A lifetime membership in WSS is a good investment. I bought one from them as well.
As for double dipping let me clarify something that really should be pretty obvious.
If you buy a lifetime membership from BCWF it is a one time purchase of a product, and the transaction is between you, the individual, and BCWF, the volunteer led and member driven organization.
If you buy a membership from a club you're buying a different product from a different group. Clubs are members of the BCWF but they are standalone organizations with their own financial goals and financial management methods. I think we all know this. What clubs charge and what clubs deliver for those charges are the business of clubs, and properly so.
There is nothing to stop BCWF member clubs from not charging lifetime BCWF members that portion of the club's fees that are remitted to the BCWF. Any club can do that. The BCWF has absolutely no problem with that and has demonstrated that in the past. Any lifetime member of the BCWF that pays additional fees through their club can ask their club to not charge them those fees.
There are three reasons that I can think of why a club would not do that.
First, it is worthwhile for a club to have more paid up BCWF members because it can translate into more votes for the club at the AGM. That's a narrow application and only makes sense when the club is on the border between the number of votes the club can exercise. A club with 100 members gets one vote. A club with 101-200 members gets two votes. A club with 201-500 members gets three votes. A club with 501 or more members gets an additional vote for every 500 members extra. As I said - narrow application but it *may* motivate your club to make a lifetime member pay twice.
An online version of the constitution is found here:
https://bcwf.bc.ca/wp-content/upload...ution-2019.pdf
The section you want is 7.2
Second, your club treasurer may not want the hassle of dealing with more work. That's the business of the club, the club treasurer and club members, not the larger BCWF.
Third, its entirely possible that a club charges a lifetime member twice simply because they aren't aware and don't particularly care that the lifetime member is paying two sets of BCWF fees and the lifetime member has not asked the club to address the issue. After all, it's very common for BCWF club members to buy a lifetime membership as a way to donate and demonstrate commitment, fully aware that they're buying two different types of memberships from two different vendors. It is also common for BCWF members to belong to multiple clubs, and most of these members don't care about the extra fees collected by the club and remitted to the BCWF.
The BCWF resolutions committee and the BCWF Board did submit a resolution to allow clubs to *not* collect or remit the BCWF portion of the club's fees (the fees that the club, through it's members, decides to charge it's members) *and* keep the added voting privilege that comes at the 101, 201, 501 member level. That is to say, the BCWF recognized the problem and tried to fix it.
That resolution was voted down by the members. Perhaps your club exercised it's vote to defeat the resolution.
I have discussed this with BCWF staff who advised that it is very difficult and time consuming for them to to review membership lists from every club, compare them with lifetime members and adjust billing between clubs and the BCWF. Many on this thread have expressed a belief that the task is a simple one. The people who do that task assure me that it is not. You can make of that what you will.
I am endeavouring to create solution that will allow the BCWF to easily refund, upon the member's request, all or part of a lifetime membership to a lifetime member who is unhappy about being charged once by BCWF and a second time by their club for what the dissatisfied member feels are the same services.
In short, this isn't about the money. It's about the difficulty of doing the job. Nobody forces your club to charge you twice. You can ask them to stop. BCWF has tried, and is continuing to try, to fix the problem. Fixing it is taking up a lot of bandwidth, but what are you going to do when an angry and dissatisfied member complains? You have to try to fix it even when you'd rather be trying to address issues you personally find more important.
I'll close by saying that arguing that the fact that a member knowingly purchasing two different products from two different vendors amounts to a malicious attempt by BCWF to screw and rip off it's members through double dipping strikes me as unfair.