howard Pawley recently, “The issues between rural and urban interests are the most serious issues Canada faces today”. If we remove the Electoral Areas from a regional district model, we remove the rural voice from the public forum. In doing so, the bickering might appear to go away, but it doesn’t, it festers. While common urban interests are addressed, rural interests are ignored. As a local government, Spallumcheen has broken ranks with the rest of its counterparts in the North Okanagan and the common “we’ll wait and see” attitude toward the proposed valley-wide super regional district. The township has officially called for a “‘valley-wide’ commission-type model to replace the three valley regional districts.”Mayor Hansma believes that regional districts weren’t set up as a permanent solution to anything and closing the book on them would be best for all concerned. “Let’s just call a fate a fate and get it done,” said Hansma. “Let’s roll this regional district into oblivion.”

But while advocating the death of NORD, Spallumcheen is casting an eye towards annexing Electoral Area B and the Swan Lake Corridor. Hansma believes that electoral areas would receive much better representation as municipalities and that residents would benefit, with Spallumcheen and Area B natural partners “They said they would want to be part of a rural municipality, not a city. “It would be more suited to being part of Spallumcheen. What Mayor Hansma has displayed is an attitude that is very much a feudal one, where a government seeks to dictate how people should be governed without ever suggesting that the choice should be up to the people themselves.

The threat of annexation is at the core of this present governance initiative. In fact any unorganized electoral area can be joined to any municipality at the whim of the provincial government and without asking for any input from residents. If this is the common view then this process is now tainted with local government representatives negotiating a new governance model while at the same time eager to divide and annex electoral areas for the benefit of their own community. This makes the case that rural residents living in Electoral Areas will not be fairly represented. By this time next year could we see a map where Cherryville and Area D are attached to the Village of Lumby? Perhaps Area F to Enderby, and so on?

When most of the negotiation is being done behind closed doors it’s not a sure thing that Electoral Areas are going to be attached to smaller corresponding municipalities, in fact we might see a greater Vernon stretching from Cherryville to the Westside and north to Grindrod.Whatever the scenario, so far it appears as though a change in the governance model will remove local political representation from rural areas in favor of urban and suburban interests.This is probably the most important issue facing residents of Cherryville and Rural Lumby in three decades and one that will define the future of community autonomy in these rural areas.