There’s a scene in Men in Black where Agent J squashes a cockroach and Edgar, the giant bug wearing a farmer’s skin like a bad suit, turns on him in a rage. Cockroaches, it turns out, look after their own. Watch it, then tell me it doesn’t remind you of British Columbia politics.

Cockroaches don’t take over a house in daylight. They wait for the lights to go out, find the cracks nobody is watching, and multiply. In my opinion, that is exactly what has happened in the Union Bay area on Vancouver Island.

900 Acres and No One at the Table

Union Bay has no municipal council of its own. Roughly 900 acres of land, homes and development sit under a patchwork of regional boards, improvement districts and provincial ministries, each one able to point at the next when residents ask a hard question. When everyone is responsible, nobody is. That is the dark kitchen where cockroaches thrive.

Big decisions about land, water, servicing and public money get made in rooms most residents never see. Grants and contracts move through layers of government with little plain-language reporting back to the people who live there. Ask where the money went and you get a referral to another office, then another, and then silence.

Turn the Lights On

I believe the way that money moves through Union Bay deserves the kind of scrutiny you’d give a money-laundering case: follow every dollar, name every recipient, and publish it. If everything is clean, an open audit costs nothing. If it isn’t, the people of Union Bay deserve to know.

Here’s what real representation would look like:

• An independent, public audit of every provincial and regional dollar spent in the Union Bay area over the past ten years.
• A single elected body that answers to Union Bay residents, not to a maze of boards.
• Every land, water and development agreement published online in full.

Edgar wore a human suit and nearly fooled everyone. Some of BC’s political class wear suits too. The difference is that we don’t need Agent J to deal with them. We need sunlight, Freedom of Information requests, and voters who refuse to be told “that’s not our department.”

Flip on the kitchen light. Watch them scatter.

This post is opinion and political satire.