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LAUTENS: In West Vancouver trusts, beware of being too trustful

The hard-boiled, unsentimental leadership of the District of West Vancouver is seeking an outrageous extinguishment of the intent of dead West Vancouverites who aren’t here to protest the town’s covetous designs on their legacy.

The hard-boiled, unsentimental leadership of the District of West Vancouver is seeking an outrageous extinguishment of the intent of dead West Vancouverites who aren’t here to protest the town’s covetous designs on their legacy.

It’s vaguely like Klee Wyck – shuttered by then-mayor Pam Goldsmith-Jones for “safety reasons,” in fact caused by years of wilful municipal neglect – but more crudely materialistic.

In 1990, Pearly and Noreen Brissenden bequeathed their heavily foliaged 2.4-acre property in the 2500 block of Rosebery Avenue to West Vancouver on the understanding – promise – that it would be used as a park.

Would they have left their loved land to the town if they’d anticipated that CEO and Mayor Michael Smith – and his all-too-frequently unresisting council and bureaucracy – seek a court order to amend (i.e. break) the trust, divide the land now valued at 10 million bucks, sell half of it to a developer, and use the proceeds to buy the two remaining beachfront houses near 14th Street?

There was thoughtful jawin’, but only Coun. Christine Cassidy voted against this DWV ambition.

Maybe the Brissendens would now wish they’d left their land to kin. Or maybe they’d be consoled by a nice plaque in their name on the remaining stub of a park. Certainly some neighbours, who may have bought or built nearby homes partly on the appeal of a supposedly guaranteed leafy property that also shielded the noise of the Upper Levels highway above, are strongly, and properly, opposed.

Oh, and there’s that awkward principle thing. Courts break trusts only for the most compelling reasons. Not for the avarice, the convenience, the “vision” of government, certainly not to buy with sale proceeds the two unobtrusive houses in Ambleside that, as Constant Reader knows, I believe provide a measure of beachgoers’ safety, especially at night when beaches can become a very different animal.

B.C.’s Attorney General, David Eby, represented by Sointula Kirkpatrick, opposes the DWV in his role of defender of trusts.

I must again quote Ingunn Kemble from this paper’s May 11 front-page story, who is so right on target: “If you ever consider donating a piece of property to West Vancouver for a specified purpose, don’t do it.”

I cheerfully hope the court kicks the DWV in its ethically cold, promise-wobbly teeth.

• • •

Suppose you asked 100 people on the street, “Do you think (a) there should be punishment, and (b) if so what would you consider a just sentence, of a man who has two dozen wives, two as young as 15 when married, and 149 children?”

I would guess 99 affirmative (there’s always one poseur) to (a), and an average of 15 seconds to answer (b) – mostly pretty damned pitilessly.

But it ate up almost 30 years’ toil by a host of police, squirming attorneys general, prosecutors, and constitutional thumb-suckers, at a cost to taxpayers beyond estimate, for the justice system to convict the shudderingly oleaginous former “bishop” Winston Blackmore of polygamy and to impose a screamingly laughable 12-month conditional sentence to be served in the jolly old community – the ridiculous “house arrest” – not a day of hard time.

Compare how a single grope alleged by an anonymous victim and untested in court, or a few damn-foolish words, or a sexual relationship that can even be consensual, can smear reputations and destroy careers and bystanders’ lives in a trice. (And don’t twist this into a defence of the repulsive Harvey Weinstein ilk.)

Columnist Daphne Bramham – incidentally one of my two excellent Vancouver Sun female bosses, the other being Judy Lindsay; I say nothing of the third – won high acclaim for her relentless reporting over decades of the Blackmore saga and his fundamentalist Mormon church that is denounced by mainstream Mormons. Bramham’s reaction in the June 27 Sun begins with a bald summing up: “It’s a travesty.” “Complete disregard for the protection of children and the rights of women.” Read every word.

• • •

For addicts of crime-sex-gunfire-murder on TV and film, the term “the police lineup” had a surprisingly fresh meaning in West Vancouver last month.

The West Vancouver Police Department’s open house for its newish quarters had people storming the place to get in, not out.

The line was so discouragingly long, and parking a zoo, that when I drove past I abandoned any hope of entry in my lifetime.

• • •

Of course, West Vancouver isn’t just a cauldron of corporate greed and venal litigiousness (led by the ancient law firm of Double Double Toil & Trouble). Amy Baird and her mother are unofficial cleaner-uppers of the beach at Batchelor Bay, Whytecliff, toting up all manner of litter, including dangerous needles, to the trash disposal. Her latest report:

“We had a great experience the other night.  There were teenagers on the beach and I asked one of the big, strong boys if he could help us carry this car tire filled with cement that we had found the night before.  He jumped to his feet and said “Absolutely, where would you like it?”  We asked him to carry it to the top of the stairs and thanked him! As the group was leaving the beach, each one of them picked up a piece of trash or bottle and put it in the trash to help us out.

“It was so nice to have such nice kids help us that night!”

rtlautens@gmail.com

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