Transparency Begins At Home

(Photo by Wilhelm Gunkel on Unsplash.)

In his 24th September 2026 Salt Spring Exchange article Trust Starts With Transparency LTC candidate Ethan Wilding made the claim that the Islands Trust lacks transparency while his tool, LTC Explorer, promotes it. He states that he built the tool "with input from friends and neighbours" but does not identify them or how representative they are of the entire population of potential users of the app. He states "This is experience I would bring to the job. I understand how information systems work, and I am already building tools to help our community use its public records."

https://saltspringexchange.com/trust-starts-with-transparency/

I'm going to give my honest assessment of Ethan's tool. I'm also going to express my opinion about some transparency issues I perceive in the tool itself and in Ethan's candidate nomination, holding companies, foundation and resume.

The LTC Explorer application is labelled beta but it's not a beta, a beta is feature complete but may contain bugs. The Explorer could be an alpha, depending on whether Ethan has established any tests that let him know whether the output it produces is the output he expects. I'd class it as a pre-alpha. It's a front-end mock-up that simulates some intended functions without having a functioning backend. I know this because I've inspected his application with Google Developer Tools and found the data he's loading is in a static text file. You can look at the file yourself here:

https://explore.saltspring.info/data.json

What you'll see are data structures for all of the records, knowledge, sources, collectionMetrics, coverage, archiveMetrics, excerpts and staff. You can explore these in Google Chrome by clicking on the little triangles on the left hand side. The data is currently eleven megabytes but expands to about twenty megabytes in your browser. It contains only a fraction of the information that's in each planning application and only covers "selected records". It's brought from the server in one huge chunk. It feels fast when you're clicking around and performing searches because after you've loaded the web page the data stays in memory, but in addition to the records that interest you everyone else's data is loaded into your browser at the same time. This works well when you're dealing with a limited set of information but it doesn't scale. Add more records or add more detail to the records and the downloads get slower while memory use increases. Scale the application and it will fail. This is an architectural problem. It cannot be fixed without "refactoring" the system or going back to the drawing board and starting all over again.

The application has a built in lag. It is not drawing data from the Islands Trust site on the fly, instead there is a compilation process. When new information is added to the Island Trust website it needs to be downloaded by Ethan, sent to an AI for processing and the processed data added to the json file. This is not documented which means that I have no way of telling whether this is a process that can be run only on fresh documents only or whether Ethan is using the less efficient alternative of reworking the entire document set. There is no indication of how much manual post-processing is needed. What is clear is that the LTC Explorer cannot satisfy what I'd consider to be my primary use case: checking current applications in the days leading up to an LTC meeting. For transparency Ethan should make the metrics of this lag public. If updates are too slow the tool is useless.

What I'm seeing is the Killer Demo antipattern described in the book Antipatterns in Project Management by Brown, McCormick and Thomas, a great read with excellent cartoons. A pattern is a good practice that can be repeated because it's a safe reliable choice: it's not re-inventing the wheel, it is the wheel. An antipattern is one you never want to see again but here it comes anyway and you find yourself muttering, "Do these people never learn?" The Killer Demo is something knocked together for marketing purposes that is nowhere near being a finished product, jumps the queue for resources and either never sees the light of day or becomes a maintenance burden that drains the life force out of whoever gets lumbered with it. In my opinion the LTC Explorer is a killer demo marketing tool and the product it's marketing is the candidacy of Ethan Wilding as illustrated by the site's Why page which contains a copy of the text of his Trust Starts With Transparency article.

Ethan might want to refresh his knowledge of data protection. To create the json file the app relies on Ethan is taking PDFs containing personally identifiable information from the Trust website sending them to AI for analysis and adding that analysis to his data structures. He does this without asking our permission. The Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) says that when this kind of processing is done we should be asked to opt in. As a government body the Trust has right to process our information for the narrow purposes for which its provided. Ethan doesn't. It's particularly unwise to do this for Trust staff when he's been criticising them in public while continuing legal action against the Trust. At the very least Ethan needs to add a privacy policy to the site and provide a clear opt in mechanism. He has our addresses, he could write to us asking for that permission.

It's unfair to denigrate a solution without giving an alternatives. What I'd do in the short term is check caching in the Islands Trust Wordpress site, identify slow running queries in the MySQL server that stores the site data and optimise the database indexes to boost performance. There's no need to throw away an app over a configuration issue.

In the medium term I'd talk to our neighbours in the District of Saanich about their Permit and Development Tracker. This shows itemised task progress and renders a nice pie chart for each application showing active processing days split between staff and applicants. I've identified the vendor of this Active Server Page app, but I'd hold off on contacting them until I'd surveyed alternative applications and talked to staff about their experience of working with the backend.

Finally, if there's a need a budget and opportunity costs allow, I'd set up an archive with full text searching using something like Solr. This open source search server scales wonderfully but is probably best implemented as a Provincial repository. The library already has its catalogue run by a consortium. It's a good way to share the costs of operating enterprise software. But it should only be done if it's worth doing. Any refinement of the Islands Trust processes comes at a cost. It's easy to demand service improvement but change always comes at a price including the cost of lost productivity while the transition is made. Anyone experienced in change management knows this.

Moving on. It's easy to demand transparency in others. It's harder to reflect on how our own actions could be made more transparent. I've put together a few examples for Ethan to reflect on. I hope this will encourage more tolerance and more openness.

In Ethan's candidate nomination package. Checkboxes C5 and C6 are unchecked and marked as pending, he did not identify his official agent or scrutineer.

While Ethan has declared his ownership of shares in holding companies and his ownership of real property his income and liabilities sections are blank. This is allowable if his income sources are outside the electoral area. However, as Ethan is running on a transparency platform he may want to voluntarily describe his sources of income outside the area to establish his ethos on a key issue in his campaign.

Ethan's holding company 1606584 B.C. Ltd. has an incorporation application dated 2nd September 2026. His candidate nomination package is dated 8th September 2026. For transparency Ethan may want to explain why he set up the holding company a week before completing his nomination package.

The registered office of Blind Baker Holdings Ltd. is in Vancouver despite owning land and buildings at 215 Baker Road. For transparency Ethan may want to explain why corporate records related to the Fab Lab and Community Hall are held off island. He might also want to tell us the date on which he transferred the property from himself to that holding company and assure us that when he did so he withdrew the claim in Wilding vs NSSWD that his Section 7 Charter Rights were being violated. Corporations do not have the same rights as natural persons.

Ethan is proud of his past association with the Ethereum Foundation and describes himself as a "Founding Team Member" and sometimes "Resident Philosopher". The website Early Days Of Ethereum, which catalogues the history of the foundation describes Ethan as "Administration". For transparency Ethan might want to clarify his role and state what his duties were.

Many of the early contributors to the Ethereum Foundation made fortunes when they were allocated "pre-mint ether" - free cryptocurrency assigned prior to launch that gained enormous value as Ethereum gained in popularity. One contributor, the graphic designer Richard Burton, whose learned of his allocation from Ethan describes it as effectively being paid three hundred months money for three months work. The same allocation process eventually made Ethereum's founder Vitalik Buterin a billionaire. Bob Summerwill who runs the Early Days Of Ethereum website takes transparency seriously and lists his crypto holdings publicly. In Bob's words: "We are not playing games. We are now talking to heads of state, central bankers, Fortune 500 CEOs, etc. Ethics and transparency are critical." For transparency Ethan may want to take a leaf out of Bob's book and disclose whether he received pre-mint Ethereum, what governance processes were used in the allocation and whether he currently holds Ethereum or any other cryptocurrency.

Candidate nomination forms ignore crypto assets. As 1606584 Ltd. holds no real property and also holds no shares in other companies Ethan may want to pro-actively fix that gap in the system by revealing whether or not his holding companies currently have crypto assets. He might want to do the same for his foundation and for himself. A good reason to make this disclosure is the push by the Ethereum Foundation for the Ethereum blockchain to be used by governments as part of their digital infrastructure, for an overview of this see Ethereum Basics for Governments and Institutions. If that push is successful and Ethan is elected then he might be called on to participate in a decision about whether or not the Islands Trust uses that blockchain as part of its digital infrastructure. Some of that infrastructure involves "staking", a process where those who hold a large enough quantity of Ether validate the transactions of others in exchange for payment. If Ethan holds Ether he could profit from any Islands Trust use of the blockchain and might want to recuse himself.

While criticising the Islands Trust transparency Ethan would do well to reflect on the transparency of The Wilding Foundation whose website does not contain a list of directors, does not publish minutes and does not publish financial statements. Two of these are mitigated in part by disclosures to the Canada Revenue Agency but those reports are not linked to from the site. Examination of the CRA documents shows that despite The Wilding Foundation website having a focus purely on Salt Spring Island the actual distributions made by the foundation have a broader geographic spread. For transparency Ethan might want to post about these. At the very least it would allow other charities outside Salt Spring to know that grants could be available to them. I'm all for local support for local causes but we need to be clear about when that's the sole intent and when it's not. Ethan might also want to explain why in 2024 the foundation spent more on life insurance than it did on charitable giving. $604,230 is a lot of life insurance.

You might think this analysis is overly intrusive. If you do, reflect on the fact that Ethan has, without asking permission, fed our personal information to an AI. Those who are comfortable with that should be able to opt in. Those who are not should be assumed to have opted out. Certainly Islands Trust staff who Ethan has openly criticised should not have had pages created about them by his app, especially when there is ongoing legal action. When he became a candidate Ethan chose to expose himself to legitimate public scrutiny. His record on transparency, when he's made transparency a core pillar of his campaign, is a legitimate focus of public interest. Political transparency is not confined to what a candidate is prepared to publish about themselves, it's also about which questions they are prepared to answer and which they aren't.



See Also:

LTC Explorer
https://explore.saltspring.info/

OIPC Resources For The Private Sector
https://www.oipc.bc.ca/for-private-organizations/

Solr
https://solr.apache.org/

Permit and Development Tracker
https://www.saanich.ca/EN/main/local-government/development-applications/permit-and-development-tracker.html

Early Days of Ethereum
https://www.earlydaysofeth.org/

The Wilding Foundation - Quick View
https://apps.cra-arc.gc.ca/ebci/hacc/srch/pub/dsplyQckVw/794054205RR0001

Wilding v Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee, 2026 BCSC 88 (CanLII)
https://canlii.ca/t/khptl