Incorporation: Debate Live Stream Hosted on the Exchange

(Note: The video archive of the debate is available here now that the live stream is complete. There were a total of 1148 people who watched the stream at different times during the time it was live with an average of 275 peak concurrent viewers.) In partnership with local streaming media specialist Robert Reinhardt at VideoRx, the Salt Spring Exchange will be hosting a live-stream of the upcoming Salt Spring Island Incorporation Referendum Debate. The debate will be presented live at the Gulf Islands Secondary School on Wednesday, August 30th, 2017 at 7 PM and will be streamed live here on the Exchange.

Panelists Announced

The panelists who are to participate in the upcoming incorporation discussion have been announced.

Michael McAllister, Ken Marr and David Wood will present their case for a change to an incorporated structure.

Greg Clayton, Brenda Guiled and Gary Holman will be supporting the arguments for our current, rural, uncincorporated structure.

The discussion will be moderated by former cabinet minister George Abbott and is to be held at the High School Gym at 7pm on 30 August.

Urban Systems Confirmed as Fact Checker

The three elected officials have declined further requests to vary the fact checker format at the Panel Discussion. We have informed the parties concerned and provided the following reasons:

The format and structure of the panel discussion was carefully considered and has been agreed with the moderator and the ministry.

We were unanimous in the need for the fact checker to be independent, authoritative and impartial. Urban Systems meets all three requirements. Fact checkers nominated by lobbying groups do not.

The Incorporation Study Report prepared by Urban Systems and the Incorporation Study Committee was the fruit of two years work. It is an authoritative document comprising over 360 pages plus appendices and took many hundreds of hours of research to compile. It is the foundational document that the ministry believed was required to furnish the technical and factual information necessary to allow the community to make an informed decision about its future form of governance and was commissioned at considerable expense. It is right and proper that it be available at the panel discussions as a reference document and no one is more familiar with the contents of that document than its author. Accordingly, it is entirely appropriate that the consultant be present at the discussion to inform the moderator, the panels and the audience of its contents, if and when called on to do so. There is certainly no conflict of interest in Urban Systems undertaking that role.

It is perfectly reasonable and appropriate that panelists are able to present their own information and statistics at the discussions. It is then up to the Salt Spring electorate to decide whether they place faith in the contents of the formal study report or the information presented by the panelists.

August 21, 2017 11:48 AM