Nothing broadens one’s perspective like travel. Last weekend, we went to visit friends on Hornby Island. While we were in the area, we took a tour of Denman and popped over to Gabriola. To round it out, I got into a great discussion with a fellow from Saltspring while returning on the Nanaimo ferry.
Hornby is quite a wonderful place. It has great beaches, magical forests and windswept bluffs overlooking a dramatic ocean. There are only 800 residents in the winter and the population is very stable. The main reasons seem to be that very few families stay on the island while their kids are in high school and because the economic opportunities are extremely limited. There is also the fact that the population jumps to about 5000 in the summer. Apparently, last summer somebody calculated from ferry loads that there were 8000 people on the island one weekend. So the winter people make the lion’s share of their annual income in the summer when every room and campground is full. There is almost no new construction on the island. The Islands Trust has placed a virtual moratorium on new subdivisions. The question one asks is “is it worth it?”. Is it right to arbitrarily stunt the normal growth of a community to keep it locked in some kind of time warp, to preserve and protect it for all British Columbians? In the case of Hornby, the answer is probably yes. You have to visit it to understand but the thought of it turning into a bunch of millionaires’ summer homes and retirement condos is quite repulsive.
Then we visited Denman. It’s not as picturesque as Hornby and it’s only a 10 minute ferry ride from Vancouver Island but it too falls under the same Islands Trust preservation mandate. The current hot topic surrounds a subdivision application. The proposal is to subdivide 2300 acres of land with 1200 acres to be dedicated as a conservancy. The other 1100 acres would be divided into 65 lots. The developer has been working on the proposal for four years. The local trust committee decide to reject the proposal before it went to public hearing. Their reason was that the proposal was too big for Denman. While I can appreciate the trustees might want to see a more creative or sensitive proposal, by Bowen standards, throwing away a 1200 acre land dedication for the sake of a 65 lot subdivision is unbelievable. I’m only going by what I’ve read so I sincerely hope that there’s something more to their rejection than meets the eye.
One thing I found out was that property values have doubled over the last four or five years so moratoriums on subdivision don’t hurt property values. By the way, we saw a waterfront lot there that we fell in love with. It was big and flat and beautiful and next to hayfields. Unfortunately it was also $600,000 so we didn’t buy it.
Our next stop was Courtenay. If there is a special place in hell for those who turn beautiful little towns into 100 car parking lots in front of strip malls, then the developers of the main streets in Courtenay know where they’re going.
Lastly we visited Gabriola Island. It has a population of 4500, and is a 20 minute ferry ride from downtown Nanaimo. In fairness to Gabriola, we were there on a cold wet day but I must say that I couldn’t see much difference between it and the slightly more remote parts of Vancouver Island. What I did find interesting was an article in the local paper. A ruling has just been made in a court case involving the Islands Trust and a local business. The defendant sold water by the truckload to 400 customers on the island. The Islands Trust took them to court to stop them. The Trust lost on all points of their case and were ordered to pay the defendant’s costs. There are undoubtedly aspects to this case that weren’t in the paper but it does tell us that the old myth that you can stop development by declaring water shortages is alive and well and that the Islands Trust should get better legal advice before they start suing people.
I was working on this column on the ferry ride home when I asked Janice if the bluffs we hiked on Hornby could be described as an escarpment. When the fellow next to us offered an opinion I found out that he was from Saltspring Island. When he found out that we were from Bowen his first question was “Did becoming a municipality work out for you?”
I told him how things were going on Bowen. He was particularly interested in how many recent subdivisions there had been and how many were pending. I relayed my stories about what I had observed on other islands and which, I felt, cast the Trust in a pretty poor light. At the end of it, he said that, all things considered, he thought Saltspring should stick with the Islands Trust and not become a municipality. Go figure.
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