By JENNIFER MARGISON
At the Dec. 2 quarterly Trust Council meeting, our organization — Friends of the Gulf Islands — presented the urgent need for Growth Limits Assessments across the Islands Trust Area.
The region experienced an extraordinary 27 per cent population increase between 2016 and 2021, intensifying environmental pressures at a time when the Trust still lacks a comprehensive build-out analysis to determine how much development the islands can realistically sustain.
We also addressed the inclusion of floor area ratio (FAR) in the draft Trust Policy Statement (TPS), the document that guides all local official community plans (OCPs) and bylaws. The draft TPS has received first reading, and the public may comment until Feb. 6, 2026.
FAR regulates total floor area rather than the number of dwellings. For example, with a 5,000-square-foot limit, a landowner might be able to build one 5,000-square-foot home or several smaller homes totalling 5,000 square feet. The draft TPS glossary explicitly defines density as including FAR, and several directives reference FAR-based tools such as “clustered housing.”
A trustee questioned our statement that FAR appears in the draft TPS, and other members of the public who spoke had similar concerns dismissed. Under this framework, adding more dwellings where previously only one was permitted would not constitute an increase in density — meaning long-standing density limits in OCPs and bylaws would no longer apply.
This represents a major shift away from the traditional density model based on the number of dwellings per lot. Such a change could substantially increase development potential, despite the absence of a Trust-wide analysis evaluating the islands’ capacity to accommodate more people and activity. Such density changes would likely increase land values, just as they have in urban areas.
Meanwhile, Salt Spring and Gabriola are already undergoing OCP reviews in which schemes to increase density are being promoted by some trustees through planning documents like “Re-imagining Growth on Gabriola,” well in advance of any approval of the draft TPS. This has understandably created concern in those communities.
Our delegation urged the Trust to begin with the basics: determine how much growth is already embedded in existing zoning before contemplating density tools that could increase development even further.
The Islands Trust’s legislated mandate is to preserve and protect. That cannot be achieved without clarity, transparency and an honest conversation about what is in the draft TPS — and what its implications truly are.
The writer is president of the Friends of the Gulf Islands Society.