By LAURA PATRICK
Islands Trustee, Salt Spring Island
Salt Spring Island is facing a well-documented and increasingly urgent housing challenge. For decades, reports have pointed to a widening gap between local incomes and housing costs. Today, limited rental supply and rising prices are placing real pressure on workers, employers, families, and the overall health of our community.
In response, the Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee (LTC) has initiated a planning project to bring up to date the existing 2008 Official Community Plan (OCP) and 1998 Land Use Bylaws (LUB). This work is intended to provide a plan that better reflects current realities: a deepening affordability crisis, the need for a wider range of attainable housing options, commitments to reconciliation with First Nations, and the growing importance of climate resilience and ecosystem protection.
As part of this process, preliminary analysis and public engagement conducted in the Fall of 2025 examined whether existing regulations continue to align with current knowledge, best practice, and community values. This work included exploring ideas identified in the Islands Trust Housing Options Toolkit, such as appropriate limits on house size, adjustments to lot coverage to reduce environmental impacts, reconsideration of subdivision rules where appropriate, and expanding the types of housing allowed — such as secondary suites, cottages and multifamily housing — in suitable locations.
At the same time, water servicing remains the most immediate constraint on how and where new housing can be built. The partial lifting of the North Salt Spring Water District moratorium presents a rare and time-sensitive opportunity to enable new housing. However, there is currently no clear framework to ensure that new water connections are used for the kind of housing our community most needs, particularly affordable, rental, and workforce housing.
Given the governance structure of improvement districts (which is the regulatory framework the water district operates within) and the province’s policy on them, and the LTC’s limited ability to guide how this scarce resource is allocated, we see a real risk that available capacity may not be used in a strategic way.
At our March 19, 2026 meeting the LTC proposed a constructive step: requesting that the Province of British Columbia appoint an independent housing advisor to work collaboratively with the committee under the Housing Supply Act.
This approach has precedent. The province has demonstrated a willingness to work with communities facing housing challenges, including through the appointment of independent advisors in places such as North Saanich. While Local Trust Committees are not subject to provincially mandated housing targets, the scale and urgency of Salt Spring’s housing needs are well understood.
The role of an advisor is not punitive — it is supportive, bringing professional expertise, experience and capacity to the table. In other communities, advisors have helped build on existing work, identified practical solutions, and accelerated progress where local capacity is limited.
Salt Spring’s elected officials and the Trust staff have already completed significant groundwork. However, translating ideas into concrete policy and regulations — particularly updates to the OCP and LUB — has proven challenging, in part due to limited capacity. An independent advisor could help bridge that gap.
Most importantly, this support could help us address the disconnect between infrastructure constraints — especially water — and housing priorities, ensuring that limited servicing capacity is aligned with demonstrated community needs.
If we want Salt Spring Island to remain a diverse and inclusive community where workers, families and seniors can continue to live and contribute, we need an OCP and a set of land use bylaws that are up to today’s challenges. If we want to preserve and protect our island environment we need to halt the damage being done to ecosystems by housing development right now because of inadequate outdated regulations. Partnering with the province to bring additional expertise and capacity to this work is a practical and constructive way forward.