(The following is an open letter to MLA Linda Larson.)

I have known you as a friend, neighbour and, on occasion, an adversary since the early 1990s but I write now to you as my MLA.   

At the April 23 South Okanagan Similkameen Preservation Society meeting, you claimed that you were “actually a signature on the LRMP so I signed that,” but you didn’t sign it. Twenty-seven signatures of volunteer participants signed the OS-LRMP (Okanagan-Similkameen Land and Resource Management Plan) upon completion in 2000 on pages TL-iii-v. All 79 volunteers and government participants are listed in Appendix II. People you know are listed there but your name is not.

The OS-LRMP’s significance is that it was a plan that was almost immediately facing displacement in 2001 when the idea of establishing a national park in the South Okanagan Similkameen was first announced. Participants who worked on it from 1996 to 2000 were understandably distressed and felt betrayed, as did many others who were involved.

So to this day, people who favoured using the OS-LRMP for managing the proposed park land have continued to push for it in opposition to the proposed national park reserve. Tony Acland of the South Okanagan Similkameen Grassland Park Review Coalition repeated this hope at the SOSPS meeting, so when you went on to say “I still think it is one of the best land management documents that was ever put together for the South Okanagan,” people applauded.

The problem is that this plan was superseded nine years ago by the New Direction land planning model that states that strategic land use planning will be flexible and responsive to current and emerging government goals and priorities, including its commitment to the “New Relationship with First Nations” (“Provincial Land Use Planning: Which way from here?” Special Report FPB/SR/34 November 2008.)

How is it that you don’t know this and it appears Tony Acland and SOSPS don’t know either? As MLA, isn’t it your responsibility to know what is going on in the government you serve so that you may keep your constituents up to date on information relevant to them? At that meeting you stated you “have seen people, neighbour against neighbour, for more than 17 years” yet your failure to be informed has contributed to this.

You announced to applause that you were “the one who sent the letter to Osoyoos asking them to support the referendum.” This was followed a few sentences later in reference to the referendum that “I understand that they as a general rule do not do that type of thing in this type of a situation,” a fact you had just learned from MP Richard Cannings who had just explained this to the same audience who then shouted him down. 

Why didn’t you check into Canada’s policy for referendums when the idea came up? You could have asked Cannings or another federal authority and averted a lot of disturbing of the peace; there would have been no Town of Oliver letter sent asking the federal government for a referendum; no letter you sent pressuring Osoyoos town council to imitate Oliver’s request;  no group of agitated people taking to the streets of Osoyoos with signs and petitions for a referendum.

You referred to “using the democratic principle of the majority rules” as a justification for a referendum, but we have elections to form our governments and those governments support the proposed national park reserve. Your constituents need peace, good government, honesty, integrity and civility. You need to restore it. 

Celia Newman
Oliver