Release Notes

Trust islands against non-Trust islands: the counterfactual, published with its falsification conditions

2026-08-29

Nobody has ever measured whether Islands Trust governance makes a difference. The only study that tried was paid for by the Islands Trust Conservancy and compared ferry-only islands to Greater Victoria; the Province had the data for a real comparison in 2002 and declined to draw it. This page is our attempt, and because it comes from a campaign it is built to be checked rather than believed: each of the five designs states in advance the result that would count against us, the findings that have already gone the wrong way are listed by date at the same prominence as the findings that help, and the indicators we cannot yet compute are listed beside the ones we can. The bias warning sits above the first table rather than in a footnote, because it runs toward us: the Trust Area was drawn in 1974 around the islands already under development pressure, so finding less development inside it would prove nothing. Preparing the page found two wrong numbers in our own protocol — a marine designation credited to Texada that is ten kilometres away in a different electoral area, and a Quadra figure that divided zoning from a 1,064,539-hectare region by a land area that was not Quadra's. Both are corrected, and both are published on the page as retired findings.

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A seventeenth judgment: the damages action against the Denman trust committee

2026-08-29

Ellis v. Denman Island Local Trust Committee, 2020 BCSC 935, had been recorded on this site as a decision we knew existed and could not find. It is now located, read from the courts' own published reasons, and added. It is another Trust win, which is why it goes in: most of the pleading was struck as an attempt to re-litigate matters already decided, and the remaining claims in negligence, nuisance and misfeasance in public office were dismissed on summary trial, the judge holding that misfeasance in public office cannot be grounded in conduct the courts have already found lawful. The counted record moves from sixteen decisions to seventeen: the Trust has now won fourteen, lost one and split two. The one point it did not get is published too — it asked for costs at Scale C and was awarded Scale B, the judge finding no complex or novel legal issue.

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Authority to enforce, discretion to defer: eight islands, eight enforcement regimes

2026-08-27

We read the Trust's own enforcement policies — the trust-wide Policy 5.5.1, the best practices manual, the public FAQ, and all eight local trust committee policies. The Trust describes its process as complaint-based and says so plainly, and complaints must be in writing with anonymous ones refused. But Policy 5.5.1 also allows an investigation to start without any complaint in six named circumstances, including where contraventions appear to occur in setbacks from water bodies or in development permit areas. The operative word throughout is may. Seven of the eight island policies open with the same sentence: the committee has the power and authority to enforce its bylaws, and also has discretion to adopt priorities for enforcement or to defer enforcement. On the face of these documents there is authority to enforce and no duty to. Four of the eight islands authorise proactive enforcement; four do not. And each committee has deferred something different: Gabriola has suspended enforcement of the Mudge Island land use bylaw entirely pending a review; Gambier records a standing deferment for non-permitted seawalls on North Thormanby Island; Mayne and Saturna will not enforce against unlawful short-term rentals except in listed cases; Salt Spring defers enforcement against non-compliant dwellings until there are safe, secure housing options. Two things we will not claim. Complaint-based enforcement is the norm for BC local government, not a scandal. And several of these deferrals are humane and defensible — Salt Spring's is a reasonable committee doing a reasonable thing. The point is that these are eight separate policy choices that appear nowhere together, so nobody can see them as a system. The number that would settle it — how many files begin proactively rather than on complaint, per island, per year — is not published.

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Four out of five Islands Trust zoning codes exist on only one island

2026-08-27

We have ingested the Trust's own zoning and official community plan layers rather than fetching them for one question and discarding them: 2,934 zoning polygons and 1,774 land use designations across 15 local trust areas. The zoning uses 509 distinct codes, and 401 of them — four in five — are used by exactly one trust area. Only one code, W1, is shared by as many as nine. Salt Spring runs 154 codes; Ballenas-Winchelsea runs three; Denman 55 and Hornby 35. We are careful about what that means. It is not evidence of incoherence: per-island committees writing per-island bylaws is what the structure exists to do, and a zone that suits Salt Spring may be useless on Lasqueti. What it does mean is that nobody, the Trust included, can compare its own islands. There is no shared vocabulary, so there is no way to ask across the trust area how much land is zoned for housing, or industry, or conservation, without building a crosswalk that does not exist. The Trust's statutory object is stated over the trust area as a whole, and its own data cannot be added up to that object. Two things we would want to know if we were reading this, so we publish them too: the layer contains one polygon whose trust area code is a typo, and its add-dates record when the file was digitised in 2008, not when any rule changed.

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Two-thirds of the water the Islands Trust administers has no marine zoning at all

2026-08-27

We measured every marine zone the Trust has drawn, using its own zoning layer — 541 polygons across 25 zoning areas — against the provincial trust area boundaries, with land subtracted from the parcel fabric. Across the twelve local trust areas that have a resident parcel fabric the Trust administers 453,582 hectares of water. 152,470 of them, about a third, carry a marine zone. The rest carry none. And the share is not broadly similar with a couple of outliers: it runs from 99.6 per cent on South Pender to 5.2 per cent on Gabriola, between committees of the same body under the same statute and the same object. The sharpest case is next door to us. Denman zones 78 per cent of its water; Hornby, four kilometres away in the same channel, in the same regional district, on the same ferry route, zones 16 per cent. Two things this does not show, stated as plainly as the finding: unzoned water is not unregulated, because federal and provincial authority over navigation, fisheries, aquaculture licensing and the seabed does not depend on a local zone; and more zoning is not automatically better, so an island that zones little of its water may have decided that deliberately. What it does show is that the variation is very large and, so far as we can find, has never been published or explained anywhere — including by the Trust, whose object is to preserve and protect the trust area as a whole.

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We measured Denman's W1 line against the rule that made it. It matches.

2026-08-27

Denman's Official Community Plan has fixed the seaward extent of the island's water zoning since 1991: out to the 30 metre bathymetric contour off Vancouver Island or mid-channel, whichever is furthest west in Baynes Sound, and elsewhere to the local trust area boundary. That is a testable claim and, as far as we can tell, nobody had tested it. So we did — 180 transects radiating from the island, measuring where the mapped W1 zone actually ends against where the plan says it should, using the Trust's own zoning polygon, the provincial boundary layer, the BC Freshwater Atlas coastlines and the parcel fabric. In Baynes Sound the mapped edge reaches at least mid-channel on 45 of 56 transects, typically 220 metres beyond it, and stops roughly 900 metres short of the trust area boundary — which is exactly what the policy directs there. Everywhere else it sits on the trust area boundary, with a median gap of one metre. The line was drawn to the rule. One anomaly is reported rather than buried: on 18 transects at the north end the mapped zone extends past the mapped boundary, by up to 731 metres, which is most likely the difference between the provincial depiction and the legal description in Schedule A to B.C. Reg. 119/90 plus ordinary digitising error in both polygons. So are the limits: we could not obtain a bathymetric contour layer, and we measured W1 alone rather than all five water zones, so the shortfall figures are an upper bound. This is the third finding in a row on this question to come out against the campaign's instincts, and it is published for the same reason as the other two.

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Correction: Denman's marine zoning boundary was decided in 1991, not in 2009

2026-08-27

On 26 August we published the 2008–09 file for Denman's Official Community Plan and Land Use Bylaw and reported that the record contains no discussion of how far out to sea the marine conservation zone reaches. We said at the time that a silent record is not proof that no decision was made, and that the zoning may simply have been carried forward from an older bylaw — which was the next document to obtain. We have now obtained it, and that is what happened. The 1991 Official Community Plan, Bylaw No. 60, states that the Water designation covers the marine area "as far west as the 30 metre bathymetric contour off the shore of Vancouver Island", and its Policy 4 commits the Trust to extend zoning out to that contour or mid-channel, whichever is further west in Baynes Sound, and elsewhere to the local trust area boundary. The 2009 plan carries that forward almost word for word. So the 2009 bylaw was implementing a commitment made eighteen years earlier, and the silence we found is explained: the seaward extent was not a change, and unchanged policy does not get debated. Anyone using our work to argue that this boundary was never decided, or appeared without discussion, should stop — that argument is finished, and we are the ones finishing it. What remains open is narrower and still worth asking: the bylaw states no seaward distance, the line that governs is a GIS file kept at the Trust's Victoria office, the published map is expressly a "generalised diagrammatic representation" at 1:10,000, and whether the mapped line actually matches the 1991 rule is a question we can measure. We publish this because a project that asks the Trust to disclose inconvenient records does not get to sit on its own.

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Six Denman court decisions added to the case law page

2026-08-27

The case law page was built by searching the Islands Trust's own document library for anything mentioning a court. That method missed every Denman Island judgment, because the Trust's library does not contain them — which meant the one island this project is run from was the one island with no cases listed. Six are now included, traced through a private archive and then read from the courts' own published reasons at bccourts.ca: a 2001 Court of Appeal decision that struck down Denman's forest cover bylaw while reviving four others, two decisions about tree cutting in the Komas Bluff development permit area (2005 and 2007), two about whether a party who has already litigated a bylaw's validity may challenge it again (both 2013), and a 2015 decision enforcing a costs award against the land itself. The counted record moves from ten decisions to sixteen: the Trust has now won thirteen, lost one and split two, and it won five of the six added here. We publish the losses and the wins on the same page, and the earlier blog post carries a dated note rather than quietly corrected numbers. None of the six changes the finding that no court has yet been asked where the trust area's outer boundary runs.

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New Trust meeting records now reach the archive's subject pages, not just its search

2026-08-27

The archive checks the Islands Trust's document library every day and adds whatever is new, so minutes, agendas and hearing records arrive here shortly after the Trust posts them. Keyword search picked those new documents up immediately, but the subject pages did not: which documents belong to a topic is worked out in advance rather than on every visit, and nothing was recalculating it after a daily pickup. A new document was therefore searchable and filed under its island, type and year, but listed under none of its subjects — with nothing visibly broken to give it away. Adding a document, or reading text off a scanned one for the first time, now refreshes the subject listings straight away. We also compared our holdings against the Trust's library end to end: the library reports 7,459 records, but 358 of those are the same document listed more than once, leaving 7,101 distinct documents. Eight were missing here, each apparently a fetch that failed on the one day it was new. Those are being collected, and the archive now re-checks the full library weekly so a single failed download can no longer become a permanent gap.

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Correction: we briefly listed 449 working Trust documents as broken

2026-08-27

The broken-record ledger exists to show which Islands Trust documents the Trust's own links no longer reach. On 27 August a new automated check ran across the archive for the first time and, for a few minutes, added 449 documents that are not broken at all. The check was requesting too many documents at once, the Trust's server responded with errors rather than files, and our code wrongly treated "the server did not answer" as "the document is gone". Of the 453 entries it added, 449 were server errors and 4 were real. The 449 false entries were deleted the same day and the genuine ones kept. The check now counts only a 404 or 410 — the responses that actually mean a document has been removed — and anything else is reported as a failed attempt rather than recorded against the Trust. It also makes far fewer requests at once, which is what caused the errors in the first place. A re-run of 200 documents afterwards found two broken links, and every one of the nine entries this check has produced was then confirmed by hand. We publish this because a ledger that documents someone else's broken links has no business hiding its own mistakes.

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The Denman 2008–09 bylaw adoption record is now published

2026-08-26

Nine documents obtained from Islands Trust on request are now in the archive, covering the passage of Denman's Official Community Plan and Land Use Bylaw 186 from first reading in June 2008 to adoption in May 2009 — the bylaw that created the island's W1 to W5 water zones. Three of them are image-only scans with no searchable text at all, including the submission package the Executive Committee actually decided on, so the pages that matter have been transcribed by hand and published alongside the originals. They were requested to find out where the marine conservation zone on the outer edge of the Denman Local Trust Area was decided. What the record shows is that on 3 February 2009 the Executive Committee was told the bylaw regulates the use of land "including the surface of water", approved it, and recorded no discussion of how far out that reaches. We are publishing the limits of that finding as prominently as the finding: a silent record is not proof that a decision was never made, this may not be the complete file, and the zoning may simply have been carried forward from the older bylaw — which is the next document to obtain. Records obtained on request are labelled as our copy, never as a Trust-published source, because the Trust does not publish several of them.

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The Conservancy and output pages now show their evidence without JavaScript

2026-08-26

"The Conservancy, measured" and "What did they do?" were publishing a headline and two links to anyone reading without JavaScript — including search engines — while every sourced figure sat in the browser bundle. On two pages whose entire claim is that the evidence is public, that was the wrong way round. Both now render in full: the Conservancy page carries the protected-hectare totals, the 8.51% share, the holdings, the pace of growth, the cost against the whole budget, the NAPTEP uptake, the named places with their documented counterfactuals, and the concession that the work is real. "What did they do?" carries the per-area document counts, the caveat that a published document is not an action, and — most importantly — the list of things a local trust committee is legally barred from doing, which is the part that stops the page being unfair.

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Correction: two archive documents were listed as live after the Trust deleted them

2026-08-26

The broken-record ledger could only ever re-check documents already known to have failed, so it could clear a repaired record but never notice a new casualty. A document that we mirrored successfully and the Trust deleted afterwards stayed off the ledger while the island pages went on listing it under "Each links to its exact source". Two were found this way — a Gambier agenda package and a Hornby agenda package, both now 404 at the Trust. The ledger now has the other half: a sweep that walks the documents we hold and opens a record for any source URL that has since died, using the same test as the repair check, so a deleted file cannot hide behind the Trust's habit of answering with a 200-status wrapper page.

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Cortes and Quadra zoning citations pointed at a moved domain

2026-08-26

The Strathcona Regional District moved from strathconard.ca to srd.ca. Every zoning value we hold for Cortes and Quadra — 2,503 lots — cited the old address, which no longer resolves. All of them now cite the district's live land-use page. The zoning data itself is unchanged and still comes from the same Strathcona bylaws; only the address moved.

Link rot swept out of the citations

2026-08-26

A full check of every outbound source across the network found six links that had gone dead because the site on the other end reorganised, and all six are now repaired and re-verified. The Province moved its Islands Trust overview, which is the source for the 5,200 km² land-and-water scale on the water study; the Islands Trust renamed its annual-report and financial-reports pages, which carry the Conservancy figures; the Trust also moved the Hornby Island Official Community Plan; the Land Title and Survey Authority moved its title-search page, which is linked from every lot page; Lasqueti's community site moved its ferry page; and the Strathcona Regional District moved to a new domain. In every case the underlying facts were re-checked against the relocated source and none of them changed — only the addresses did.

Four pages were listed in the sitemap but answered 404

2026-08-26

Islands Trust on Denman, Bylaw disputes, How we estimate property values and the Privacy Policy were all reachable by clicking through the site, and the first two are in the main navigation — but opening, refreshing or sharing their addresses directly returned "Page Not Found", and the sitemap was telling search engines to crawl them anyway. All four now server-render their own title, description and summary like every other public page. A test checks the sitemap against the server on every run, so a page cannot be advertised and missing at the same time again.

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Correction: a fairness receipt pointed at a page the Trust had deleted

2026-08-26

The fairness page cited the Islands Trust's Bylaw Enforcement Review Project page for the statement that the Trust approved revised enforcement policies in March 2026. We recorded that link as verified on 24 August 2026; by 26 August the Trust had deleted the page and it returned a 404, so a published claim was resting on a source a reader could not open. The claim itself was correct and is unchanged: it now cites the adopted policy instead — Islands Trust Policy 5.5.1, Bylaw Compliance and Enforcement, whose own header records Trust Council approval with an amendment date of 11 March 2026. Because the policy document carries the date, the citation no longer depends on the Trust keeping a landing page alive. The ocean page's federal-role receipt has also gained a second source, the Pacific Aquaculture Regulations, after the DFO regional site failed to resolve twice during the same check. Every source on all eight argument pages is now checked for liveness by a script (npm run check:campaign-links), which is how this was found and how it will be found again.

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The water study now shows the full marine scale

2026-08-26

The water study now leads with the official 5,200 km² land-and-water scale and explains how Islands Trust zoning overlaps with provincial Crown tenure, federal fisheries and aquaculture licensing, navigation review and shellfish sanitation. Its new sourced Salish Sea infographic can be shared or downloaded uncropped in portrait, square, story and full-resolution formats, with a complete accessible text edition on the page. The campaign's argument pages and share cards now use the same navy evidence-field, fair-counterpoint and real-question visual system.

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The artists directory has been retired

2026-08-25

The artists directory, individual profile pages, navigation and sitemap links, submissions, discovery jobs, and administrative controls have been removed from DenmanIsland.co. Former directory URLs and APIs now return 404. Historical database rows remain offline as an inert archive and are not exposed to visitors, search engines, the site assistant, or administrators.

The democracy page now shows who decides what

2026-08-24

The democracy case now distinguishes decisions a Local Trust Committee can conclude from the controls that remain Trust-wide. It shows the local two-trustee majority; local permit, resolution and enforcement powers; the Executive Committee approval route for every local bylaw; and Trust Council control of budget, policy, procedures and staff. It also says plainly that local trustees are not powerless, the appointed member cannot defeat two participating local trustees who agree, and the bylaw approval chain does not apply to every permit.

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Trust-wide evidence first; island evidence filed by island

2026-08-24

The Abolish homepage and case index now separate institution-level evidence from local case files. The Trust-wide case comes first; local disputes are labeled and grouped under the island they document. The farming article now leads with all twelve measured local trust areas instead of a Denman worked example. The water study no longer defaults to Denman, and its three demands apply to every controlling boundary and zoning record. Detailed Denman material remains available as a clearly labeled Denman case study.

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Eight arguments, eight evidence dockets

2026-08-24

The abolition campaign now opens with the democratic-accountability case and carries eight separate evidence dockets: democracy, farming, ocean jurisdiction, housing, fairness, older Islanders and accessibility, public spending, and families. Each page separates the political verdict from the facts that support it, states what the evidence does not prove, links primary sources with pinpoints, and generates its own sourced 1080-by-1350 share image. We also retired legacy posters whose motive, causation, age, map, or accessibility wording could not survive a hostile fact-check; corrected the FOGI point number and the case-law tally; and kept the full water-map study beneath the new divided-jurisdiction argument.

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A network-wide accuracy and publishing sweep

2026-08-24

We corrected host canonicals and sitemaps, strengthened no-JavaScript campaign pages, fixed pre-existing map, media-gallery, crawler and route type errors, and regenerated the current social and poster artwork from deterministic source files.

Denman Town petition status phrase corrected

2026-08-24

Denman Town petition version 3 corrects the K’ómoks Treaty status phrase to ‘ratification and implementation process’. The Restructure Study request is unchanged, and every earlier version remains public.

Every argument can now travel as a sourced image

2026-08-23

Every petition homepage, substantial argument section, and public post now has a top-right share control. It opens a 1080-by-1350 image made from that exact page heading, excerpt, and deep link. On a phone or supported desktop browser, native share sends the PNG and link to installed apps. The same panel covers Facebook, WhatsApp, Bluesky, Threads, X, Reddit, LinkedIn, Telegram, Pinterest, email, and SMS, with copy-image, copy-caption, PNG download, and print for everywhere else. The four property families keep distinct art direction. Their illustrated backgrounds make no factual claim: every word and source destination is drawn from the live page in deterministic code.

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Exact petition versions, corrected claims, and ads paused

2026-08-23

The island-town petition now says exactly what it asks and what it does not: a town with a council residents elect and can replace; current law requires an island municipality while the Trust area exists; abolition is a separate decision. Earlier signatures have not been rewritten or silently moved. They remain attached to version 1 unless their owner reads and explicitly accepts version 2 from the private management page. Public totals now separate current-version signatures from earlier-version supporters, current PDFs include version 2 only, and the full wording history is public. A one-time correction notice shows both texts, contains no cross-petition pitch, and says plainly that doing nothing preserves version 1. The abolition petition demand itself is unchanged. We also retired an 86% water creative after finding that it mixed different land and area geographies; parcel-residual estimates are now labelled with their road and unsurveyed-land caveat. Marine zoning is valid, reference maps and GIS exist, and the narrower demand is to publish the controlling records online. Campaign ad routes are paused while election-period registration and authorization requirements are resolved.

We went looking for the court cases. They mostly go against us.

2026-08-23

There is a new page carrying every court decision we could find on the Islands Trust, and the short version is that the Trust nearly always wins. Of the ten decisions we counted it won eight, lost one and split one — and both times a court went against it at trial, the result was reversed on appeal. We read eight of them in full; two are old enough that we have them only through later judgments quoting them, and one we could not find at all. The page says which is which rather than blurring them together. We are publishing all of this because we spend a lot of time asking the Trust to disclose things it would rather not, and we do not get to keep our own awkward evidence in a drawer. One finding matters more than the rest. Our water study asks how far out to sea the Trust's rules reach, and until now our own notes marked it an open question whether it had authority over water at all. It is not open. A local government in British Columbia can zone the foreshore and the water above it, and the two leading cases saying so are both Islands Trust cases, both upheld on appeal — one about a floating marina office on a leased water lot at Ganges, one about a shed at Port Washington sitting half in the sea. Anyone who tells you these marine bylaws are invalid is wrong, and we have corrected our own pages to say so. None of the ten decisions counted in this review addresses the question the water study asks. In each, the argument was whether a bylaw reached one particular building or activity. None cites the regulation that is supposed to contain the Trust's outer boundary. These decisions therefore do not approve or reject that boundary. In the one case where a judge did have to work out where a water zone line ran, he looked at the zoning maps and found they did not match the coastline. The page quotes the judgments, links each one to the court's own published text, and says plainly where we have not read something rather than implying we have.

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We broke the petition for several hours. Here is exactly what happened.

2026-08-23

On the morning of 23 August, every attempt to sign the petition failed. The form returned an error and, worse, printed the database's own error text at whoever was trying to sign. It lasted several hours and we found it because the signature count stopped moving, not because anything alerted us. The cause was ours: a change adding comment screening passed an empty list into a database query in a way that produced invalid SQL, and because almost every signature has no comment attached, it failed for everybody rather than for a rare case. It is fixed, and confirmed working on phones and desktop. Two things follow that matter more than the bug. If you tried to sign during that window, your signature was never recorded — nothing was stored, so we cannot even email you to apologise. Please sign again; it takes a minute. And every release from now on is gated on a check that fills in the real form on the live site and confirms a signature can actually be created, at three screen sizes. Nothing we had — the type checker, the build, 234 tests, the accessibility and mobile audits — could catch this, because a page looks identical whether or not the thing behind it works.

Maps you can move, a mistyped-email catch, and the other side's petition

2026-08-23

The water study now lets a reader choose any local trust area and inspect its provincial boundary on a movable street map. It does not default to one island and it does not invent marine-zone lines. The sourced chain spans eight bylaws using sea-surface or air-space language, Galiano and Saturna's boundary clauses, Salt Spring's Vancouver Island carve-out, and the provincial Schedule A office-map provision. The global demand is to publish and reconcile every controlling boundary and zoning record; detailed single-island examples are filed under the island they govern. Also new: if you mistype your email domain when signing, the form now offers a correction. Somebody signed with an address ending .comm, which means their confirmation could never arrive and no reminder will ever reach them — from their side they signed, and we have no way to tell them otherwise. It suggests and never corrects, because plenty of real domains look like near-misses of the big providers. And there is a new section carrying the Friends of the Gulf Islands petition: their case in their own words, all six of their asks quoted in full, with a link. We disagree with it and we would rather you read it than take our summary of it.

Rebuilt for the phone, and a way to tell people you know

2026-08-22

Most people read this network on a phone, so it has been measured on one. Every button, link and form field is now at least 44 pixels tall — the size a thumb actually hits — and no text field renders under 16 pixels, which is the point where iPhones zoom the page in and do not zoom back out. The campaign material page no longer scrolls sideways: the ad previews were rendering at their true widths, up to 970 pixels, and pushed a 320-pixel screen more than 400 pixels off to the right. They now scale to fit at full fidelity. Three of these faults were invisible on a desktop browser and none of them broke the build, so there is now a script that loads each page at phone widths and measures what rendered, and tests that fail if the old traps come back. Separately, after you sign the petition you are offered — once, not pushed — the option to tell people you know. It sends from your own email, everyone goes in BCC, and the addresses never reach our servers: nothing to keep, because we never receive them.

Every island now shows its census population

2026-08-21

Until today this network held no population data at all. Each island site now states how many people Statistics Canada counted there in 2021, how that changed since 2016, and how many of its dwellings are nobody's home — each figure with its census year and a link to the StatCan table it came from. Two things worth knowing about the numbers: they cover the Trust Area designated place rather than the island's shoreline, and Statistics Canada publishes no age breakdown at that geography, so anything we say about the adult population is an estimate and is labelled as one.

Salt Spring Island: the deep dive

2026-08-21

A long, fully footnoted piece on the largest unincorporated community in British Columbia — bigger than 107 of the province's 161 municipalities, and twice a rejector of incorporation. The centrepiece is a 2015 provincial analysis, now surviving only in a web archive, showing that Salt Spring's property taxes fund roughly a quarter of the Islands Trust, and that if it ever stopped, a benchmark household on every other island would pay about $62 a year more to keep what the Trust does. Two of the article's findings run against our own argument, and are published anyway.

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Unsubscribe now exists on denmantown.org

2026-08-21

The privacy page had been promising a one-click unsubscribe link and there wasn't one. There is now — on every email, and on the manage link for your signature. Unsubscribing never removes your name from the petition, and it does not stop you signing again later; those are separate things and we keep them separate. Denman Town signers can also now pick how often they hear from us, on the same page.

You can now choose how often we email you

2026-08-21

Sign a petition and you can pick a weekly digest, daily, every two weeks, monthly, or no email at all — and change it any time from the private link we send you. The digest covers what changed on the sites, what turned up in the public record, and how the petitions moved, with every figure sourced. If you signed before this existed we will write once to ask what you want; if you ignore that email, you stay off the list. Unsubscribing is one click and never removes your name from the petition.

Release notes now live on every island site

2026-08-21

Until today only DenmanIsland.co published a running list of what changed. Every site in the network now has its own Release Notes page, linked from the footer, showing the changes that affected that site. It is the same standing rule we already followed — anything a visitor can notice gets written down — just published where the visitors are.

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Corrected the land-area figures on the island sites

2026-08-21

Our parcel totals were counting statutory rights-of-way — leases, licences of occupation and similar interests that are registered over land rather than being parcels of it — as if they were lots. Because they overlap the lots beneath them, they inflated every hectare total, badly in places: Galiano was showing 23,229 hectares for an island of roughly 5,700. They are now excluded from every total. We have also relabelled the figure as mapped parcel area rather than land area, because the parcel fabric covers the whole Local Trust Area including foreshore and marine parcels. Individual lot pages are unchanged — a right-of-way is a real registered interest and still shows on the lot it crosses.

Zoning now cites its source on every island

2026-08-21

Gambier and North Pender were showing each lot's zoning with no citation behind it, and 819 of Cortes's 820 lots were citing the wrong island's bylaw — the regional district publishes Cortes and Quadra zoning from one layer whose shapes reach across the channel between them. All three are corrected, so every zoned lot on the network now names the bylaw it came from.

Water pages now say when the Province has not mapped an aquifer

2026-08-21

Lasqueti and Texada have drilled wells on record but no provincially mapped aquifer at all. The water page used to say no record was "available yet", which read as something we had not got round to fetching. It now names the gap for what it is, shows the well count and the median depth, bedrock and yield the Province does record, and notes that none of the usual provincial ratings — vulnerability, productivity, demand, water quality — exist for these islands.

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Every island site now shows who has signed

2026-08-20

Each island-town site has a public signatures page listing the people who chose to show their name, with the date they signed and any comment they left. Signatures marked private are counted but never named, and email addresses are never published. Islands with no signatures yet publish that honestly too, with an invitation to be the first.

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Per-island water reports

2026-08-20

Every island site now has a full water report at /water: each aquifer the Province maps beneath the island, its vulnerability, productivity and demand ratings, wells on record, water licences, and the provincial observation wells tracking long-term levels — plus median well depth and yield from wells actually drilled on that island's lots. Gabriola and Salt Spring lead with written analysis; every other island gets the same data.

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Lost your petition link? Email it to yourself

2026-08-20

Every petition form now has "Already signed? Email me my sign-in link". Enter the address you signed with and the private link comes straight back to your inbox — no account, no password. From that link you can switch your name between public and private, edit your comment, or withdraw entirely.

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Registered wells on lot records

2026-08-20

Lot pages now show wells registered on that lot in the Province's GWELLS registry — depth, bedrock depth, reported yield, and a link to the provincial record — plus aggregate context for wells within 500 m (count and medians only; individual neighbouring wells are never listed, and owner information is never stored or shown).

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Water on Denman: aquifer page, well counts, and lot-level groundwater

2026-08-20

New /water page tells the island's groundwater story straight from provincial data: one bedrock aquifer (Aquifer 740) under nearly the whole island, its High vulnerability classification explained, plus well counts, water licences, and the active provincial observation well from the GWELLS registry. Every lot record now shows which mapped aquifer sits beneath it, and the map's aquifer popups include wells-on-record and licence counts.

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Groundwater aquifers on every island map

2026-08-20

The parcel maps now carry the Province of B.C.'s official groundwater aquifer mapping as a toggleable layer — on denmanisland.co and every island-town site. Tap an aquifer for the provincial classification (material, vulnerability, productivity, demand), its mapped size, and a link to the provincial factsheet. Provincial mapping shows a single bedrock aquifer (Aquifer 740, 47.7 km², mapped 2006) underlying nearly all of Denman Island, alongside the confined sand-and-gravel Aquifer 739 on the east side. Every lot record also now notes which mapped aquifer most underlies it. Source: B.C. Ground Water Aquifers dataset, Open Government Licence — BC.

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Confirm a signature, then share it — and sign both petitions in one click

2026-08-20

Confirming a petition signature now lands on a share page: your name in a signature card, ready-made posts for X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Reddit and email, a downloadable share image, and QR codes for flyers. Signed the abolish petition? One click also adds you to your island's own become-a-town petition (and the other way around) — no second confirmation email, because your address was already verified.

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Petition signatures are now email-confirmed

2026-08-19

Signing the Trust-wide abolition petition or any separate island petition now works in two steps: add your name, then click the confirmation link we email you. Your signature counts the moment you confirm. Every signature made before this change stays counted; nothing was removed. Why the change: it stops anyone else from signing or altering a signature using your email address, and it makes every published count one a skeptic can trust. Each island site now also sends its mail from its own domain.

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Signature ledger: look up public names across every petition

2026-08-19

abolishislandstrust.org now has a central signature ledger. It totals the Trust-wide abolition petition and every separate island petition, and lets you look up names people chose to publish. Private signatures stay in the counts only.

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Camp Denman / Elkhaven interest disclosed; portfolio map published

2026-08-19

Tony Aly's involvement with Camp Denman (also known as Elkhaven / Elk Haven) is stated on the ownership and transparency pages, the directory, and the Elkhaven archive. The live portfolio — landintelligence.co, denmanisland.co, denmantown.org, abolishislandstrust.org, the island-town sites, and iloveislandstrust.org — is described as a private network, not a federation of local chapters.

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Our market estimate is now called LandIntelVal

2026-06-09

We renamed our independent market-value estimate from "DenmanValue" to "LandIntelVal." The methodology is unchanged — it's the same comparable-sales, waterfront-aware land model plus measured-footprint building value, still clearly an estimate and not an appraisal. The new name reflects that this estimate now extends beyond Denman to Hornby Island and the Comox Valley Regional District's Electoral Area A, and will keep expanding. (Earlier changelog entries still say "DenmanValue" — that was its name at the time, and we don't rewrite history.)

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Value heatmaps on the parcel map

2026-06-07

The island map can now colour parcels by value, not just by zone. Toggle between assessed value, estimated tax revenue, our DenmanValue market estimate, and the property tax that would be collected if our market estimates were taxed at each lot's current rate. Colours run a light-to-deep scale by quantile, and the legend shows the island median and average for whatever you're viewing. The legend itself is now collapsible — and starts minimized on phones so it doesn't cover the map.

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New: Farms — farm-class assessment analysis

2026-06-01

A new Farms section presents an aggregate analysis of farm-class assessment on Denman: across the ~53 parcels whose public records show an assessment pattern consistent with Class 9 (Farm), total assessed value vs. our market estimate, and an estimated $645,000/yr difference from a residential-class counterfactual. This is not tax owed or revenue lost. Farm class is a legal program with a public purpose; this is aggregate, clearly labelled analysis from public data, not a statement about any individual property.

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Fresher building data + buildings shown on the map

2026-06-01

We added current building footprints from Overture Maps (refreshed roughly monthly, vs. the older 2018–21 imagery), kept alongside the previous set as a fallback, and the code now prefers the fresher data. Lot maps render the actual building outlines over satellite imagery.

DenmanValue rebuilt on real market comparables

2026-06-01

After a reader pointed out that an 18.8-hectare oceanfront lot was valued far too low, we rebuilt DenmanValue from the ground up. It no longer leans on BC Assessment's figures (which are low, especially for farm-class land); instead it values land from a waterfront-aware base plus a market rate for additional acreage, and buildings at a Denman replacement cost of ~$350/sq ft of measured footprint. Waterfront now lifts only the homesite, not every back acre. The result is far more realistic — and the gap between assessed and market value is now visible per lot.

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Real buildings shown on every lot map

2026-06-01

Lot maps now display the actual building footprints over satellite imagery, with a count and total floor-area measurement — so you can see what's really on a property, not just its outline.

Farm-class income requirement shown on farm lots

2026-06-01

Lots that appear to hold farm-class assessment now prominently show an estimated public-data farm-income threshold under BC's rules. For parcels over 10 acres, the legal formula uses 5% of the farm operation's actual value for farm purposes beyond the 10-acre baseline; because BC Assessment's farm-purpose value and actual income are not public, our displayed number is a proxy estimate.

Building siting vs. setbacks — measured from satellite

2026-05-31

Lot pages now show how far the nearest substantial building sits from the closest property line, measured from satellite building footprints, alongside the minimum lot-line setback Land Use Bylaw 186 sets for that zone. Where a building appears to sit inside the minimum it's noted — clearly framed as a measurement, not a determination of non-compliance (a building may pre-date the bylaw, be an accessory structure, or follow a boundary with different rules). Front-yard and sea setbacks, which are larger, come next.

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Property-tax estimates corrected — now include local service-area levies

2026-05-31

Our earlier tax estimate was materially too low: it left out the CVRD and local service-area levies that make up a big share of a Denman bill — Denman Fire, Community Parks, Garbage, Vancouver Island Regional Library, Community Facilities, CVRD Denman/Hornby, Recreation, regional solid waste, 911, Economic Development, Grant, and Heritage. The real residential rate is about $4.64 per $1,000, not $2.94. Every lot's estimate has been recomputed. (Estimates still assume Residential class and are per legal lot — a home spanning several lots pays the sum.)

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DenmanValue + measured buildings on every lot

2026-05-31

Each lot now shows DenmanValue — our independent estimate of market value, built from BC Assessment's land value plus the building value implied by the actual building footprint we measure from satellite imagery (or the reported value, whichever is greater). Because BC Assessment often under-reports building size and count, this is frequently higher than the official assessment. Lots also show their measured building count and footprint area, and likely farm-class assessment is flagged with the minimum farm income required to qualify.

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Every lot on Denman now has its own page

2026-05-31

We published a public page for every parcel on the island — zoning (Land Use Bylaw 186), Agricultural Land Reserve status, area, ownership type, and an estimated property tax, each with a link to the public source it came from.

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Island parcel map

2026-05-31

A new interactive map of every parcel, coloured by zoning, with click-through to each lot's full record.

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Estimated property taxes, using real rates

2026-05-31

Each lot now shows an estimated annual property tax based on the actual 2025 rural rates for our jurisdiction (CVRD Area A), applied to the assessed value — clearly labelled as an estimate.

Denman by the Numbers

2026-05-31

A data portrait of the island: lots by zone, residences, ALR share, total assessed value, median value by neighbourhood, and estimated property tax by zone.

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Denman Island News — a searchable record

2026-05-31

Thousands of real happenings compiled from community sources (starting with The Islands Grapevine), sorted by date, each linked to its source. An ongoing, growing record.

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Real Estate, refocused on listings

2026-05-31

The Real Estate page now shows current homes for sale and for rent on a map and list, with the option to view historical listings and their timelines.

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Islands Trust applications shown on the lots they affect

2026-05-31

Rezoning, development, and variance applications from the Islands Trust now appear on the specific lots they concern, linked to the official record.