The following was adapted for print from a presentation given March 11 as part of the Trust Council quarterly meeting in Nanaimo.
By ERIC MARCH
When I first decided to get involved with local politics it was to run as a candidate in the May 2023 Local Community Commission election on Salt Spring Island. At that time I received the sage advice that “guys like us are the wrong age and wrong class to be getting involved in Salt Spring politics; the CRD and the Islands Trust only exist for wealthy retirees.”
While this person’s statement has stuck with me, it is not a unique sentiment. I have heard similar refrains from many, many working-class folks. Just in preparing for this presentation I heard from several people how talking to the Islands Trust is too difficult, a waste of time, and pointless. And who can blame people for feeling this way?
First of all, almost all public engagement for the Islands Trust happens during the work day. It cost me $54 in lost wages to speak at a recent meeting of my Local Trust Committee and today my partner and I have had to give up $496 in combined wages in order to be here. Can you imagine charging someone a $50 fee to speak at a town hall or a $500 delegation fee? As if the cost wasn’t enough, since my partner and I both work, we are required to make difficult sacrifices to attend these meetings. We both have important tasks we should be doing today that we are not not able to do. Worse, not only are we workers but we are employees, so we need to justify our missed work to our employers. This time and wage cost doesn’t even include the time necessary for writing applications, outlines and the presentations themselves.
The very nature of Islands Trust public engagement is exclusionary and therefore lacks a diversity of opinions. How can you expect to hear from the general public when some members of the public need to face egregious costs and make sacrifices to attend?
Nowhere is this lack of diversity of opinions more clear than in the public engagement around the Trust Policy Statement. Since the statement of Sept. 26, 2023 where the Trust Council announced that they believed that unique amenities were “broad-ranging and may include issues such as, but not limited to, housing, livelihoods, infrastructure and tourism,” a handful of voices have been frequent attendees at Trust Council meetings to speak out against protection of housing and livelihoods. Meanwhile, the folks who need their housing and livelihoods protected are unable to attend due to the difficulties in attending these meetings.
So let’s talk about the Trust Policy Statement. That statement from Sept. 26, 2023 was amazing. Finally, we heard a statement from the Islands Trust that recognized not only working-class livelihoods but the need to house them and build infrastructure to support them! A statement from the Islands Trust that recognized that the Trust Area, its unique amenities and its environment are three pieces of a whole! Unfortunately, such a statement cannot go unanswered, and so the same small number of voices have been showing up at Trust Council meetings to let us all know that no, the environment must come first, and adding any mention of protecting the workers of the Trust Area weakens environmental protections.
When the Islands Trust was created in 1974, the largest threat to the Gulf Islands was, by far, overdevelopment. The Islands Trust stopped that, undoubtedly a good thing. However, in 2025, overdevelopment has to compete with climate change, drought and gentrification for the greatest threat to the Trust Area. Unfortunately, while I and many others see gentrification as the current greatest threat to the Trust Area, there are those that consistently weaponize the fear of overdevelopment against any attempt to build any sort of densification. Due to the unforgiving laws of supply and demand, the limited housing in the Gulf Islands has quickly spiralled out of the reach of even the hardest-working and hardest-saving workers. How can the Islands Trust claim to be protecting the Trust Area when working-class islanders, the folks who built these islands and provide the services needed to make them functioning communities, are struggling with unaffordable, unsustainable, unsuitable housing?
The Islands Trust must make greater efforts to support all members of the Trust Area. The Trust Council and the Local Trust Committees must ensure delegations and town halls are accessible to all members of the public, and commit to reaching out to the public if they are not able to make sufficient strides in accessibility. More importantly, the Trust Council must recognize that the Trust Policy Statement must include protections for rural workers, rural livelihoods and housing. If the Islands Trust excludes protections for rural workers then the Islands Trust is simply facilitating the extirpation of the Gulf Islands worker in favour of gentrification.
It is time for a balanced Trust Policy Statement that balances environmental protection with protections of housing and livelihoods for working-class residents of the Gulf Islands.