Walking into the public meeting for Sechelt's new draft official community plan (OCP) Monday evening, I discovered, like the other attendees, that I'd have to pick a discussion table. I scanned the room, noting the four topic choices: business, industry and economic development; environment, shoreline, parks, trails; growth management, residential areas, downtown; or transportation and infrastructure.
It wasn't a hard decision.
I chose the economic development table, not because the other topics don't interest me or because I have any particular entrepreneurial dreams, but because commuting into Vancouver every weekend to find other twenty-somethings to hang out with gets a little old.
And here's the thing: since moving to the Coast a year back and realizing just how few under-40s can conceivably make a living out here, I've had this wild hope that the Coast would cease to be complacent about its "retirement community" label and start actively looking to create the kind of jobs that would attract -or simply keep -the young and ambitious.
And no, not just because I dislike that commute.
In my time here, I've fallen pretty hard for what this community has to offer: its breathtaking coastline, its large swaths of untouched forest, its "homeyness" and familiar faces, and its blessedly non-frenetic pace. But as the median age creeps ever up, and primary industries continue to decline, I have real questions about how the Coast will fare into the future.
Will it have kids to fill those schools the community recently fought so hard to keep open? Will it have a tax base that isn't just scraping by on pensions? Will it have more people living outside of retirement homes and hospitals than inside them?
Here's hoping.
But if the discussion at my "economic development" table Monday night is any indicator, this community has its work cut out for it.
It struck me as telling -and more than a little ominous -that a discussion about a community's 20-year economic vision for itself would be dominated by an interest group whose raison d'être is keeping Target Marine Hatcheries Ltd. from developing a sturgeon processing plant.
Yes, you read that right. Our "economic development" discussion didn't focus on how to build a thriving economy, but how to entrench the status quo and hold one particular project at bay.
And yes, I've covered enough municipal meetings on the Coast to know that the only thing that gets a crowd out is some form of dissent. And I get that. Municipal meetings are a hard sell at the best of times. They can be long. They can be dull. And they often have the pompous trappings of Robert's Rules of Order. But they are also the places where voices get heard and community decisions get made. And when those meetings are dominated not by visionaries but by naysayers, what kind of policy will the Coast end up with?
For this community to function well, we desperately need the counterbalance: we need to hear from people who dream dreams, who embrace new ideas and who have the imagination to take the Coast forward. Only then will we see a context where "economic development" can mean something more than keeping one more project out of one more backyard.
