On June 4th there was a well-attended All-Candidates Meeting for the 2025 Election of GFPID trustees. The meeting was held at the AGI Hall and facilitated by Gabriola Talks. The Sounder News will have a full report on the meeting, which we will link to as soon as it is published. This is the first of a series of blog posts documenting the questions and responses at the ACM.
QUESTION 1
In 2022 the GFPID’s own governance review made dozens of recommendations to improve transparency and accountability, including limiting trustees to two consecutive terms of three years. I served on that committee, and I can say that very few recommendations have been implemented. Yet the Chair, now seeking a third term, recently told the Sounder that all the recommendations have been dealt with. That is simply not true. The same trustee was also the subject of a non-confidence vote by the Firefighters Association, which I was a member of at the time. As elected officials, what will each of you do to ensure the recommendations are followed, and how will you keep the public informed of your progress?
ANSWERS
Wayne Mercier
I believe you’d be correct that few of those recommendations have been implemented. The ones that seem most important to me are the ones that refer to a clear delineation of responsibility between the board, the corporate officer, and the fire chief, and the clear adoption of policy to deal with a number of human resources and administrative concerns. I think there are good models for such policies. I am particularly fond of the human rights and communications policies adopted by the Deep Bay Improvement District, which are very comprehensive and were arrived at through work with the Office of the Ombudsperson. I would advocate vociferously, even combatively, that the trustees work with the Office of the ombudsperson proactively to adopt best practices policies which reflect the recommendations in the governance report and also those in the Brownlee report, which focus on the administration, particularly the role of the corporate officer.
Paul Giffin
You excuse me while I find this… okay. Thank you for the question. The governance report was issued July 22, 2022 and that report dealt with the trustees themselves, and it was done by members of the community on Gabriola Island. The bulk of the recommendations have been met. The comment with respect to two terms was dealt with by the board when the report was received, and the board decided at that time not to accept the two year term limit, so that recommendation was voted down. With respect to the Brownlee report that was just mentioned, that was done in February 2023, and it dealt with the review of the fire department. And as a result of that review, there was also an impact on what the trustees were doing. That report [...] had 52 recommendations in it. Of those 52 recommendations, 25 have been adopted. 18 of those recommendations have not been adopted, and […] the probable reason for that is the provincial government, and some legislative issues that have been going on for the last four years that hopefully, we're told will be dealt with in the next six to eight months. Once the province deals with those issues, then we can deal with the recommendations. So hopefully that addresses the question on both of those reviews.
Oliver Bussler
Thank you. So I think the question actually dealt with one of the reports, the governance report, but yeah, in terms of keeping track of the of the deliverables in that report, I think that is important. It speaks to transparency. So if we, for example, the public wanted access to that report, right now, you can't actually find it on the trustee website or on the [...] Gabriola Volunteer Fire Department website. It's actually hidden. So I looked at it before this meeting, and I found it on Wayne's website, which is kind of a weird place to find it. In terms of tracking the progress against it, what I would suggest is make it more transparent. These are the deliverables. What Paul's saying right now, the fact that there's a vote around trustee term limits, this is the first I've heard of that, so, but [...] if that vote did take place, if it's documented somewhere, that's let's make that available publicly. A good place to document some of these things would be with a long range plan, for example, very public documents, if you have their deliverables, then put those deliverables in there and show how you're tracking against those deliverables.
Rick Jackson
[Ed note: each term is 3 years, so 2 terms would be 6 years of service.]
Basically, in my opinion, two terms is not really productive or realistic. Some of the best outcomes we've had have been trustees have been like, three, four terms. I don't really see—you know, I think it should be up to the public if they're happy with the input or the work that trustees do when they get re-elected for the next term. And I really think it should be up to the public to make that decision, rather than an arbitrary […] two term limit. Basically, it takes two terms to really get a sense of what's going on in the overall picture, in my opinion, and I think past trustees would probably agree with that. There's also a subsection in that one report saying that trustees should be judged by a panel of a panel of the public annually, which is another, I don't know, again, I think it should be the public that judges them when it's election time, if they've been effective or not. And anything like people who really don't know what's going on, sitting on a board, a sub panel, that seems counter productive to me.
Dave Chorneyko
Yeah, so one of the things that governance review talked about was working on the website. The website has been [an] ongoing issue for years now, and I think to be able to put together a good website with all the documents from the organization, from the Improvement District is just demonstrating basic competence, and so it, this needs to finally get resolved. You know, right now I think that there's probably five websites regarding this fire department. You know, Wayne has one. I have one. There's the Chronicles. [...]the improvement district had a website, and then the fire department has a website. So I think there's like five websites regarding this fire department. I think we have a record for [...] number of websites per Fire Department. So that needs to be resolved. You know, how do we ensure progress? Just by getting getting it publicly available on a website.
Another thing that needs to happen […] from that governance review is that, Wayne had mentioned the […] ombudsperson has a best practices for open meetings. I think that that needs to be adopted. The leak recently, [...] er, a month or so ago, about the closed meeting and the subjects that were in it. I think—like people have known for a long time that the board has buried a lot of stuff in closed meetings, and that just proved to a lot of people on, just the stuff that should be in open meetings ends up in closed meetings. So there again, how do we ensure, how do we show progress? I'm not sure. […] I think we adopt the Ombudsman's best practices and then just purposefully work towards that. Thanks.
Chris Bowers
I was really interested in this review when it first came out, so I tried to attend it, and I was told that it was they decided that it was going to be private, which I found out a few months later, is not actually allowed in the committee of the board. So I was disappointed in that when I took a look at it just recently, it looked like some of the recommendations were pretty good, and I understood from talking to a couple of the trustees that some of the recommendations had already been achieved. And one of the ones that I found interesting, and I don't know that, if it's there or not, was training for trustees, new trustees, I would be really interested in that as a new trustee. [unintelligible] I like the idea of having work done on the website, I know that people have been trying to do work on the website, from I think Penelope all the way to Ray is working on it now. And so it's one of those things where, if there's lots of time and/or money, those things can be done, and my sense is that the time and the money has been absorbed by all sorts of other things that maybe are not as helpful. So hopefully that will start to ease off in time, and people can get down to work again.
NOTES: These transcripts were made from audio recordings. Editing is minimal, for the most part only to remove extra or repeated words or add punctuation. Any indecipherable speech is indicated as such. We have added links to referenced documents or institutions where possible. We've done our best to make this accurate; if you are aware of anything that should be corrected, please let us know through the contact form.
Anyone who had a question for the candidates submitted a slip of paper with their name on it as they registered their attendance; the names were put into a question box. A set of six names were initially drawn from the box to ask their questions. Two more names were drawn later, because time allowed for additional questions, so a total of eight questions were asked and answered. Responses were managed so that the order of response was not predictable. Both questions and answers were time-limited and the limits were actively moderated. (We commend Gabriola Talks for a very well run meeting, and thank all of the candidates for working within the constraints applied to them.)