May 1st Updates
FOIA's, Petition, Newspaper, and more
Dear Community,
We are writing to give you some updates on our work over the past couple weeks and month.
In the beginning of March, COAP sent a letter to 4 local governments who had declared a climate emergency in 2019, and requested they share the data they used to make such a declaration. We heard nothing but crickets back, save one counselor in Ladysmith, who suggested we do a FOIA.
Original letter :
After waiting over a month, we decided to send in one FOIA at a time. Our first FOIA request was sent to North Cowichan and the confirmation was received April 20th 2023 .
COAP has also sent other letters that we will upload to the website - ie a letter requesting that N.C. Council refrain from purchasing electric fleet vehicles, as well as the electric garbage truck until they can source the materials ethically, and create infrastructure to dispose and recycle the materials environmentally responsibly. Sadly, they voted for the additional fleet vehicles and the electric truck.
We have show proof of a local counselor referring to 15 min cities and we at COAP know we need a even a small win, and because of our extensive research, we are well aware of what these ‘cities’ will be adopting infrastructure wise. We have created a petition that will be on-line soon ( we will send out an e-mail) asking the North Cowichan Council adopt a bylaw outlawing facial recognition and license-plate reading software, as well as any additional camera hardware. This petition will be able to be signed on-line on our website, as well as a printable version you can print off and take to your place of work, or around your neighbourhood - what a conversation starter! We will then present it to the appropriate committee to garner a motion to be placed before council to adopt the bylaw.
COAP has recently contacted another scientist and we will be working on our second town hall - “Climate, is the science settled 2” ! We are so excited for this, and will of course invite all local governments again to this one.
We shared with you our last visit to Council to argue against a letter placed before council. We sent it out already, but if you missed it -
We have plenty more in the works behind the scenes, but our priority is launching our first edition of our newspaper - Westward Independent. We are still looking for advertisers, and we are open to article submissions, as well as letters to the editor. Topics we will cover in our first edition will be ‘Behind the scenes in our local street crime and addiction problem in the valley’, Forestry Reserve - the other side of the argument, concerning issues within the CVRD OCP, a story of one man’s attempts to create his own energy being shut down by local governments and BC Hydro, some “happy news” stories, and more. We are open to any stories YOU may find interesting, and are happy to interview anyone either on-camera or we can keep sources anonymous. Please e-mail sales@wwind.ca for a rate sheet, or for tips and stories.
FINALLY … we are going to approach council to make a presentation on what COAP is, so the more people we can represent the better ! Please pass the word along, and lets keep the membership numbers growing!
Thank you all so much for your continuing support ! Happy Spring .
Photo by Meriç Dağlı on Unsplash Of possible interest - a behind the scenes look at the organization used to get all councils to declare a climate emergency
