Fourteen governance bodies. No single elected council. And the bills add up.

“Fourteen bodies. None of them is the Town of Denman. None of them can be.”

What we pay for what we get

The average residential property on Denman Island is assessed at $865,000 in 2024. For that average home, here is what gets collected from us each year, before we even get to provincial school taxes, the homeowner’s contribution to BC Hydro, or the federal portion of fuel costs at the pump. The figures come directly from the 2024 CVRD Property Tax Insert for Electoral Area A. The point of this section is not that the total is high — it isn’t, by BC standards. The point is that no single elected Denman body controls any of it.

What you’ll notice.

We pay for streetlighting, but most of the island has none. We pay for “Economic Development” through a Denman Economic Enhancement Society we cannot vote on. We pay for “Heritage Conservation” but our heritage buildings are managed by volunteer non-profits. We pay $3.38 per $100,000 assessed value for “Denman/Hornby Bylaw Enforcement” — and yet bylaw enforcement on the actual issues residents report (uncontrolled dogs, derelict vehicles, illegal dumping, noise) is, in practice, a referral to the conservation officer, who is busy.

We do not pay less than residents of Cumberland or Courtenay. We pay differently — and we get less in return.

Total Area A requisition for 2024: $1,405,673 across all Denman, Hornby, and Baynes Sound services.

“We don’t lack tax revenue. We lack a council that can spend it.”

The cable ferry

A CASE STUDY IN POWERLESSNESS.

In 2016, BC Ferries replaced the conventional MV Quinitsa with the MV Baynes Sound Connector — at the time, the longest cable ferry in the world. Denman residents told them, in detail and at length, that we did not want a cable ferry. The Quinitsa had served the route since 1977 with an on-board engineer and four engines, any one of which could run the boat. The Baynes Sound Connector has three cables, one engine, and a long history of breaking down.

This is what powerlessness looks like. We told them no. They built it anyway. We told them it was breaking. They told us it wasn’t. We have a non-binding Ferry Advisory Committee that meets, asks questions, and is ignored. We have an MLA who agrees with us and cannot fix it on her own. And we have no municipal council that BC Ferries would actually have to answer to.

A municipal council would not magically replace the Baynes Sound Connector. But it would put a single elected body — accountable to us, with a budget and a staff and the standing to litigate if necessary — in front of BC Ferries’ management. Right now, they negotiate with no one. That is a choice we made, by not having anyone.

“We have never had so many issues with ferries in our whole history on the island.”— Ricia Hollinger, Denman Island resident, Global News, May 2024.

The roads, the bylaws, the no-recourse

The roads.

Denman roads are owned and maintained by the BC Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure (MOTI). Most are gravel. The paved ones are degrading. Patches are reactive rather than scheduled. There is no on-island MOTI office, no district engineer who lives here, and no formal mechanism by which residents can prioritize road work. We can ask. We are usually told what cannot be done.

Compare this to a municipality. Cumberland — population about 4,500, a 25-minute drive from Buckley Bay — has a public works department, a council that votes on the road budget, and a five-year capital plan that residents can read, comment on, and oppose. When a Cumberland road fails, a councillor’s phone rings. When a Denman road fails, an email goes to a regional MOTI office in Nanaimo and is added to a list.

There is more, and it goes beyond roads:

• No building inspection. Denman has no building inspector. Every structure is supposed to have a Trust-issued Siting and Use Permit before construction. In practice, very few do. There is no enforcement against illegal construction except, occasionally, by complaint to the Trust years after the fact.
• No animal control. The CVRD animal control bylaw does not apply on Denman. Uncontrolled dogs harassing wildlife and livestock are a documented, recurring DIRA agenda item. The only “recourse” is the regional conservation officer, whose actual job is wildlife. DIRA passed a motion in June 2025 asking CVRD to study extending the bylaw to Denman. There is no mechanism to compel that study.
• No bylaw enforcement against most things that bother neighbours. Noise, lighting, derelict vehicles, illegal dumping, short-term rentals, fencing disputes — most of these are either unregulated or regulated by bodies with no presence on the island.
• No police on island. RCMP non-emergency calls go to Courtenay. RCMP response time depends on the ferry schedule. Hornby has a small detachment. Denman does not.

The bylaws.

Bylaw enforcement on Denman is handled by an Islands Trust officer working from Victoria. In most active enforcement files, the officer has not visited the property. The Trust’s own enforcement manager has publicly stated that, unlike every other jurisdiction in BC, the Islands Trust never developed a policy to deal with vexatious or repeat complaints. Trustees, including from Denman, have called the system “too overwhelmed to show discretion.”

The Denman trustee David Graham, speaking to Gulf Islands Driftwood in September 2024, captured the situation as plainly as anyone has:

“They could have driven around Denman Island and probably found 100 infractions and sent that along to the bylaw enforcement, and they would’ve been swamped. Can you imagine the chaos?”

That is not a system that works. It is a system that survives because nobody asks it to do its job.

“This is not bad faith. It is structurally impossible to do well from Victoria, or Courtenay, or Saltspring.”

The utilities under our feet and over our heads

Every house on Denman runs on its own well, its own septic, and a power line that swings from a tree-fringed pole somewhere up the road. Most of us, until recently, also lived with the worst residential internet in the Comox Valley. We buy stickers for our trash bags and drag them — sometimes a kilometre or more — to the nearest drivable road, then drive our recycling separately to a depot we run ourselves. None of these systems is operated by anyone elected by Denman residents.

Water.

There are two aquifers under Denman Island. Both are classified by the BC government as moderately vulnerable to surface contamination. Most residents draw from private wells. A growing share have to top up with cistern deliveries each summer — and according to the Hornby and Denman Community Profile, those deliveries are starting earlier and running later each year.

Power.

BC Hydro delivers power on overhead lines through dense second-growth forest. Storms drop trees on lines. Outages happen. A municipality cannot take over BC Hydro — it is a Crown corporation. But it can negotiate line-burial priority for critical corridors, apply for federal infrastructure resilience grants restricted to local governments, and fund battery-backup systems at community anchor points so that when the lines do go down, the island has working facilities.

Internet.

CityWest finished underground fibre to about 95 percent of occupied properties on Denman by 2023, after a four-year volunteer push by the Hornby/Denman Internet Committee. TELUS, the prior provider, told residents in writing that Denman was “low priority” and would not be upgraded. Volunteers organized; the Province eventually contributed $5.64 million; the build came in at roughly $33 per year on a $600,000 property. The lesson is that Denman can organize and can win — but shouldn’t have to do it on volunteer time, every time.

Solid waste.

DIRA volunteers run the recycling depot. Households drag their stickered trash bags to the road for a CVRD-contracted truck. Bowen Island has universal curbside garbage and recycling pickup, and a green bin for organics. Most small BC towns do. Denman could too.

Sewage and septic.

Every property on Denman is on its own septic field, and oversight is provincial via Island Health. There is no local body responsible for a coordinated septic-replacement strategy as fields age. A municipality could run a small grant program for upgrades on at-risk waterfront properties, in coordination with Island Health and the Trust’s freshwater sustainability program.

The treaty and the table we cannot sit at

The K’ómoks Treaty was ratified by Nation members in March 2025 and the implementation legislation was tabled in the BC Legislature on April 14, 2026. Federal ratification is expected to follow. When the treaty takes effect — anticipated by 2028 — K’ómoks will be a self-governing nation under a modern treaty, with co-decision authority on fisheries, wildlife, parks, and water stewardship throughout its territory. That territory includes Denman.

A municipal council with planning staff, an elected mayor, and the legal standing of a local government can sit across the table from K’ómoks as a fellow government. A regional planning body chaired by an off-island Trust appointee cannot. Reconciliation requires real institutions on both sides of the table.

The aquaculture under our shore

Baynes Sound, the strait between Denman and Vancouver Island, produces 39 percent of the farmed oysters and 55 percent of the manila clams in British Columbia. By any measure, this is the shellfish capital of the province. It is also the most consequential thing happening in our local environment, and the body that regulates it — Fisheries and Oceans Canada — is in Ottawa. ADIMS volunteers have organized cleanups, monitoring, and submissions for fifteen years. They cannot, by themselves, hold federal regulatory standing. A municipality can.

The housing crisis and the empty seat at the table

The Denman Housing Association (DHA) has been working since 2008 to build affordable housing on the island. Its flagship project, Denman Green — twenty units of carbon-neutral, rent-geared-to-income housing — was first proposed in 2013. The DHA received title to the land in February 2023. By 2024, the project was, in the DHA’s own words, shovel ready. As of April 2026, more than twelve years after the project began, the site has not been broken. Construction has not started.

Twenty kilometres north, on Hornby Island, Beulah Creek Village — 26 units, $18 million, started later — is currently under construction, completion scheduled for spring 2026. The two projects are nearly identical in their fundamentals. Both are on Trust islands, governed by the same Trust mandate. Both are in the same regional district. Both required Trust rezoning. Both targeted affordability through BC Housing partnerships.

The difference is institutional architecture. Hornby’s housing society partnered with M’akola Housing Society — a thirty-year non-profit operator with five thousand units across BC — which took on the operating agreement and held the $9.5 million mortgage. The CVRD director, the Trustee for Hornby, MLA Josie Osborne, HICEEC, HIRRA, and HIHS itself formed the “Hornby Housing Network” — a structured coordination body that gave BC Housing the institutional confidence to issue Final Project Approval in fall 2024.

A Denman municipality is what fills the empty seat at BC Housing’s table.

“Twelve years. Land secured. Approvals granted. Architecture finished. Shovel-ready. And still no homes built. The empty seat at BC Housing’s table belongs to a Denman council we don’t yet have.”

The bottom line

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