Response to Transition Salt Spring Election Questions

These responses can also be found on the Transition Salt Spring website here

Q1. Affordable Housing: The high cost and lack of availability of housing on Salt Spring make it difficult for many people, including workers, to continue to live here. Without a diverse community, Salt Spring will struggle to meet the challenges of climate change and other worsening issues. According to the Salt Spring Island Foundation's 2025 Living Wage Report, the average Salt Spring family spends more than 40% of their income on housing. 

Do you support the creation of more affordable housing on Salt Spring within sustainable population limits?

Support for not just housing but actual homes is a central part of my platform.  We need diverse housing options for our diverse community, from tiny house villages and home shares to small apartments and even single family homes.  Our workforce and seniors deserve room to grow and thrive in our community.  Many other jurisdictions have used creative zoning options to limit housing to locals and workers to ensure it is not open to the wider market, Salt Spring should be doing the same.  I’d also like to see the Trust and other local governance work together to build a housing authority, something else that has been successful in other jurisdictions.

Q2. Housing Density: Over 80% of housing on Salt Spring consists of single-family detached homes—double the regional average. This type of housing contributes to sprawl. Increasing housing density into already serviced villages cuts the driving, land clearing and ecosystem impacts, and infrastructure sprawl that add to Salt Spring's carbon footprint, taxes and climate risk exposure, while also creating more affordable housing options. 

Will you ensure the revised Salt Spring Official Community Plan (OCP) directs most new residential zoning capacity into Ganges and other existing serviced villages, rather than continuing to expand into rural and forested areas?

Shifting our existing land use planning from the luxury rural sprawl we are currently allowing to attainable workforce density in and around villages and amenities is going to be essential for our community’s survival.  I believe we need to build housing near services, amenities, places of employment, shops, and transit routes in order to promote sustainable lifestyles and sustainable land use.

Q3. Smaller Housing Forms: Smaller homes use less energy to build and heat, let people live closer to where they work, and can often be more affordable - all of which cut commuting emissions, protect ecosystems and create more housing options. 

Will you support zoning bylaws that allow smaller housing forms such as garden suites, cottages, and tiny homes (aka: accessory dwelling units) as permitted uses for year-round housing in more places?

Gentle density in smaller housing forms is a great way to create attainable housing for our community, I am very much in favour.  However it is important not to build an over-reliance on these types of housing.  We need to ensure we have housing for all family types and stages of life.  Suites, tiny homes, and cottages are vital, but so are modest apartments and, in limited quantity, single family homes.

Q4. Engagement with First Nations on Land Use: Indigenous knowledge of this land's fire, water, food and ecological history is vast, and land use decisions made without them risk missing information that matters for adapting to a changing climate, while also repeating a pattern of consultation after decisions are already made.

Will you support a policy requiring early engagement with local First Nations governments before land use decisions affecting their territories move to a vote, even where that adds time to the approval process?

First Nations governments should always be engaged with early and often, and that engagement should be baked into the process.  It’s essential to build good relationships with First Nations governments so that we are all operating from a position of trust.  It is much faster to have an engagement plan based on trust and mutual respect rather than try to rebuild trust late in the process.

Q5. Data-Driven Planning: As wildfire, flood, and drought risks grow, decisions made without current and locally specific hazard and vulnerability data lock in policies that are difficult to reverse later.

Will you support a requirement that current climate hazard data (wildfire, flood, sea level rise, drought, food and freshwater availability) be a mandatory part of reviewing rezoning and subdivision applications?

Fact based decision making needs to be the way the Trust operates.  Climate hazard data needs to be a part of that, but also watershed health, shoreline erosion, and other factors.  If we do not know and understand the environment we live in, how can we accurately govern within that environment.

Q6. Development Permit Areas for Habitat Protection: Forests, wetlands, and shorelines absorb floodwater, buffer wildfire, and store carbon, so weakening their protection removes exactly the natural systems that help the island cope with climate extremes and protect biodiversity. 

Will you support the strengthening of Development Permit Area (DPAs) guidelines for forests, wetlands, and shoreline habitat, even where that adds cost or process time for applicants?

DPA guidelines are a great way to protect natural systems.  I support strengthening them, however we must build systems that strengthen protections like DPAs without adding an extreme burden onto our residents.  This is an area where balancing needs is essential.

Q7. Watershed Health. With droughts becoming more frequent and severe, approving growth without confirming water supply sustainability sets up shortages that can hit every household. Water is also a lynchpin issue in ecosystem wellbeing and climate risk reduction. 

Will you make watershed health and freshwater sustainability a key priority if elected?

Maintaining watershed health is essential and part of why we need to reduce luxury rural sprawl in favour of density in and around the villages.  We also need better data on what water we have, where it is going, and where we can dramatically reduce our use.

Q8. Food Security: Local food production is one of the clearest ways to reduce emissions from transporting food from off-island and strengthen our resilience when supply chains are disrupted by climate, political and economic events. Farming is also notoriously hard to sustain, with farmers saying they need to be supported to allow for agri-tourism accommodations, worker housing, and on-farm sales.

Will you prioritize food security and the preservation of farmland and farming as a viable livelihood within the ALR, and outside of it, on Salt Spring?

Maintaining food security by preserving and protecting farms and farmland is a central part of my platform and I strongly support making farming easier on Salt Spring.  However, I oppose the creation of farmworker housing.  We need to build housing for all workers, and when we have more workers we will have more farm workers.  Farms and farmers should be able to focus on farming and let someone else do the landlording.  We also should not be building housing on productive farmland.  However I support the current housing allowed on ALR land, and would not be interested in restricting it.

Q9. Climate Risks: What do you believe are the main climate risks to Salt Spring Island’s citizens, infrastructure, economy, and ecosystems? What specific actions do you think the community should take now to adapt to these risks and prepare for the growing challenges, and how will you help advance these efforts?

The biggest climate risk on Salt Spring Island is lack of affordable, safe, and secure housing.  Salt Spring Island is at risk to many climate threats such as sea level rise and more extreme weather events.  Many of these risks are amplified by not having stable housing.  A heat dome is bad, but it’s worse for someone who doesn't have a place to cool off.  A polar vortex is bad, but it is worse for someone who lives in an uninsulated Airsteam.  An atmospheric river is bad, but it is worse for someone who has an aging roof they can’t afford to repair.

We need to move from our current planning mode of luxury rural sprawl to attainable workforce density.  This new density needs to be zoned in and around services, amenities, places of employment, shops, and transit to encourage sustainable lifestyles.  Following the models of other jurisdictions zoning needs to focus this density on folks already living on Salt Spring and folks working on Salt Spring.  We need to find out just how many illicit and potentially unsafe ADUs exist on Salt Spring, incentivize landlords to bring them up to code and house those whose landlords are unwilling or unable to do so.

Q10. Top Overall Priorities: If elected, what will your top priorities be in the coming term, and what specific actions will you take to address those priorities?

My top priorities are making the Trust more accessible to working Salt Springers and finding ways to increase workforce housing while maintaining the Preserve and Protect mandate.  The Trust is failing in its duty to a significant portion of Salt Spring’s population by being an almost impossible organization to interact with, and by prioritizing single family homes over housing working folks can actually afford.

Improvements on housing will involve shifting land use planning from the luxury rural sprawl we are currently allowing to attainable workforce density in and around villages and amenities.  During our OCP/LUB review we must make sure workforce housing is prioritised rather than an added density.  The Trust needs to use special zoning, as has been done elsewhere, to ensure that housing is not just affordable but reserved for long-time Salt Springers and new workers alike.  At the same time we must ensure that these densities are added in places that make sense so that wildspaces further outside of the villages can remain wild.

The first steps towards transparency meeting times that ensure the public can engage at times that work for them, easier to read agendas shared with the wider community, and regular reports from either Trustees or staff on where we are at with major projects.  We can continue this by ensuring the OCP/LUB is updated with plain language.