This is the strongest case for the Islands Trust that the evidence supports. It was written by someone who wants the Trust abolished. No complete, sourced defence of the institution was on offer anywhere, so this one was built from the same data the opposing campaign uses.
British Columbia created the Islands Trust in 1974 during intense pressure for subdivision. The problem it was built for was never one destructive project. It was the transformation of a finite archipelago through thousands of individually reasonable decisions. One subdivision, one cleared acre, one more well. No single application has to look catastrophic for the result to become irreversible.
The Islands Trust Act, s.3, answers that by imposing a duty wider than any one owner or island: "The object of the trust is to preserve and protect the trust area and its unique amenities and environment for the benefit of the residents of the trust area and of British Columbia generally, in cooperation with municipalities, regional districts, improvement districts, First Nations, other persons and organizations and the government of British Columbia." (Islands Trust Act, RSBC 1996 c.239)
And here is the difficulty with that argument: the Trust's own 2022 governance review found that "key partners, most notably First Nations and representatives of province-wide interests, are absent from decision-making." The Act names a province-wide beneficiary with no seat at the table. That is a real hole — but the remedy is to seat the province, not to dissolve the duty.
Across the twelve Islands Trust designated places, population grew from 22,538 in 2016 to 26,256 in 2021 — +16.5% in five years. The fastest growth is on the smallest islands, the ones least able to resist a well-funded application: Gambier Island +74%, Mayne Island +37%, Galiano Island +34%. These are the same figures, from the same database, that the abolition campaign publishes. (Statistics Canada, Table 98-10-0012-01, 2021 Census)
The honest qualifier, which the Trust's own supporters do not print: that surge follows a decade of decline. The Trust's own indicator report shows the Trust Area grew 3.38% between 2006 and 2016 against British Columbia's 13.14% — slower than the province — and eight of thirteen local trust areas actually lost population over that decade. So this is a current surge, not a sustained trend. It is still the pressure the institution exists to manage, and it is still running at more than twice the provincial rate. But anyone telling you the islands have been filling up steadily for fifty years is not reading the same data. (State of the Islands Indicator Project, Feb 2020)
As of 2017, 15.7% of the Trust Area land base had been converted for human use — ranging from 1.8% in the Gambier local trust area to 31.4% on Mayne. Roughly 0.8% of the remaining natural land base is converted each decade. The same report puts the ecological threshold for this region at "approximately 30–40%", while noting scientists disagree. On that measure one island has already reached the bottom of the range.
Read carefully, that is a moderate finding rather than an emergency — and it is more persuasive for being moderate. Nothing here is running away. It is moving one direction, slowly, and it does not move back. (same report, p.18)
Most of these islands drink groundwater, and on several a single mapped aquifer sits beneath nearly the whole island. There is no property line underground. On Lasqueti and Texada the Province has mapped no aquifer at all while its own registry records drilled wells there — a gap in the map, not an absence of water.
What that looks like in practice: freedom-of-information requests to the City of Nanaimo established that at least nine million litres of water were trucked to Gabriola Island between May and October 2021, sourced from a Capital Regional District filling station in Langford. Nanaimo confirmed that in a drought its supply to the islands could be rationed or suspended. That work was done by private citizens filing FOI requests, because nobody was collecting it officially. (Friends of the Gulf Islands, FOI delegation, Feb 2023)
This is not a new argument, and the case against the Trust has twice come close. In 1982, Municipal Affairs Minister Bill Vander Zalm introduced Bill 72, whose section 190 read simply "The Islands Trust Act is repealed" — the work to be "carried through very effectively by the Regional Districts". It was introduced without consulting the Trust or island residents, and died on the Order Paper. In 1987 a Select Standing Committee recommended converting the Trust into a regional district; a concurrent Simon Fraser University study recommended instead that it "be retained and strengthened", and the 1989 Act followed the university.
Twice proposed, twice defeated. That is not proof the institution should survive a third time — but it does mean the question has been examined by the legislature before, at length, and answered the same way twice.
The strongest case is not ecological. It is legal, and it is very hard to argue with.
MacMillan Bloedel once owned 55% of Galiano Island. In 1991 it announced it would sell its forestry lands, which were zoned for one dwelling per parcel. The Galiano Local Trust Committee responded in 1992 with a forest zone that prohibited residential use entirely across 63 of the company's properties. MacMillan Bloedel sued, and after a fifteen-day trial it won — the judge found the trustees' stated motives were not their real motives. The Court of Appeal reversed him completely. Finch J.A. held that even a motive "to prevent, or at least to delay residential subdivision" was "clearly within the objects expressed in s. 3 of the Act", and that "an ulterior purpose that is within the ambit of the delegated power is not an improper purpose." The Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear it. Thirty years later, in January 2025, the Court of Appeal upheld the same zoning again. (BCCA, 10 Aug 1995 · 2025 BCCA 15)
The counterfactual is unusually clean: 63 parcels, each otherwise entitled to a dwelling, on an island a forestry company owned more than half of. The Private Managed Forest Land Act permits that dwelling. The bylaw is the only thing that does not.
And it enforces, at least sometimes. On Denman Island a landowner cut trees inside a development permit area along the crest of Komas Bluff without a permit. The Local Trust Committee sued, won, and obtained a mandatory injunction requiring him to restore it. The Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal. (2007 BCCA 536) That is the full chain — designation, breach, litigation, restoration — actually completing, which is the thing critics say never happens.
And on Gabriola, 65 hectares of old-growth Coastal Douglas-fir called S'ul-hween X'pey stand because of a purchase. Its own management plan records that a forestry company "acquired the harvesting rights for surrounding properties in the 1980s, but SXNR itself was not logged", and that BC Parks recognised the area in 1993 yet "the area was never added to the BC Parks ecological reserve system." The land around it was logged. The Province considered protecting it and did not. A Trust body did, in 2006. The Snuneymuxw First Nation excluded the parcel from its treaty settlement to make that possible, and named it. (Management plan)
Here is what does not exist, and not for want of looking: no study has ever compared the Islands Trust Area to comparable coastal British Columbia outside it. No matched comparison, no before-and-after with a control region, by any government, university or environmental organisation, in five decades.
It came closest to existing in 2002. The Province audited its own Sensitive Ecosystems Inventory and divided the study area into five parts — one of which was the Gulf Islands, the other four being the Comox, Nanaimo, Cowichan and Capital regional districts. The comparison group was sitting right there, already surveyed. Then the report says: "comparisons between geographic sub-units… are not statistically valid. For this reason, the data were not analyzed by sub-unit for this report." (Caskey & Henigman, 2002, p.12)
There is one study finding 39% higher bird diversity and 82% more standing carbon inside the Trust Area than outside it — and this page will not lean on it, because the Trust Conservancy paid for it, it makes no causal claim, and its comparison area is metropolitan Victoria and Nanaimo. Comparing ferry-only islands to a highway corridor and crediting the zoning is not evidence. A geographer's 2024 study notes the point that finishes the argument: the Trust excludes Quadra and Cortes precisely because they were "less directly threatened by development" — so the obvious control islands were left out for the very reason that would have made them useful.
That absence is the most important fact on this page, and it cuts both ways with equal force. Nobody can show you the islands were saved. Nobody can show you they would have been fine. Fifty years of a unique institution and no one — not the Province, not a university, not an environmental group, not its critics, not this site — has run the test.
An externally conducted, Trust-commissioned governance review concluded in February 2022 that "Current Trust Council practices, however, do not meet the requirements set by good governance principles" — though the same summary also found "every reason to believe Islands Trust's financial records and practices meet the standards set for a public agency", and the review is now four years old. (Governance Review, February 2022)
The Chief Administrative Officer's own internal review reported 189 meetings supported in 2024 and estimated close to 12,000 staff hours a year on meetings — while noting 189 "isn't an unusual amount" against a five-year average of 175, and flagging the 12,000 as an estimate.
Restriction also costs. A peer-reviewed study of the California Coastal Act found the regime raised multifamily values by about 6% locally and 13% across the regulated area — the amenity argument and the affordability critique in one sentence. Protection has real value, and it is capitalised into prices that price people out. (Severen & Plantinga, J. Urban Economics 107, 2018)
Its own science says the species are still going. A draft Trust report by its own biologist, funded by Environment and Climate Change Canada, assessed seventy populations of species at risk across the islands: 41 declining, 12 possibly extirpated, 11 stable, and nine listed species with no specific safeguards at all. On Salt Spring, with the most developed regulatory framework in the Trust Area, the northern red-legged frog was last recorded in 2005 and the sharp-tailed snake in 1982. Fifty years in, that is the outcome measure that matters most, and it is not good.
Enforcement is losing ground structurally. The Trust's own briefing to Council in February 2023 recorded 598 open bylaw files, 260 opened a year against 179 closed, and 112 formally deferred. By the end of 2024 it was 602 open. And enforcement capacity goes where the complaints are: the Trust reports that proactive enforcement against unlawful short-term rentals "continues to dominate the workload". Its own FAQ notes that no local government in British Columbia is required to enforce its bylaws at all.
A court has held that its broadest forest bylaw was beyond its power. A local trust committee defended five forest bylaws and the Court of Appeal affirmed in part: Bylaw 113 was "not within the legislative competence of the Islands Trust", while the order striking down the other four was set aside and their validity remitted. An earlier version of this page called that a straight loss; it was not, and the correction belongs here rather than in a changelog. The blunter authority is the statute — the Private Managed Forest Land Act s.21 bars local government from restricting forest management on private managed forest land. In the same period a subsidiary of a US insurer bought 30% of one island, and its successor logged inside a covenant setback, taking most of the standing timber before it stopped. (2001 BCCA 736) Roughly 5,125 hectares inside the Trust Area remain Private Managed Forest Land. Municipal governments have asked the Province to change that nine times since 1991.
And the scale is smaller than the rhetoric. About 19.5% of the Trust Area is protected — but the Trust's own conservancy holds only about 8.5% of that, roughly 1,340 hectares, growing at around twenty hectares a year. The rest is provincial and national park. Its land-acquisition Opportunity Fund held $100,329 and took in $4,063 in donations in 2024/25. Its unique tax-exemption covenant programme, genuinely the only one of its kind in British Columbia, had 27 landowners enrolled as of January 2024 — under 1% uptake, with two new covenants registered in all of 2024/25.
Some of the sharpest criticism comes from conservation groups rather than developers. And two sitting trustees were found by the Court of Appeal in 2013 to have voted in conflict of interest, awarding contracts to societies they had themselves incorporated.
Most of these describe how an organisation operates, not whether its purpose is necessary — a hospital can be badly governed without making healthcare unnecessary. But the species decline is not that kind of criticism. It is the outcome the institution exists to produce, and it is going the wrong way.
The Trust's "5,200 square kilometres" is islands and surrounding waters — its own page says the area "encompass[es] the waters and islands of the Salish Sea." Rather than leave a gap, this site worked the land figure out. Statistics Canada publishes a land area for each of the twelve Island Trust Area geographies, and they sum to 716.1 km²: Salt Spring 194.05, Gambier 98.02, Lasqueti 73.32, Galiano 60.13, Gabriola 58.12, North Pender 52.13, Denman 51.50, Saturna 35.71, Thetis 31.67, Hornby 29.95, Mayne 22.35, South Pender 9.10. That is 13.8% of the 5,200; the other 4,484 km² — 86.2% — is water. Bowen Island lies inside the Trust Area but is a municipality doing its own land-use planning, so it is excluded deliberately: counting it would overstate what local trust committees regulate.
The "49% of the Coastal Douglas-fir zone converted" statistic describes destruction that happened almost entirely where the Trust has no jurisdiction — roughly three quarters of British Columbians live in that zone, in Victoria, Nanaimo and the Lower Mainland. Borrowing a city's clearance to justify a rule on an island is a bait-and-switch. The honest inversion is stronger anyway: the islands are what is left of that ecosystem, across all thirteen major islands and the smaller ones around them, largely because nobody could build a highway to them. And the Trust's "more than 300 species at risk" carries no citation, no date and no methodology, so this page does not lean on it. A site insisting every figure be sourced cannot make an exception for the institution it defends.
Three more that a defender would be tempted by. Medicine Beach on North Pender is usually told as a rescue from developers; its own management plan records no development application pending, and the community raised $533,997 to buy it from a family that sold below market. Fairy Fen on Bowen is told the same way, and a reservoir for a golf-course development really was proposed there in the late 1980s — but the project was withdrawn on its own, the land was always Crown land, and protection came by free Crown grant in 2010. Nothing was wrested from anyone. And the Taylor's Checkerspot butterfly on Denman, the only known breeding population in Canada, is real and remarkable — but the land was bought by the Denman Conservancy Association in 2006 by settling its own six-year lawsuit, not by Trust action. The Trust holds a covenant added later. It protects that butterfly now; it did not save it.
And one that gets repeated in the other direction, which is simply false: Bowen Island did not incorporate to escape the Islands Trust. It remains inside the Trust Area as its only island municipality, sends two trustees to Trust Council, submits its official community plan to the Trust Executive Committee, and pays a levy.
One more, and it comes from this side's own advocates. Friends of the Gulf Islands publish, repeatedly, that the Trust Area population "rose from 26,218 to 30,512, representing a 27.0% increase". Those two numbers give 16.4%, not 27%. The 27% is the unweighted average of their thirteen per-island percentages, which counts Gambier's gain of 183 people the same as Salt Spring's eleven thousand residents. It is their most-repeated statistic and it is wrong — and the true figure, 16.4%, is still more than twice the provincial rate and makes the argument perfectly well. This page uses its own figure, 16.5%, computed from Statistics Canada directly.
Islands Trust tax on an average residential property in 2026 is $465–470 outside Bowen Island and $185–195 on Bowen, the island that incorporated (Islands Trust budget). That gap is real and it is the opposition's best number. It is not evidence of waste: Bowen does its own land-use planning, so it pays for Trust Council and region-wide services only — a different basket of goods, not a cheaper price for the same one.
Abolition would return land-use authority to municipalities and regional districts. That is coherent. The real answer is that it disperses one duty among institutions with separate mandates — none of which, acting separately, carries a statutory obligation to weigh cumulative effects across the whole archipelago for the benefit of British Columbia generally. So the question for any abolition model is whether it creates a body with that duty. If it does, it has rebuilt the Islands Trust under another name. If it does not, something real has been given up.
That is the argument, and precision matters about how strong it is. The Trust's demonstrated wins are legal and institutional — zoning that held against a forestry company in court twice, a land-holding body that outlives councils, a tax instrument nobody else in British Columbia has. They are not the case-by-case ecological refusals its supporters describe, which are rare and mostly invisible in the public record. Its own science reports decline. And nobody has ever tested whether it caused any of the difference.
So the honest version is narrower than the one you will hear from its defenders: the duty is worth keeping, the institution has not proven it discharges it, and the case for abolition has never had to meet a measured standard because no one built one. If you think that is too weak to justify keeping it, that is a reasonable place to land. It is roughly where the person who built this site lands. He would rather you got there having read the best version of the other argument first.
We, the undersigned, support the continuation of the Islands Trust. We believe the islands of the Salish Sea are a finite, shared inheritance; that the harm done to them is cumulative rather than dramatic; and that protecting them requires a body with a legal duty to the whole region and to British Columbia generally — not only to whoever holds title today. We support reforming its governance where it has failed. We do not support abandoning the obligation.