A petition to the Province of British Columbia
We, the undersigned, call on the Province of British Columbia to abolish the Islands Trust and return land-use planning authority to accountable, elected local government.
61 islanders have signed the petition.
Incorporation is what one island can pursue for itself under current BC law. It can improve local accountability, but it does not end the Islands Trust levy or solve every Trust-wide problem; Bowen Island demonstrates that limit.
Abolition is province-wide statutory change that only the Province can make. This project's near-term work is building documented public support and a checkable evidence record. Candidate recruitment and paid promotion are paused during the election-law review.
Official community plans and land-use bylaws stay in force until a successor government amends or repeals them: BC's Local Government Act s. 34(2) continues local trust committee bylaws as bylaws of a new island municipality "until … amended or repealed by the council," and s. 22(2)(c) does the same for dissolved bodies. Regional districts — the general local government for every other rural area in BC — take over planning with the same OCP and zoning powers (ss. 472 & 479), and already provide local services to island communities today. Abolition removes the extra layer — not your plans, not your protections.
Salt Spring is the largest unincorporated community in British Columbia — bigger than 107 of BC's 161 municipalities. It has voted down incorporation twice. The Province's own analysis shows why the second vote mattered to every other island in the Trust.
Bowen incorporated in 1999 and stayed inside the Islands Trust. Nobody has ever formally reviewed how that turned out. Here is the record — including the finding that the fiscal grievance does not survive contact with the evidence.
Thetis Island's elected trustees did everything the land-use system asks: years of hearings, a unanimous rejection, a formal request to the Minister. The Province licensed the industrial shellfish site anyway. On Thetis, the Trust layer delivers process, cost, and delay — but when it matters, not control.
Gambier Island, a Howe Sound community of roughly 150 year-round residents with no central road network, carries a full second layer of government — two elected trustees, Islands Trust planning staff, an Advisory Planning Commission, and provision for a Board of Variance — that holds veto power over land use but could only write letters when the island needed a dock repaired or internet delivered. Its flagship "targeted" bylaw review has run since September 2022 and was still in public consultation in mid-2026, with no adopted bylaw and a survey deadline of August 31, 2026.
North Pender Island shows what the Islands Trust model looks like in slow motion: a housing problem the Trust itself says has run "for more than a decade" before a dedicated response began, a complaint-driven enforcement system carrying a multi-year backlog, and broad land-use power that stops exactly where residents' most urgent needs begin. All of it is funded by a budget rising 8.1 per cent per household — one that even North Pender's own trustee suggested voting down to force the province to listen.
South Pender's elected trustee asked Trust Council, on the record, to hold spending at pre-pandemic levels — and was outvoted by trustees from other islands while the budget climbed from $9.1 million to $11.8 million. The record since then shows an institution that grew its tax take while closing its nearest walk-in office and drafting agriculture out of its policy statement.
The Islands Trust spent five years and a lawsuit trying to remove a private dock in Scottie Bay, defeating a second rezoning attempt in May 2025 — two months before a floatplane crash closed Lasqueti's only ferry dock and that same private dock became how marooned islanders got home. Paired with an enforcement system whose only escalation is court and land-use rules that leave guest cabins empty amid a housing shortage, the saga shows a process that is slow, discretionary, and disconnected from the island's ferry-dependent reality.
Gabriola Island has spent nearly three decades governed by a community plan the Islands Trust itself says has not been updated since 1997, while the Trust's own research documented a deepening housing crisis and its bylaw staff estimated hundreds of unlawful dwellings it lacks the capacity to address. Housing advocates and conservationists disagree about almost everything except this: the process is not delivering.
Salt Spring Island declared a housing crisis, and the Islands Trust's own volunteer task force then told it publicly that it moves too slowly to meet one. From a six-month wait for a single staff report, to a community-plan rewrite its consultant walked away from, to a water system that stopped taking new connections in 2014, Salt Spring is the case study in an institution whose pace has become the problem.
Saturna Island pays a share of the Islands Trust budget more than double its population share into an institution whose costs have outrun inflation for decades, whose local committee is chaired by a trustee another island elected, and whose enforcement regime drew formal recommendations from BC's Ombudsperson. Drawn entirely from the Trust's own pages, local press, and Saturna residents' documented record, this is the case against the institution — not against the elected islanders inside it.
Galiano Island's experience under the Islands Trust is not a story of an agency losing in court — it is a story of process: a forest-zoning rule litigated across three decades, a community-backed affordable housing project that took seven years from first application to title transfer, and an enforcement system of three staff for an entire archipelago. The record suggests a governance layer that is slow and litigation-prone even when it ultimately wins.
Between 2022 and 2025 the Islands Trust closed Mayne Island's walk-in office and ended print newspaper public notices, leaving islanders to track development decisions through a website and a Facebook page the local paper noted had 974 followers. Mayne's own elected trustee had already told Trust Council that "people are not happy with the Islands Trust" — an unease with a paper trail on the island going back to at least 2011.