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COMMUNITY HANDBOOK
Watershed
Intelligence Network
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The Watershed Intelligence Network is an activist New Media organization. Our focus is to help individuals, organizations, businesses and governments deliver good work within efforts that will better protect the environment and expand elements of social justice and equality.
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The New Local Handbook #1
Progressive Ideas for a New Generation of
New Democrats in British Columbia
Written and Compiled by D.H Elzer
With support from the Regeneration Alliance
“Creating a better future for communities, people and places of British Columbia.”
107 Pages - E-book Cover Price $20.00
ISBN 978-0-9867444-3-3
Regeneration Alliance:
Creating a better future for communities,
people and places of British Columbia.
The New Local Handbook is made up of a series of guidebooks exposing issues and providing progressive ideas for a new generation of New Democrats in British Columbia. The guidebooks provide readers with a way of understanding issues that impact all things “local” in rural and inland British Columbia.
This series and its e-broadcasts are made possible through the support of the Regeneration Alliance, a group of hard working people who are strengthening the BCNDP by encouraging “good work” and “local” coalitions which will form a movement to create a better future for communities, people and places in British Columbia.
This is the first book in “The New Local Handbook” series and because it’s the first, it seeks to define something that we call “The New Local”. This is a movement that has emerged that cannot be categorized within the confines of distinct parameters; politically its neither left, right or center, its part of something new, something that exists outside of the present political landscape – but something that is changing our lives.
“Local” has always been here, it anchors our existence, our sense of place, community and our culture. It becomes part of our spiritual center because it becomes our tangible world that includes our family, friends and neighbours. Our life is hosted by all things local, as is our death and it becomes the platform by which we participate in an economy that is both close to us and attached to the rest of the world.
Local is personal and creative because each of us uses all that it provides in our own unique way.
Local is now in transition because it has become known as the polar opposite of global. It is for this reason that local is strengthening and is now carrying certain expectations that it may be the vehicle that could correct certain wrongs that globalization has created. We call this transition of local, The New Local.
This first book is somewhat reactive because it tells of things that are wrong or broken because it speaks about a certain distrust of power because there are layers of past empty promises and disappointments – but at the same time there is a richness that embraces hope that this will change, because beneath all that is negative there are great opportunities.
We invite you to purchase this e-book that is designed as a toolkit. Your purchase will allow us to develop and produce the next book in this series. We also invite you to support alternative publishing by making a donation to the Watershed Intelligence Network and Wildcraft Forest Books.
Purchase your copy of The New Local Handbook for $20.00 – a PDF E-book. We will be sent a message when you make this purchase and then we will send you a book download link.
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“Perhaps it is time to evolve our national purpose so that our connection to the land and our conviction towards our neighbours becomes our legacy directed to all that is noble and good and excellent - and then what we make of our nation becomes a reflection of that purpose….”
- The New Local Handbook – Page 35
For the past 150 years the evolution of governance has become stuck within the realm of entitlement, supported by the same feudal elements that caused the Magna Carta to be written eight hundred years ago - which marked the beginning of a struggle for common people to strive for equality and self-determination.
Today, based on knowing our past mistakes, it’s hard to imagine that we have come to accept that someone in an office in Vancouver or Victoria can be allowed to make a decision about a place 700 kilometers away that will affect an entire community of people without ever visiting or really knowing those people, or that place.
We are a democracy, which is indeed, becoming remote.
- The New Local Handbook – Page 35
“You can pretend to know the issues by asking people but if they themselves don’t know what the issues are then we are most certainly in a conundrum – we become the blind leading the blind...”
- The New Local Handbook – Page 57
The role of government as representative of the people has become somewhat muddy. Governments have a vested interest in many policy issues where they might be receiving revenue in the form of taxes and license fees. In some cases, federal, provincial and local jurisdictions are in competition over financial interests. If this is occurring, who or what is representing the individual at a local level?
- The New Local Handbook – Page 53
BC Hydro has introduced smartmeters so that they can manage a multi-tiered billing strategy and it is catered to urban areas. Increases in hydro rates have been substantial and it is assumed that all hydro users have access to natural gas for heating. This has created a major inequality because much of rural BC is without natural gas and depends on electricity for heat as primary or backup heating. We must have a rural electrification policy that guarantees low rates for primary and life-supporting electrical use.
- The New Local Handbook – Page 56
In many parts of rural and remote BC....Properties zoned “Rural Residential” are currently unfairly appraised by lending institutions. This serves as a form of “redlining’ which then removes millions of dollars of equity from rural BC residents and businesses.
- The New Local Handbook – Page 53
Brownfields....In the BC Interior, toxic real estate can be found in most communities and there is a shared common reluctance in trying not to take notice of the risks that lay on the surface and deep in the soil. Covering brownfield’s up and pretending that they are not there, ignores the memory of those workers who gave their lives towards constructing the community and the BC economy. Not dealing with brownfields means that opportunities are lost when trying to attract industry. Many communities have lost their sawmills so they are rich with industrial land and if that land was clean and subdivided into small lots, rigor would be introduced into the local economy.
- The New Local Handbook – Page 86
Letting brownfield’s leach into ecosystems does nothing to enhance the local environment. Scarcely mentioning them in an Official Community Plan is most certainly an act of denial. Brownfields are not talked about much. They are the elephant in the room. They represent something on the long term that may poison us and they are difficult and expensive to fix. So clearly, we would rather poison ourselves than pay out the bucks.
- The New Local Handbook – Page 87
...Communities and governments know nothing about the "grow-op economy". In fact, messing with it probably will have even more dire consequences. Money laundering has become an advanced science in British Columbia and is now split between two agricrime communities; one that is corporate and driven by organized crime; the other being community-based and driven by independent individuals and families which operate as small businesses and within consortiums of like-minded-people.
Between these two underground business communities is law enforcement that does not have the capacity to deal with the magnitudes of activity and resources that agricrime will generate.
- The New Local Handbook – Page 83
"The important features of a poor neighborhood are, first, the discrepancy between the aggregate expendable income of the neighbourhood and the paltry level of its commerce, and, second the discrepancy between the considerable tax revenue the neighbourhood generates and the low level of benefits it receives in public services and welfare. In both cases the neighbourhood exports its income…its present internal commerce is dependent, as is, its level of public services, on commerce and personnel outside the neighbourhood." - Milton Kotler
- The New Local Handbook – Page 38
