I am writing you this information because I as well as my family, whom are members of Lax Kw’alaams, are absolutely disheartened and were very surprised about this surprise vote.
Please understand that this vote was never spoken about at the community meeting in Vancouver in July 2016.
There were many, if not hundreds of members, who did not receive their ballots in time to vote. We had less than a week to mail in our ballots through snail mail. We feel absolutely cheated in regards to our council continuing talks with LNG.
We were not informed of any new information in regards to the pipeline in July 2016 and so when we heard of this recent vote we were surprised because nothing changed!
As you can tell in our community dialogue booklet, the mayor’s message never mentioned anything about a vote but asked us to answer a question.
In addition to the vote many of our members were not even on electoral officer Lawrence Lewis’ electoral list!
How is that possible that not all our voting members were not on his list?
In addition to that, when some members called both Mr. Lewis and the Band’s office to be placed on the list, no one could be reached. What a big farce.
The vote favoured the project of course because they pushed this through so fast.
Many issues arose, like not being on the ballot list to not receiving the ballot until five days or less to submitting it, to not receiving it at all.
Many elderly members do not have emails or access to fax machines and rely on using snail mail.
It takes at least three days to reach Victoria and that’s from Vancouver, so never mind if some of our members live outside of B.C.
This is an absolute shame what our leadership has done to our members.
As you can imagine I am absolutely disgusted with what our leadership did.
Dean Febbo
Vancouver
