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The Islands Trust No Longer Considers Farming A “Traditional And Valuable Activity”

Photo of Ruckle Heritage Farm on Salt Spring Island.


By Riley Donovan
Oct 3, 2025

The Islands Trust was founded in 1974 to “preserve and protect” the unique environment and rural character of the islands between southern Vancouver Island and the mainland. A new draft policy statement that disregards agriculture is yet another example of the Trust having forgotten this original mandate and lost its way.

The Trust is in the process of creating a new policy statement to replace the current one, which was adopted in 1994. Far from symbolic, the principles and policies in the policy statement will guide official community plans and regulatory bylaws on islands across the Trust Area.

I undertook the great pain of reviewing the current (read here) and draft (read here) policy statements, both full of repetitive bureaucratic language – with the new one having an added dash of the social justice lingo that I thought I had escaped upon my graduation from UVic.

The current policy statement contains a lengthy section on agriculture. Notably, this section begins by designating agriculture as “a traditional and valuable activity in the Trust Area”.

In the new draft policy statement, this language has been removed entirely. The omission was covered by Country Life in BC in July 2021 in an article titled Farmers say new policy statement devalues ag.

The latest version of the draft policy statement was released in July 2025, and still contains this omission. I wrote an article for Country Life in which I sought comment from the agricultural community in the Gulf Islands. This piece was just published – Islands Trust sidelines ag in policy statement.

I reached out to the Trust, asking why they removed the “traditional and valuable” designation, and was told that it was part of a pivot to replace specific commitments in policy statement subsections with one page of broad “guiding principles.”

Naturally, I checked out this page of “guiding principles”, which can be found in Part 2.1 of the draft policy statement. There are seven principles, which range from “acknowledge and respect Indigenous rights” to “foster sustainable, inclusive, and resilient communities”.

None mention agriculture.

One other aspect of the draft policy statement that some in the local agricultural community find troubling is that the Trust will no longer endorse applications from property owners for new parcels of land to be added to the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR).

When writing my Country Life piece, I talked to Pender Island Farmers Institute president Barbara Johnstone Grimmer, who expressed her concern about the weakened ALR provision.   

“We don’t have enough ALR land as it is. We find when it is taken out, it becomes more developed, which should be against what the Islands Trust wants,” she argued.

All in all, the draft policy statement is yet more confirmation that the Islands Trust has lost touch with its mandate to protect the unique environment and rural character of the islands.

You can email islands2050@islandstrust.bc.ca to give your two cents on the policy statement.