Valley News: Gaetz & Co Should Be Ashamed

Opinion – By Walter Neufeld. If you scratch around a bit in our politicians’ local bed, what might you find?

This story shows just how/why politicians fail their constituents at the most fundamental levels of good governance.

At issue is an industrial proponent that wants to build a hazardous waste facility next to the Fraser River, the City of Chilliwack which has green lighted the proposal vs the legitimate opposition from First Nations, and constituents with a long view of sustainable development that includes the environmental integrity of an important BC river.

Reporter Henderson lays out just how Chilliwack’s mayor Sharon Gaetz (et al) circumvent due process when it suits them. What Chilliwack’s Gaetz and company are saying is becoming painfully familiar: Their election is a mandate to govern as they wish and gives them license to manage community engagement via administrative cattle shoots.

When constituents object, they’re informed to vote for someone else at the next election.

Course some people take issue with being jacked out of the local political process for three years with their only option being to choose which tyrant they want to dictate their lives for next three years.

Aggravating that dysfunctional process is the fact that that cosmetically dolled up piggish version of democracy is made to look like due process when in-fact it’s nothing more than a prosthetic grin designed to win the next election.

We all know governments have the power to make discretionary decisions. An application for a hazardous waste facility in a bad location does not warrant the same review as a restaurant application.

Paul Henderson’s excellent article below pulls down Gaetz’s prosthetic grin to show the pimpled disfigurations driving this issue

Gaetz and company should be ashamed, but …

Chilliwack Times article: http://www.chilliwacktimes.com/critics-say-riverside-is-no-place-for-chilliwack-hazardous-waste-facility-1.798452

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Walter Neufeld is known for his advocacy work as president of the FVRD Citizens Association and his work against the gravel industry lobby.

He also founded a group called ‘Men on Roofs’. The full name of the group is ‘Men on Roofs ask Canadian politicians to stop filching our democracy’ and they are sponsoring a series of politically charged images aimed at Canadian politicians.

Today Media regularly publishes his satirical vignettes.

Walter’s latest project is a group called ‘woMen on Roofs – Fools in office’

*Walter Neufeld was born and raised in Abbotsford. He manages a development company operating in BC and in Alberta. Walter has been a critic of the provincial government’s dysfunctional Mines Act for about 12 years. Neufeld is the president of the Fraser Valley Regional District Citizens Association (FVRDCA). Most recently, he’s critiqued both Honourable Randy Hawes and the gravel industries Aggregate Pilot Project which he believes to be a harmful private production document .