A $300,000 slice of the regional budget already allocated to start a “missing link” pathway is now likely to sit idle well past next year, a consequence of uncertainty among officials as to whether the proposed Salt Spring Island Regional Trail (SSIRT) should be considered recreational or transportation-focused.

That distinction matters, at least to the Capital Regional District (CRD) Board, who have presided over considerable administrative friction on a long-imagined 21-kilometre bicycle and pedestrian route that would run from Fulford Harbour to Ganges, then on to Vesuvius — closing the last gap in a 186-kilometre regional network that connects trails in Victoria and the Cowichan Valley. 

The CRD Board had allocated that funding for design work for SSIRT, and the CRD’s Parks Committee — after an exhaustive multi-agency feasibility study concluded SSIRT represented a “significant opportunity” to enhance active transportation across Salt Spring — unanimously recommended the CRD Board refer “planning, implementation and operation” of all Gulf Islands regional trails to the nascent Transportation Committee.

The board did just that, but in January that committee referred the issue back to the board, largely over concerns SSIRT might be more recreational than transportation-oriented — and therefore less suited to be managed alongside $53.5-million plans for widening and lighting on the Galloping Goose and Lochside trails. 

Notwithstanding the 47-page SSIRT feasibility study report, the board agreed not to determine a designation without more information, and tasked CRD staff to return with their own report — on the “implications” of designating all Gulf Islands Regional Trails as regional trails under the transportation service.

Gulf Islands representatives seemed at their wits’ end over the process.

“At this point in time, regional trails in the Gulf Islands are still under the auspices of regional parks, [while] regional trails in the Greater Victoria Area are under the transportation service,” said Salt Spring CRD director Gary Holman at the CRD Board’s Committee of the Whole meeting Wednesday, April 29. 

“So when we talk about a regional plan, and a regional service, and a regional commission — do staff believe that we can resolve what are silos at this point, in terms of regional trail management within the CRD?”

Salt Spring property owners are expected to contribute some $175,000 this year to support the CRD’s Regional Transportation Service, roughly $26 per average residential property. If managed by that service, Holman has said, SSIRT would be the first local manifestation of a tangible benefit for Salt Spring; Holman, along with the island’s Local Community Commission (LCC), had opposed being part of the new service at all, given Salt Spring’s extant self-funded transit service. 

CRD general manager Kevin Lorette reiterated staff were performing the work asked of them by directors, and expected that report on implications — covering issues such as land authority and construction standards — will be part of the update to the Regional Transportation Plan, being brought to the board in September 2027. At that point, the board presumably will consider again how it wants to designate Gulf Islands regional trails. 

Southern Gulf Islands alternate director Robert Fawcett said he had concerns about the pace of the process, and given the only complete section thus far is a two-kilometre stretch on Mayne Island, finishing the rest could take years.  

“Currently, the residents on the Southern Gulf Islands don’t have any access to convenient, green, affordable multi-modal transportation at all — so I’m really glad that we’re looking at equity when we’re doing this,” said Fawcett.  “If we look at how much we’ve built so far through the Regional Trails Plan, to get to all of the Gulf Islands and all of the sections, we’re looking at many, many decades.” 

CRD regional planning and transportation senior manager Patrick Klassen clarified that a June transportation workshop will focus predominantly on “umbrella objectives” — broader vision and goals for the transportation service — with limited opportunities to discuss actions like how to define regional trails or how to build them out.

“There’s quite a bit of time that lies ahead to develop the plan itself,” said Klassen. “We are still in that earlier stage of developing the higher-level framework.”

A new report has reignited the debate over fairness in funding between urban centres and rural electoral areas (EAs), as Capital Regional District (CRD) officials said they will task future directors with addressing disparities revealed in regional spending.

Suspicions that regional investment favoured cities over rural areas like the Gulf Islands and Juan de Fuca were largely borne out by the report, which — even taking into account population densities — found dollars coming in usually didn’t find their way into rural projects at similar proportions. 

“I think there is sufficient evidence in here to suggest that, at least for some services, some electoral areas are contributing way more than they’re receiving back,” said Salt Spring Island CRD director Gary Holman as the report was brought to committee in April. “The staff report indicates there is a concern there for EAs, about paying taxes and not necessarily receiving benefits back.”

According to the analysis first presented to the CRD’s Hospital and Housing Committee, while Salt Spring Island, the Southern Gulf Islands and Juan de Fuca EAs combined represent 5.1 per cent of the CRD’s population, they contribute about 7.5 per cent of regional hospital and housing requisitions and receive just two per cent of hospital capital spending within their areas — and merely 1.5 per cent of housing capital investment. 

“We’re all part of the social contract,” said Holman. “But in my view, the social contract is a two-way street.”

The analysis covered the 15 years between 2010 and 2025, and looked at tax requisition, investments and grants for the Capital Regional Hospital District (CRHD) and Regional Housing, including “non-application-based” grants, i.e. direct awards to the CRD such as the Community Works Fund, COVID “Safe Restart” dollars and Growing Communities Fund (GCF). 

The request for the report — and the subsequent vote Wednesday, April 29, advising the next CRD board to consider regional equity as part of its strategic priorities planning process — was prompted by EA representatives. Holman told fellow directors on April 1 that in light of the report, his goal was simply to ensure equity was among the principles future boards use in planning.

“Not the only principle, but one of the principles,” said Holman. “For example, we’ve got First Nations reconciliation as a key principle within our strategic goals, we have climate action. The intent of my original motion was to try to get the board, when it was considering its priorities and how it was allocating both staff and funding resources, to take into consideration the equity issue.”

That issue was front and centre in the report. From 2010 to 2025, according to the analysis, $352 million flowed into regional housing capital projects, delivering 989 affordable rental homes across eight municipalities; standout efforts include creating 250 new housing units between Langford’s $36.4-million Spencer Close and the $31.1-million Hockley House projects.

Yet of that total, Salt Spring and the Southern Gulf Islands saw just $5.29 million, or 1.5 per cent — less than half the dollars expected with a strict by-population formula — and zero capital investment was recorded for the Juan de Fuca EA. 

EAs similarly funded $1.34 million of the $18-million CRD Land Banking and Housing Service requisition during the period, but despite ongoing initiatives — like $75,000 set aside through 2027 for the Rural Housing Program pilot and $1.2 million to purchase land for Galiano’s Thuthiqut Hulelum’ Housing Project — dollars for completed work are dominated by those in urban centres, according to the report, with 98 per cent of funding.

For hospitals, the picture was consistent. CRHD granted almost $300 million to Island Health for a portion of its capital needs, with only two per cent — about $6 million — targeting EAs, mostly Salt Spring’s Lady Minto Hospital and to a far lesser extent Galiano’s Health Care Centre. During the same period, EAs shouldered 7.6 per cent of the $450 million in total requisition.

On the surface, non-application-based grants painted a rosier picture in the report for EAs. The CRD Board, for example directed 100 per cent of Community Works Funds — $2.6 million annually, across two 10-year terms — to EA projects. 

But for other grants, the situation was more complicated. The GCF provided a one-time total of $1 billion in grants distributed among all 188 of B.C.’s municipalities and regional districts, for their use to address each community’s “unique infrastructure and amenity demands,” according to the province — including development finance portions of infrastructure costs that support affordable housing. 

And the report noted that the CRD Board directed about 47 per cent of its share of the GCF to electoral areas. But while seeming generous in exceeding the province’s suggested 32 per cent population-based share, that number, according to Southern Gulf Islands EA director Paul Brent, does not tell the full story, 

“Of that billion, $100 million came to the CRD,” said Brent on April 1. “$89 million to municipalities directly, and then $11 million that the board distributed: $5.4 million to Electoral Areas, and the balance back to the municipalities.”

From “the perspective of equity,” he continued, “it certainly looks to me that it’s more like 95 per cent versus five per cent, which is kind of consistent with the numbers [for] hospitals and housing.”

EAs already have a lower level of service in terms of health care, affordable housing and other services, according to Holman, who said while the province had made suggestions on how to allocate those dollars, the decision was ultimately up to the CRD Board.

“Provincial funding programs have absolutely benefitted us, and we’re grateful for them,” said Holman. “But they have been inequitable. The board could be thinking about offsetting that, and not reinforcing it.”

As directors from “core” districts noted their own experiences of inequity — where they also might’ve contributed for projects not built inside their municipal boundaries — Brent was less circumspect.

“If there’s affordable housing built in Esquimalt, and you live in View Royal, it’s not very far away — if you qualify for it, it’s realistic and there’s a bus route,” said Brent. “On Saturna? It’s ridiculous. And it’s the same thing with medical services; we may be only 30 kilometres from Swartz Bay or 50 from the hospital, but in reality, depending upon what time you might get sick or need it, we’re 12 hours away.”

The 24-member CRD Board is composed of one or more elected officials from each of the 13 municipalities within the regional district; there is one director from each EA. 

“I have always been a regionalist,” said Brent. “I understand it takes time for equity to work its way through. But we’re talking a decade and a half of analysis here, and I’m seeing nothing in terms of housing, close to nothing in terms of hospital. That’s what equity is about, and what I want this board to reflect on. If you want the EAs to be supportive of the region, then the EAs at some point in time have to see it. We can be patient, but I think we’ve demonstrated patience enough.”

By GEORGE SIPOS

FOR SALT SPRING FORUM

Any of us who have been alive a while can, if asked to name transformative inventions in the world within the last 80 years, come up with a number of obvious ones.

Gadgetry will come to mind, everything from the internet, to smart phones, to satellite communications and the like. In medicine, the invention of antibiotics, transplant surgery, MRNA vaccines, etc. have revolutionized the quality of life for many of us.

But what about ideas, especially ideas in the social and political realm?

We may not immediately think of the idea of human rights as an invention, but it did come about as a distinct formal concept in 1948 when the newly born United Nations created and adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

After the horrors of World War II, the world for the first time articulated an explicit belief that all human beings share common, inherent and inalienable rights and freedoms by virtue of being human. But beyond simply believing this, United Nations member countries wanted to codify the concept in the form of international human rights law.

Ah, you say, that’s where the problem arises. Law is only useful if it can be enforced. And the last 80 or so years of world history have shown that disregard of human rights has been all too common, and injustices have tainted the fabric of the benevolent world we had hoped would emerge in time.

Not for want of trying, however. The UN’s Human Rights Council has worked tirelessly on a global scale to promote international treaties and legal mechanisms such as the International Criminal Court, criminal tribunals in the aftermath of genocides in Rwanda and the Balkans, and so on.

Perhaps more significantly, the idea of universal human rights has led to the emergence of international non-governmental organizations whose purpose is to fight for the acceptance of human rights as the moral and legal basis of world order.

Last October, Kenneth Roth, former director of one such important NGO, Human Rights Watch, visited the Salt Spring Forum and spoke about many decades of its work around the world to defend human rights.

On Wednesday, May 13, the forum will present Alex Neve, who spent 20 years as Secretary General of Amnesty International Canada, another crucial NGO whose initial focus was defending imprisoned and abused individual rights activists in many countries. Over the years its scope has grown to engaging with human rights issues more broadly.

Arising from this work, Alex Neve has just published a book: Universal – Renewing Human Rights in a Fractured World, which is a compilation of his 2025 CBC Massey Lectures.

In light of the acute conflicts currently ongoing in the Middle East, Ukraine, Sudan and elsewhere, the forum event will be both very informative and, unfortunately, all too topical.

The Neve event takes place on Wednesday, May 13 at 7:30 p.m. at Fulford Hall.

A link to tickets can be found at saltspringforum.com.