A Quick Note About The Discourse Article
Hey neighbours,
As many of you have probably seen, The Discourse published a lengthy article this week looking back at the community opposition to the CVRD’s Comprehensive Zoning Bylaw, with a significant portion focused on COAP, our history, our writing, and various people and organizations we’ve crossed paths with over the years.
We have a lot to say about it.
We actually published an initial response shortly after the article came out. We’ve since pulled it.
Why?
Because this deserves more than a quick response written while everyone is sharing the story around Facebook.
One half of COAP’s founders is currently on Haida Gwaii visiting with family, and the other one is dealing with the death of their family fur-baby. So rather than race to get something back online, we want to read the article again as a larger group, go through the claims carefully, revisit our own reporting and sources, and put together the response we think this deserves….lengthier than our original rebuttal.
Most likely a two parts - Pt1. Brief history, and debunking. Pt2 - Addressing the ‘conspiracies’, hyperbole and insinuations.
Did we debunk Eric’s ‘investigative journalism” ? - Yes
Did we start introducing what has been going on behind the scenes with his supposed ‘source’ ?Yes - but we feel that needs more expanding and background context for those new to us.
Stay Tuned…
But there is one thing we don’t want to leave sitting for a week….What happened with Bylaw 4710 belonged to this community.
Thousands of people joined local Facebook groups. Hundreds wrote elected officials. Residents signed petitions, printed and distributed their own material, organized, protested, packed meetings and started reading a 322-page zoning document most people probably never imagined they’d spend their evenings talking about.
And for once, a whole bunch of people who probably disagree on plenty of other things found themselves standing beside each other asking their local government to listen.
COAP participated in that movement. We researched the bylaw, wrote articles, dug through documents, filed FOIs, recorded meetings and tried to make an enormous and complicated land-use proposal a little easier for regular people to follow.
We’re proud of that work. But we have never claimed COAP created what happened.
In fact, Adrienne said exactly the opposite publicly at the time that Eric quoted: “This isn’t my win. It’s not COAP’s win at all. We just played a little tiny part... This was absolutely 100 per cent community.”
We believed that then. We believe it now. And that’s probably our biggest disappointment after reading The Discourse’s version of what happened.
There are fair questions to ask about information that circulated during the CZB fight. There are fair questions to ask about things COAP wrote too.
We’re going to answer them….and we look forward to doing so after holding on to so much for so long.
Where we believe The Discourse has confused a difference in interpretation or context with misinformation, we’ll show you exactly why, with the original material there for anyone who wants to read it and make up their own mind.
That’s what we’ve always tried to do.
What we don’t accept is the idea that tracing political associations, Facebook groups and organizations somehow explains away the political agency of thousands of people who independently decided something wasn’t right.
COAP didn’t put 10,000 people into a Facebook group.
We didn’t write hundreds of emails to the CVRD from hundreds of different households.
We didn’t manufacture packed meeting rooms.
We didn’t make farmers, small-business owners, rural residents, families and people from across the political spectrum suddenly care about zoning.
People showed up because they cared.
Were they all perfectly informed about every line of nine existing bylaws and a proposed 322-page replacement?
Of course not.
Neither were we, but we worked almost 5-6 hours a day to get out a 9 part series to help break down each part of the Comprehensive Zoning Bylaw, with some posts reaching 5k readers - even at that rate, we had a stellar record of being factual, as even Jessica was quoted as saying, we were “not factually incorrect” .
That is what public debate looks like. People ask questions. They argue. They research. Sometimes they get things wrong. Sometimes governments get things wrong. Sometimes journalists get things wrong. And sometimes two people can read the same government document and reach very different conclusions about what it means.
That’s why we’re a little uncomfortable watching one of the largest displays of civic engagement we’ve seen in the Cowichan Valley reduced to a story largely about misinformation and the advocacy groups involved around it.
You can criticize COAP all day long. We signed up for that when we started publishing our opinions publicly.
But give the community some credit. They weren’t puppets. They weren’t waiting around for COAP to tell them what to think. And they certainly weren’t incapable of reading information, listening to different arguments and reaching their own conclusions.
.
So give us a little time…..
We have already gone back through The Discourse article carefully, checking its criticisms against what we actually published. BUT, we as a group have to decide what to release initially when our whole group is back together from summer fun this coming week.
Then we’ll respond properly.
Not because everyone has to agree with us.
They don’t.
But if we’re going to challenge someone else’s framing, we are prepared to show our work and let you challenge ours too.
That’s kind of the whole point of COAP.
Thanks to everyone who has reached out, sent us the article, shared their thoughts, argued about it, or just followed along.
We’ll have more when the whole team is back at the table.
TEAM COAP
coap.ca
contact@coap.ca
We need to support this writer, COAP is our watch dog, when the rest of us are 'too busy'...
THANK YOU! All of those who know your group, KNOW. Don't get too stressed out by the paid - to -not- think -for - themselves component.