Islands Trust Elections

JS McIntosh-Fash – Lasqueti Island

1. If elected, what will you do to sustain the health of our islands’ ecosystems – as per the Trust Object and as made explicit in the Trust Policy Statement?

My absolute best! Healthy ecosystems are the basis of liveable futures for our islands, which makes them an objectively constraining consideration for all viable land use planning. The Trust Object echoes this in the form of a legal constraint, which helps protect it from being eroded by shorter-term interests. And on Lasqueti, this is a priority the community has already made clear. In our most recent community-led OCP review, Lasquetians asked to conserve the full range of our terrestrial and marine ecosystems, keep our forests connected, restore native forest understory, ask the Province to protect all unencumbered Crown land, undertake watershed planning, and encourage private landowner stewardship and covenants. Ecosystem health is one of the clearest places where facts, laws, and local values all align towards being a critical factor in every land use decision.

Water in particular would be my area of focus as an incoming Trustee. It’s the clearest limiting biophysical factor for how many people and what kinds of land use this island can sustain, relevant to every future question of land use planning, and the place our existing information is thinnest. The Trust’s regional groundwater mapping includes Lasqueti, but found too little groundwater information here to build more than a simple model, and none of the provincial observation wells in the study are on our island. Lasqueti is a unique case due to our self-reliant off-grid lifestyles, and how we go about measuring water here should reflect that. It would be inappropriate for blanket data to be used against dry parcels with people still sustainably living on them, for example. I would propose water education opportunities, and consideration for a community-shaped water budget (more on this in questions 4 and 5).

Beyond water, I’d keep strengthening the working relationship between the Trust, the Islands Trust Conservancy, and our Lasqueti Island Nature Conservancy (LINC), with a particular interest in collaborations that help landowners understand their conservation options – from conservation covenants to the Trust’s Natural Area Protection Tax Exemption to voluntary land donations. Roughly 10–12% of the Lasqueti Local Trust Area is protected, but only about 6% of Lasqueti Island itself – and nearly all of that island land exists because neighbours donated it, left it in their wills, or raised the money themselves. The Trust can support people in choices towards these and related initiatives.

2. How do you define the term “unique amenities” used in the Trust Object?

I read “unique amenities” as the human side of the Object: what makes an island distinctly itself in a cultural sense. On Lasqueti, that means our off-grid and self-sufficient ways of life, a foot-passenger-only ferry, the Freestore and community food sharing, our habit of working out disputes as neighbours with education over enforcement, low-density rural land use, and the cultural landscape of millennia of First Nations presence on this island (First Nations themselves being governments and rights-holders, not amenities – but their heritage is part of what the Trust exists to protect). It does not mean housing, tourism, or infrastructure as such. Every community needs those, so they aren’t unique, and I don’t agree with the 2023 Trust Council interpretation that folded them in.

While I recognize and appreciate the intent behind the historical reading of “unique amenities” to include areas of special ecological importance as well, I find this interpretation redundant, since “natural environment” covers all ecologies with equal measure and is clearly stated next in the Object. My sense is that it’s in fact the project of balancing the tension between the two – our unique ways of life and our critical ecosystems – that is the ambitious, open-question mandate of the Trust, and the commitment to ever-unfolding exactly that dilemma into balance is the true foundation of sustainability.

This tension was also the core axis of Lasqueti’s most recent OCP review, where ecological limits and social continuity both came through strongly, and where we defined “sustainable” as including “stewardship and balance.” In our case, the Lasquetian way of life is already low-impact, and strengthening our community’s self-determination has generally gone hand in hand with preserving and protecting the natural environment.

3. Will you commit to producing a development build-out report for your island if one is not available? This report would be a calculation of the maximum number of dwellings that could be built on the island under current zoning. From that an estimated island population can be calculated.

I support producing an aggregate build-out capacity figure for Lasqueti as part of finishing our Community Plan review, with its assumptions made public, so that the community can see clearly how our current rules compare to what the island can sustain. Lasqueti is well below our permitted development limit, and we already know roughly by how much. The closest existing figure is a 2013 Islands Trust staff report that found subdivision under our current rules could add about 860 lots, taking us from 376 to 1,236 – against a population of 498 in the 2021 census. That gap largely hasn’t been filled because Lasquetians haven’t wanted it filled. There’s a strong consensus signal on this island for maintaining our existing low-density subdivision “in order to protect and preserve our natural environment,” and for every subdivided parcel to pass its own sustainability test – adequate firewood, fresh water, soil, and waste assimilation. That’s a build-out advisory limit written from the ground up.

Rather than curbing present risks of ballooning development, our live housing question is more in the realm of how to hold onto our low density while making room for secure, long-term housing, so that seniors can age in place with support and younger people and those on lower incomes can build stable lives on this island. A community-led water budget would give Lasquetians critical information towards arriving at those answers, appropriately bounded by ecological limits and without introducing unnecessary risk along the way. I fully support build-out reports with built-in protections for vulnerable populations on islands where development has clearly outpaced ecological baselines, for the benefit of the entire Trust Area.

4. Carrying capacity can be defined as the number of people each island can support without causing loss of functioning natural ecosystems on that island. Carrying capacity should also consider how many people can be supported by existing water supplies, ferry systems and other essential infrastructure. Would you support an analysis of the carrying capacity of your island and set a limit on the number of residences accordingly in your OCP?

I would support building towards a carrying capacity analysis of our island, beginning pragmatically with a community-led water budget, since Trust funding constraints require focus and water is where Lasqueti’s limits actually bite. It’s worth noting that the Trust’s own 2022 Governance Review named this same gap Trust-wide: there has never been a comprehensive analysis of the Trust Area’s capacity to sustain its current population, including the adequacy of its water supply. Lasquetians explicitly rejected an OCP amendment for determining density by carrying capacity in our 2020 review, but I would support the commissioning of the baseline information on water that can be added to the table for consideration in all land use decisions and future iterations of our density conversations in an ongoing way.

5. What weight would you give to water quality and quantity problems when considering rezoning properties on your island to a higher density?

Heavy weight. On an off-grid island where every household sources its own water – rain, storage, surface water and wells – the responsibility of any density decision depends directly on evidence that the water is there. Given the community’s emphasis on ecosystem protection, its historical directive for private costs covering private projects, and a lack of whole-island data, applications for rezoning should have a reasonable basis for showing the water is sufficient – especially through August and September, when our streams generally stop running and summer life here comes down to storage.

In terms of a proactive LTC that can commission its own baseline water information, it’s important to remember that measuring water is sensitive. Blanket derived data could be used to the detriment of dry parcels – refused applications, hazard designations, lower property values – where certain ways of living off-grid may have considerations that overall policy doesn’t capture. Under BC’s Water Sustainability Act, water rights run on “first in time, first in right.” Household wells don’t need a licence, but they’re treated as holding rights from the date they were first used, so if the Province ever declared a shortage, the rights of older wells would come before newer ones. A study that treats water as a fixed pie could quietly shift risk onto newer and younger households – exactly the people we’re trying to keep here. The question is how to measure sustainable water capacity without inadvertently creating a blunt instrument.

We wouldn’t be starting from scratch. In 2012, Lasquetians proposed the formation of neighbourhood watershed groups to map their catchment, set goals, and potentially share storage costs. Pete’s Lake Water Users Society has run a shared, volunteer-governed water system since 1987. Lasquetians know how to build robust processes from the ground up, such as our most recent OCP review, conducted through seven public forums that drew over 200 attendances on an island of around 400 people at the time. Water, being our primary biophysical constraint, is a future worth considering together.

In this spirit, a Lasqueti-attuned water budget could determine a study design towards getting clear data on biophysical constraints within considerations of local relevance, like deciding how data is gathered and used before any of it is collected. In collaboration with staff, the Trust could then support a strong example of locally adaptive environmental assessment.

6. Do you think environmental reports paid for by development applicants are sufficient when determining impacts on the natural environment?

They’re certainly an essential starting point that places the onus of cost correctly on the private developer rather than the public taxpayer, and provide a benefit of information to all that wouldn’t otherwise be commissioned. Lasqueti’s Community Plan already puts these costs on the proponent (“the community rate payer will not cover costs associated with a private initiative”). In the majority of cases on Lasqueti when these reports are conducted in good faith, they can be sufficient, and over-formalizing creates unnecessary overhead for small projects. However, it’s clear that this approach also leaves room for exploitation at the environment and community’s cost when conflicts of interest are at play, since the person paying for the report is also the one who benefits from its conclusions. For higher-risk applications near freshwater, shorelines, or sensitive ecosystems, I would support proposing a required step of peer review by a Qualified Environmental Professional selected by the Local Trust Committee and paid for by the applicant, with a fee cap and the LTC setting the scope up front so applicants know what’s expected before they spend. I strongly support finding a solution to this gap, with this as one option among several, and the final approach needing to be shaped by community consultation.

7. Which Governance Review Report recommendations do you believe would best support improving Trust Council’s effectiveness?

I believe Trust Council’s effectiveness would be best served by focusing its Trust-wide mandate and Policy Statement on the minimal set of constraints that properly bound ‘Preserve and Protect’ – biophysical capacities for functioning ecosystems, irreplaceable heritage including archaeological sites, and a ceiling on the scale of development and servicing that keeps the islands rural – and returning the rest of its considerations to Local Trust Committees. Within those bounds, each island’s way of life is its own to determine. The 2022 Governance Review points this way itself. It found that “whenever possible, it works best when local issues are dealt with at the local level.” Much of the needed reform comes downstream of pruning the Policy Statement to what truly belongs at the Trust-wide level to protect its essential mandate, and then organizing Council around what remains.

I back Recommendation 11: a multi-year plan that ties priorities to the budget, with real performance measures – which the Review found are “largely absent.” Residents should be able to see what the Trust committed to, what it cost, and whether it worked, including which of the Review’s own recommendations Council has acted on, which it has declined, and why.

I also strongly back trustee education – briefings for candidates before an election and workshops once elected (Recommendations 6 and 7). This is a unique government body and it isn’t straightforward to understand, though trustees must understand it to deliberate on their own structural questions, like the Policy Statement review.

Consensus-oriented, deliberative decision-making is very important: fewer, better-focused committees (Recommendations 4 and 5), agendas and briefings built for dialogue rather than hundreds of unread pages (Recommendation 8), and time for new trustees to know one another before electing leadership (Recommendation 1).

I support fair compensation (Recommendation 15), “so that Trust Council is not the preserve only of those who do not need to earn a living” – it makes the job accessible to younger people without supplementary retirement or property income.

On First Nations representation (Recommendation 9), I’d hold to the sequence the Review itself sets out – the Province should act only “following consultation with the appropriate First Nations,” and the Trust should work with Nations to identify roles that are “appropriate and meaningful.” It’s worth knowing that the Review was built on interviews with trustees and staff; public consultation was outside its scope, and it doesn’t indicate that any First Nation was consulted. It’s unclear that co-governance is served by adding seats to Trust Council – a few seats designed across the roughly 30 Nations with territory in the Trust Area, without Nations’ input on whether this is the best way to involve them, risks tokenism. The Trust is also a harder body to interface with than a regional district: it’s a land use regulator spread across 13 local committees with their own plans and bylaws, so a single Nation can face referrals from many separate processes at once. First Nations should be offered real options for how they want to interface with the Islands Trust, and be brought into relationship, before they’re hooped into responding to consultation requests on every single bylaw. I’d advocate for Indigenous-led engagement to design that relationship – when the nearby Island Coastal Economic Trust faced the same question, an Indigenous-led process invited every Nation in its region to define what inclusion should look like. Municipal interface is a live question across the Province, the Islands Trust is a further step of complexity given its unique structure, and the form of relationship that best serves reconciliation is far from straightforward or up to Trust Council to decide independently.

8. Would you support an amendment to the Trust Policy Statement to make protecting the natural environment paramount in land use decisions?

I certainly support the Trust Object, and I would support an amendment to its interpretation in the Trust Policy Statement that strengthens the existing priority on the natural environment by ensuring its definition involves upholding the set of biophysical constraints necessary for ecosystemic health. In this way, protections of the natural environment ground protections for unique amenities, and this is the correct nesting order for foundational balance. This would have little impact on Lasqueti, which still has some of the most intact contiguous forest and least-disturbed shoreline in the Gulf Islands. In our most recent OCP review, the community placed the environment at the foundation of everything, structuring it as the base layer in a nested consideration structure beneath resources, community, and land use. Notably, this was possible without ever voting for “environment over everything”. This is because priority on protecting our unique amenities and way of life is also what has kept so much of this island intact. Here, I nod again to the critical balance of unique amenities and natural environments in the Object, and to Trust Council’s 2023 statement calling for “a reasoned recognition of all the elements”. Lasqueti is a prime example of a place where protecting self-determination has also generally served strong environmental protections in the end.

9. In your opinion, what is the role of Reconciliation in the context of the Islands Trust mandate of preservation and protection? Please provide a concrete example of how you envision this working at the Local Trust Committee level.

In my opinion, any responsible action to “Preserve and Protect” the Trust Area requires an understanding of what we are inheriting – both how this land was sustained for thousands of years, and how “we” came to hold this mandate in the first place. People lived on Xwe’etay for at least 7,000 years, with a peak population estimated between 800 and 2,200 – more than live here now – and they actively tended this place through clam gardens, fish traps, and managed plant communities. Much of this knowledge has surfaced to settlers through islander Dana Lepofsky’s work since 1989, which grew into the Xwe’etay/Lasqueti Archaeology Project, an extraordinary feat of community-held archaeology guided by First Nations partners and which has built real relationships between our communities along the way. The Islands Trust was created in 1974 as rapid development began to encroach on island life, and by the Trust’s own account there’s no record that First Nations were part of that conversation. Its mandate was updated to first name First Nations in 2021. My personal reading is that the Trust has functionally been, without quite saying so, an attempt to recover a kind of stewardship that was already here and was decimated by colonization. And those original stewards are still here, with jurisdictions that presently overlap ours across the Trust Area. So, our mandate to ‘Preserve and Protect’ these lands is impossible without Reconciliation – from an informational standpoint lacking traditional knowledge, and on the Object’s own terms, since it purports to exist “for the benefit of the residents of the Trust Area,” and First Nations are among those residents. From a jurisdictional standpoint, the Trust’s legitimacy hinges on reconciliation. More than anything, reconciliation is our unequivocal relational responsibility.

Beyond my opinion, reconciliation is another area where facts, laws, and local values largely align on Lasqueti. A consensus signal for strengthening First Nations relations carried through from our 2005 Community Plan into the 2020 review – one of the sections that islanders both kept and strengthened, adding archaeological heritage to what we conserve and asking for proactive consultation with Nations on land use, zoning, and heritage. It’s also part of our legal operating environment, not an optional value. DRIPA binds the Province, and the Province’s statutes bind us: the Islands Trust Act names First Nations in the Object, and the Local Government Act requires us to consider consultation when preparing an OCP.

At the LTC level, based on Lasquetians’ recent asks, that community-led work can be supported through participating in relationship building, supporting collaborative educational opportunities, creating guides for explaining landowner choices around topics like pre-build assessments and voluntary land back donations, and a commitment to orderly, fair and respectful town hall meetings, with clear rules applied evenly to everyone so that every member of our community can freely participate, including our First Nations partners. Places where land use decisions involve jurisdictional collaboration are critical opportunities for systemic reconciliation, and pre-existing good standing in our personal relations will support the capacity for mutually deliberative processes between our communities, protocols that protect everyone involved, and a pace that can allow for transparency and trust-building.

10. What would you strive to accomplish during your four-year term?

A trustee’s core job is land use decision-making: stewarding our Community Plan and the bylaws that follow from it. Everything discussed above concerns what should inform those calls. Within the job’s actual scope, I will strive to: Complete the Community Plan update that the community started in 2018. Build the water knowledge it rests on, on the community’s terms. Support social continuity on Lasqueti, including pathways towards security for long-term rentals. Strengthen First Nations relations and shared process, as islanders asked for in 2005 and again in 2020. Make every decision’s reasons public and every process navigable, starting with plain-language civic tools for understanding how land use actually works on Lasqueti. And take a full part in the restructuring at Trust Council, standing for the balance Lasqueti already lives: local self-determination and strong environmental protection, together.