By
Elizabeth Nolan
August 5, 2019

Part One:

Salt Spring’s Lions Hall resembled a mini-Clayoquot Sound last December when sign-bearing protesters rippled through and then completely overwhelmed audience seating at the Local Trust Committee meeting.

Some of those involved were veterans of the 1990s “War in the Woods” against old-growth logging on B.C.’s West Coast. This time the fight was personal, with 45 hectares of mature second-growth forest about to be clear-cut on Beddis Road.

Those who turned out for the local government meeting included four young students from the Stowel Lake Farm class, each of whom urged the trustees to maintain forest cover for the sake of biodiversity, climate action and the next generation.

“I think we need to protect the forest because trees have been a big part of our life and they help us, and if we get rid of them we’re just going to be a dead planet,” 11-year-old Sebastian Ralston summed up.

It may be some time since the dramatic arrests of the ‘90s occurred, but forestry practices in British Columbia are as divisive as ever. As the world rushes toward a climate tipping point, a dramatic clash between the resource economy and planetary survival is unfolding. And on Salt Spring Island, where virtually no old-growth remains, the fate of one 45-acre property has come to encapsulate a crisis that has local, regional and global levels.

“We have 10 years turnaround for climate disaster, and if we don’t do something about emissions and protecting the carbon sinks, we’ve had it,” said long-time Salt Springer Briony Penn, an award-winning author, educator and naturalist.

Preserve and Protect

On the practical side, forests are key to maintaining the global carbon balance. Natural Resources Canada lists a range of “essential ecosystem services” that forests provide, which include filtering pollutants from air and water, improving air and water quality, and reducing surface and air temperatures, among other benefits.

Trees also tend to inspire emotional connections. The Beddis Road situation has been especially heartbreaking for neighbours like Peter McAllister and Bernadette Mertens-McAllister, whose property backs directly onto the contested land. Peter is a veteran of anti-logging campaigns in Clayoquot Sound, the Carmanah Valley and Moresby Island, so the whine of the chainsaw and the crash of large timber is a painfully familiar sound. But it’s not something he ever expected to face in his own backyard in the Gulf Islands, where land-use is governed under a “preserve and protect” mandate by the Islands Trust.

Touring the edges of the by-now mostly cleared Beddis parcel this spring, the McAllisters mourned the loss of cedars and firs that may have been close to 200 years old when they were felled, with trunks spanning five to six feet in diameter. Based on the fact the timber was being removed for profit, while the property was zoned for agricultural and residential uses, a group of residents had asked and failed to have the Islands Trust get a court injunction against the logging. They were told the zoning bylaws do not preclude clearing the land of trees, and they were now pondering raising the funds for a citizen-led suit.

“We’re going to take the legal action that it’s the responsibility of the trustees to undertake. But since they’re abrogating their responsibilities, we’re going to have to do it,” McAllister said.

The Islands Trust was created by a provincial NDP government in 1974 with the specific mandate to protect the islands in the southern Strait of Georgia and Howe Sound from over-development. Its local committee meetings have been known to inspire riotous crowds when people are upset by land-use planning decisions, especially when more restrictive bylaws are contemplated.

The group of residents that has been protesting the Salt Spring Local Trust Committee over trees is unusual, though, in comprising those who normally align most with the Trust’s aims: the kind of people who voted in the nation’s first Green party MP in Elizabeth May, and then helped create B.C.’s Green caucus by electing Adam Olsen as MLA.

Many of them participated in the War of the Woods, on Vancouver Island and at home on Salt Spring. Battles for trees in the 1990s and 2000s included the locally infamous situation that would have stripped most of the timber from two mountains on land owned by the Texada Land Corporation. Islanders were moved to chain themselves to machinery and even take off their clothes for the cause. Penn pulled off a modern-day Lady Godiva act, horse and all, during a downtown Vancouver protest, and numerous island women and men took off their clothes for fundraising calendars.

In the end, the campaign was successful and conservation groups managed to fundraise enough money to partner with BC Parks to protect a large area that included endangered Garry oak ecosystems. The problem with local government’s inability to regulate forestry remains the same, however, while the urgency to protect the remaining forests has only increased.

“We can’t get naked every time we need to protect something,” Penn observed.

Nor is purchasing every parcel under threat a possibility.

Regulatory hurdles

Controversial logging of privately owned Salt Spring acreages over the past few years has included several agricultural properties that had reverted to forest and were cleared for new farming uses, and trees removed from the Buddhist retreat on Mount Tuam.

Residential properties cleared in the south end along Morningside and Beaver Point roads prompted heated community discussion on social media, while the Beddis Road situation has produced a campaign involving over 300 residents signing onto letters sent to the ministries of Environment and Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development. Multiple delegations have now appeared before the Islands Trust, most recently at the Islands Trust Council’s quarterly session in June.

Trust Council chair Peter Luckham and Salt Spring Island trustees Peter Grove and Laura Patrick have repeatedly said they are sympathetic to residents’ concerns and indeed share them, but a combination of provincial laws that privilege forestry practices and limit local government ability to regulate tree-cutting has left them with few legal tools. Those that do exist have yet to be fully developed on Salt Spring.

“Precedents show that [Beddis Road] landowner is within their rights to pursue that authority [to clear the land] — as sad as that might be,” Luckham told the crowd who came back for the January committee meeting. “The LTC does not have the ability to interfere in that. Certainly looking ahead we may want to look into our bylaws and development permits to protect these delicate ecosystems in the future.”

Under the Local Government Act, local Trust committees can establish development permit areas for their communities and develop guidelines that would limit tree cutting in those areas, according to some specific parameters. They can also establish tree-cutting bylaws for areas that are subject to flooding, erosion, land slippage or avalanche.

“Unlike municipalities, however, Islands Trust does not have the ability to regulate, prohibit or impose requirements generally in relation to trees outside of the two situations mentioned above,” the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing told the Driftwood in June.

And while many residents of the Trust area consider this a huge omission in preserve and protect powers, the ministry said the province is not considering amending the Local Government Act at this time.

“We’ve made strides with bylaws about excessive noise and intrusion, but we haven’t dealt with our collective responsibility for trees, and that they’re actually essential for our survival,” Penn observed. “It’s just not in the public consciousness. It’s not reflected in our legal system.”

Islanders of all ages have not ceased demanding the Islands Trust do more to stop clear-cut logging on privately owned properties. Though they’ve been informed again and again over the past year that clearing land is currently within property owners’ rights, many simply cannot believe that a local government agency formed to protect the environment has no ability to save its trees.

Part Two:

Twenty years ago, Salt Spring Islanders gave everything they had to stop a massive logging operation, putting their criminal records, bank accounts and modesty on the line to save 770 hectares once slated for clear-cutting by the Texada Land Corporation.

Similar battles were taking place on other islands with more tragic consequences. The name Mike Jenks — who has been identified as British Columbia’s largest private land logger — remains anathema to people on Denman after his company removed up to a third of the island’s forests in the late 1990s.

Local regulations enacted for environmental protection on Denman were powerless to stop the destruction. The B.C. Supreme Court upheld the rights of the private company to pursue its business and quashed a forest cover bylaw on the basis of jurisdictional over-reach.

“That was really the apocalypse here for us. That was the real struggle, and we really couldn’t stop him,” said Patti Willis, who won an Islands Trust Community Stewardship Award in 2010 for her work with the Denman Conservancy Association.

Considering the current climate crisis and the dwindling trees, she added, “Maybe it’s time to try to enact forest bylaws again.”

Legalities limit power of the Islands Trust

Clear and enforceable local regulations are needed to maintain the Islands Trust Area’s remaining forest, whether the threat comes from large forestry corporations or new neighbours who prefer a parklike estate to acres of trees. A look at recent history on Salt Spring and islands like Denman suggests that developing such tools requires political will and community support. They also have to be crafted very carefully to meet provincial laws and survive legal challenges.

Linda Adams, who was the Islands Trust’s chief administrative officer before retiring in 2016, was the senior planner on Salt Spring for many years. She has decades of expertise working under the Local Government Act.

“One of the misunderstandings I see is that people kind of think because the Islands Trust has this preserve and protect mandate, they can just go and tell people ‘Stop tree cutting, right now,’” Adams told the Driftwood. “But the local Trust committee can only tell people to stop tree cutting if they had previously put a bylaw in place that regulated tree cutting on that person’s land. They can’t just go and tell somebody to stop, and that’s the same with any government.”

Zoning could be used to establish setbacks that protect trees, for example by requiring that development take place a certain distance from the lot’s centre or that it take place in a certain area to keep building sites clustered together. Zoning cannot regulate tree removal by itself, however, because provincial law does not consider it to be a land use, but natural resource extraction.

Local governments, including the Islands Trust, can regulate tree-cutting to some extent with development permit areas, but those areas have to be defined with mapping in the official community plan. They are also permissive by definition, to be awarded as long as the applicant follows the guidelines, and they can’t restrict uses that are allowed by zoning. Another challenge of the development permit area is that it can only be established for specific purposes. The forest cover DPA established on Denman Island failed to hold up in court when challenged by 4064 Investments Ltd., for the very fact that it purported to regulate logging on private lands.

Continued in Part two