By ERIC MARCH

Adherence to the status quo is hugely problematic for a significant portion of Salt Spring Island’s population, and vilifying those who hope for more equitable housing solutions as “seeking urban amenities and growth” or wanting big box stores, bigger apartment buildings and fast food chains is unhelpful and dehumanizing.

One-third of Salt Springers live in some sort of housing need. Some have tried to discredit or minimize this statistic, but it comes from the Southern Gulf Islands Tourism Partnership’s Short-Term Rental Impact Report released in mid-September 2025, using housing data from the 2021 census. It states: “We recommend interpreting the available data as suggesting that there is something closer to ~1,695 households currently living in unaffordable, unsuitable and/or inadequate housing, and for whom there is currently no realistic alternative (until rental vacancy rates improve).” This statistic is discussed on pages 28, 29 and 30 of the report.

It defines affordable housing as costing less than 30 per cent of before-tax household income, adequate housing as not being in need of major repairs, and suitable as having enough bedrooms. These are not households that “simply need a roof repair” as was suggested to me recently. These are households who are having to make unreasonable sacrifices to afford rent or mortgage payments. These are families where children are not able to have their own bedrooms. These are retirees and working folks trying to make a home in buildings with severe and potentially dangerous structural defects.

For some this may be academic or abstract. There are plenty of people on this island privileged enough to only encounter folks in housing need on the other side of a till, waiting their table, waving their car onto a ferry or any of the other impersonal proletarian encounters one may have in a day.

But I have been a member of that third. I know numerous people in that third. While there has always been nonconforming housing on our nonconformist islands, forcing much of our working class into it as their only choice is a new phenomenon. Approximately 3,729 people are struggling with housing, valuable and beloved members of our community, hard-working members of our community, seniors who have contributed to our community and deserve a secure retirement.

Brazilian environmentalist Chico Mendes famously stated that “Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.” I think this is an incredibly valuable sentiment to express in the context of Salt Spring Island, our housing crisis, our participation in the draft Trust Policy Statement, and our official community plan (OCP) and land use bylaw (LUB) update.

I think it is important because from where I stand, Salt Spring Islanders are united in their desire to live in a community that preserves and protects the natural environment, but are fractured down class lines. What many folks seem to fail to realize is that Salt Spring Island is very much a pay-to-play community. If you have the available capital it is not a big deal to buy land, clear it of trees, build a 5,000-square-foot, five-bedroom, six-bathroom house with irrigated landscaping and high flow waterfall showers. However, if someone lacks the capital to buy a property worth a million or more, for example retirees looking to downsize, or a worker looking to get into the market or find a decently priced rental, life is much more difficult.

That is the status quo. Not one of equity, but one of gross overdevelopment of single-family homes built into our OCP and LUB, while workforce housing of any type is an exception that must be passed through local government at great expense.

Certain groups on the island are heavily invested in keeping the status quo. They seem uninterested in managing growth or density to ensure equity, they simply want to set a growth cap and let fall what may below it. They seem uninterested in stopping the proliferation of large, resource-consuming luxury mansions, but keen on ensuring workforce housing is done slowly, in limited amounts, in extremely limited locations.

Worst of all, they seem bent on painting anyone who questions their plans for our community as wanting to destroy our community. This last thing is actively damaging our community more than a lack of housing ever could. When I try to get friends or coworkers to come to meetings or participate I am often met with the idea that the Islands Trust is built to protect the rich and the retired, and there is no point in speaking out, or that the Islands Trust just exists to say no to working folks. When I stand up at meetings and speak out I often have at least a few but sometimes several folks come and tell me they appreciated me speaking out, that they were afraid to speak out because they might be shamed for doing so.

Wanting attainable housing that is affordable, adequate and suitable is not an unreasonable ask.

It is definitely not comparable to wanting to urbanize our rural community, nor is it something worth shaming people over. It’s time to have an honest look at our Trust Policy Statement, OCP, LUB and the way we speak to and about the people most negatively affected by the status quo. One-third of Salt Spring Island residents live in some sort of housing need, and that just isn’t right.

The writer is a working-class advocate living and working on Salt Spring Island.

The following forms part of a Galiano resident’s letter to Islands Trust trustees and staff and sent to the Driftwood for publication.

By AKASHA FOREST

On the subject of “unique amenities,” I suggest the Trust has wrongly included development in its working definition of unique amenities. 

Please list my opposition to the 2023 working definition:  will “include, but not be limited to, housing livelihoods, infrastructure, and tourism.” I base my opposition on an excellent Trust discussion paper, cited below, that includes the history of First Nations’ curating of the Trust’s unique amenities.

Simply put, development activities are not unique amenities. Every community across the country has economic, development, tourism and housing infrastructure amenities and/or needs for them. Each Trust island has land use bylaws that provide opportunities for meeting islanders’ needs for housing and economic activity, which can be updated without the need to erase the meaning of unique amenities.

The Islands Trust Discussion Paper – The Islands Trust Object, Past, Present and Future – from March 2021 clearly delineates the unique amenities of the Trust Area. The last sentence: “Residential, commercial or tourism development appropriate to the services and lifestyle of the islands can, in this way, be steered to the most suitable areas” in fact advises ‘steering’ development to areas that will not damage the unique amenities.

The unique amenities of the Trust Area are its natural environment, curated since time immemorial by First Nations. 

The 2021 discussion paper further illustrates how far afield the Trust has deviated from its primary task.

“At the time of the formation of the Islands Trust in 1974, the government of the day recognized the importance of the unique ‘amenities’ of the lands and waters. There was understanding that the environment of the area was fragile and could be greatly impacted by development and resource extraction or overuse. However, it was not acknowledged or understood that this unique environment was the result of thousands of years of active cultivation and stewardship by Indigenous peoples.”

Throughout its 47 years of preserving and protecting the Trust Area, the Islands Trust has consistently failed to recognize or acknowledge resource gathering areas, spiritual places, medicinal plant areas and culturally significant species. The Islands Trust has managed the Islands Trust Area with a disconnected, single-species view of the ecological landscape versus a relational, interconnected acknowledgement of what truly makes the Islands Trust Area unique. Indigenous ways of knowing are not only important to reconciliation efforts but also to the effective stewardship of these lands and waters.

In 1992, the Islands Trust encapsulated the views of the public in a summary report on the Islands Trust public forums called These Islands of Ours . . . Framing Our Common Future. At the public forums, people listed “history and archaeological heritage” and “archaeological record” as key attributes they valued about the Trust Area.

At a time of rapid climate change, in a time of recognition that reconciliation requires stewardship and restitution of First Nations’ largely unceded lands, and in a time of development pressures that have existed in the Trust Area since before the formation of the Islands Trust in 1974, the Trust must find leadership to enact its mandate of “preserve and protect.”

The road to hell is almost certainly paved with “best practices.” 

We might pick on BC Ferries for rolling out a “what we heard” document mentioning the Vesuvius homeporting issue months after a decision had already been made, but the islander’s eternal torment — of being defined by the interpretations of others, rather than by our own authentic selves — comes indeed from all sides.

As we watched the rocky “harmonization” of public notice policies among our delightfully varied Islands Trust area communities, it struck us: in many of our important moments, we are beginning to substitute completion of a standardized process for understanding or support of an issue.

It is to our collective detriment. The idea that Trust-wide “best practices” could be happily dragged from one island to the next was a manifestation of perhaps the purest optimism — and should charitably be praised for its attempt at frugality. 

But it reflects a wider tendency toward substituting standards for legitimacy, and it demeans the individuality of each island. 

Keeping islanders informed is so vitally important that our legislation prescribes very specific means by which it should be done.

And we can agree that times change, and processes should meaningfully change with them, but under the mantle of modernization and austerity, that sliver of public engagement is being — explicitly — whittled down to the minimum needed to survive a lawsuit.  

The use of standardized community engagement as reputation management could perhaps be expected in BC Ferries’ case — the power dynamic between a handful of islanders and the vast province-wide system is apparent to anyone who can count — but it is far more disappointing to see our Islands Trust reduce policy to risk management.

Being able to say there has been “a thing” has become more important than what that thing is meant to accomplish; a public notice process crafted to frugally meet legal minimums is as saddening as “best practice” engagement set too late in a timeline for islanders’ input to be meaningfully incorporated — and as doomed as a presumption that one island’s needs could be met in precisely the same manner as every other’s.  

Like any process, there is likely a way to improve public notice policy. But we doubt it will be found within a framework of legal minimums, austerity or homogenization.