Kinuseo falls in Tumbler Ridge, B.C.

British Columbia introduced its Instant Towns Act in 1965 during the height of an industrial boom. The policy’s purpose was exactly what the quirky name suggests: to allow the government to instantly grant municipal status to the many informal settlements surrounding its natural resources. The idea was that instant towns could prevent some of the problems of company towns, which had a habit of becoming ghost towns, by empowering local governments to create real communities.

Not everything went as planned. Four decades and a dozen such towns later, many once-vibrant communities were near death as mills and mines shut down or shipped out. The government was, however, right about one thing: towns aren’t so quick to grab the tombstone. Here’s how four post–Instant Towns are embracing their abundant resources, natural and artificial, in hopes of a greener second life.

Hudson’s Hope

Industry: Hydroelectricity
Incorporated: 1965
Population: 1,012
Hudson’s Hope was incorporated in 1965 when it became the second-largest municipality in B.C. Dubbed the “Land of Dinosaurs and Dams,” the town is rich with fossils. There are more than 1,700 dinosaur tracks in the area dating back to the Early Cretaceous Period. They even have their own dinosaur—the Hudsonelpidia—that was named for the town.

Mackenzie

Industry: Pulp and paper
Incorporated: 1966
Population: 5,452 (2006)
Mackenzie is home to the world’s largest tree-crusher. Indeed, in 1968 the 175-tonne behemoth flattened a 1,773-square- kilometre patch of woodland that would become Williston Lake, the province’s largest reservoir. The town has since incorporated the tree-crusher, which sat idle for years, as a central attraction in the town’s push for tourism.

Tumbler Ridge

Industry: Coal
Incorporated: 1981
Population: 2,454
Tumbler Ridge bills itself as the “Waterfall Capital of the North.” Kinuseo Falls is taller than Niagara at nearly 200 feet. The Cascades are 10 waterfalls that are all located within a few kilometres of each other. The community also holds an annual music festival—Grizfest—which this year hosted April Wine, Platinum Blonde, and children’s entertainers Sharon & Bram.

Elkford

Industry: Coal
Incorporated: 1971
Population: 2,463
Elkford may be a coal town, but nature still dominates. Indeed, the town’s website calls it a place where “humanity borrows a bit of space.” Currently, Elkford is repositioning itself as a good getaway for photographers. If would-be tourists are brave, they can try to snap some of the area’s grizzlies, elk, lynx, or wolves. If not, there’s always the Elkford webcam.

A Campa Vista home with a view to the ocean. Photo by Dawn Paley.

I’m sitting with the cab driver who has brought me to the end of a long gravel road, near the edge of Trujillo, a small town on the north coast of Honduras. He’s flipping through a newspaper, telling me in halting English that he’s saving up to buy an excavator. Anyone with an excavator has work, he says. I hear the sound of four-wheeled all-terrain-vehicles in the distance, humming as they near. In a cloud of dust, Cathy Bernier appears at the top of the hill, followed on another ATV by her two daughters. All of them are here for a vacation from a freezing Alberta December. Bernier, who works as a client-relations manager with the development, has agreed to take me on a tour of Campa Vista, a housing project for retired Canadians perched above the Caribbean Sea.

With a wave from a security guard tuning his radio in a tiny booth, we pass under the front gate, a cement arch built over a dusty gravel road. From the back of Bernier’s speeding ATV, her blonde hair blowing in my face, I can see that the route we’re on is cut through what was quite recently a thick jungle. Along one side, a high wall of earth shades the road, and on the other, a steep ditch drops away toward the ocean. Peeling around a corner, the road forks. We hang right, and Bernier slows to a stop in front of an imposing house with a pool set in the front patio. Within a few months, this house will be occupied by a 70-year-old rugby player from Edmonton—one of this gated village’s first residents. Below us, dense jungle sprawls down the mountain toward the water, interrupted only by the newly built roads, faint outlines of staked-out lots, and high power lines.

Once completed, as promised in the promotional materials, Campa Vista (“Country View” in English) will afford a sunny, secure perch for Canadian snowbirds. The development’s website boasts of a “Euro-Mediterranean-style private gated community, with each property possessing its own unique and outstanding view.”

North American baby boomers have proven to have a boundless appetite for vacation or retirement homes in sunny, cheap places that aren’t too wracked by crime or war. It’s been a global windfall for many other countries, and now the people who run Honduras want a cut. Canadian entrepreneur Randy Jorgensen, developer of the Campa Vista complex, is happy to oblige. Jorgensen sells this tropical dream over the internet and in hotel conference-room seminars held in grey-skied Canadian locales: Regina; Etobicoke, Ontario; Duncan, B.C. His basic pitch: Honduras is the latest, best bargain available to Canadians wanting to own their own piece of a developing country.

But—as you might have guessed—this sunny picture doesn’t tell the whole story. Just off the beach in Trujillo, six men sit around a peeling wooden picnic table. They’ve agreed to meet me here to discuss their concerns about the Canadians they say are squatting on their ancestral lands.

“Canadians have a strong sense of private property,” said Evaristo Perez Ambular, a native of Trujillo and member of Honduras’s major organization representing the Garífuna indigenous population. “We don’t have any access to that land anymore, including to some of our traditional pathways.”

Ambular speaks fluent Spanish, but switches back to the Garífuna language at times to discuss with the other men. The Garífuna language and its people are unique in a way that is recognized worldwide: the language, dance, and music of the Garífuna peoples were added to the United Nations’ list of rare cultural traditions in need of safeguarding.

Popular lore has it that Garífuna peoples descend from a slave ship that washed up on St. Vincent Island, whose passengers escaped slavery and instead intermarried with local indigenous people. The Garífuna were once called “Black Caribs” by the British, who forced them off St. Vincent and onto Roatán Island and the Central American mainland in 1797.

A fishing people, the Garífuna developed a rich collective lifestyle dependent on the ocean, the forests and the beaches. Expert seafarers, many Garífuna became deckhands for cargo ships travelling up and down the coast of Latin America. Today, there is a significant Garífuna diaspora in the United States.

The latest threat to Garífuna people, says Ambular, is the wave of Canadian settlers who are cutting them off from their land base.

In the first decade of the 20th century, the Garífuna who live in Trujillo were given collective titles for a fraction of their territories. But community members allege that in 2007 a former leader misrepresented himself as the owner of the land and wrongfully sold off parcels of real estate—land that eventually ended up in Randy Jorgensen’s hands.

“There are many Canadians in our communities on the coast, and we haven’t seen a positive presence from them,” says Ambular. “They use our bridges and our roads, and they don’t leave us a thing.”

Evaristo Perez Ambular (far right) together with members of the Garifuna community in Trujillo. Photo by Dawn Paley.

José Velasquez, the current president of the two Garífuna communities in Trujillo, hands me a photocopy titled “Pronunciamiento No. 3.” It outlines the Garífuna peoples’ desire to reclaim their ancestral territories, and demands that the Honduran government nullify all land sales to Jorgensen.

Randy Jorgensen has lived in Honduras for 20 years, on and off. It’s been a getaway of sorts from his bustling life in Canada, where he conceived and oversaw the creation of Adults Only Video, the country’s first national chain of pornography stores.

Originally a muffler salesman in small-town Saskatchewan, Jorgensen was nicknamed Canada’s “porn king” in a 1993 Maclean’s profile. His specialty, as the article put it, was to “bring dirty movies into the clean streets of middle-class Canada,” and by the early ’90s, Adults Only Video was bringing in $25 million a year. Faced with lawsuits and police raids because of the content of his videos, Jorgensen maintained that everything he did was within the boundaries of the law.

Later, when I called Jorgensen to get his response to the claims of the Garífuna on the land where he’s building Campa Vista, he laughed, chalking the claims up to a form of “extortion.”

“For Canadians, the easiest way to compare it is to compare it to our own native Indians in Canada,” he says. “Depending on what’s going on, they may or may not decide that they have a land claim going on.” He says all of the paperwork for the land that he’s purchased is legitimate, and there’s no conflict. “As soon as there is any development going on generally, the Garífuna start checking around and seeing if there isn’t some way that they can extort some funds or something out of whoever is doing that development,” said Jorgensen.

Today, Jorgensen lives full-time in his home near the Campa Vista development in Honduras. He runs AOV Online, the internet broadcasting version of what his porno chain once was. But his first career is downplayed in his most recent venture into real estate, where he instead positions himself as a lifestyle expert. However, it’s clear that he’s learned something from his years in the porn business: sex sells.

The marketing videos for a partner project sold in Costa Rica include close-ups of various young, attractive women in tight, white T-shirts. After I watched these videos with a crowd of prospective buyers, the first comment from a man sitting nearby was “I wonder if she’s single.” Should he choose to move down to Honduras, he wouldn’t be the first to discover that sex tourism abounds.

In the tropical coastal town of La Ceiba, a few hundred kilometres from Trujillo, I meet Rick Mowers. I find him, a retired Ontario Provincial Police officer from Hamilton, sitting at the computer beside the bar at Expatriates, a restaurant that he now co-owns.

“I just quit, moved here, went to instant retirement, did nothing for one year,” he says. The boredom eventually got to him, though. “It costs money to do nothing all day long. We find that too many of us drink too much alcohol or beer if you have nothing to do all day long.” Buying the restaurant has given the young-looking 53-year-old something to do with his time. He tells me he moved to Honduras with his wife, but they split after he had an affair. A warm breeze moved through the restaurant, stirring up the air under the high, thatched roof.

“It’s too cold, it’s too expensive, and I’m not going to live there for the free health care,” says Mowers of Canada. He rattles off how much cheaper things are in Honduras, from rent and food to crack cocaine and sex.

“Here sex is, in the whole country, sex is $10. So if you go downtown, and you stop and the girl gets in your car, it’s $10, 200 lempiras, for you to go have intercourse,” he says. Mowers didn’t mention the AIDS epidemic in the north-coast region, where over 60,000 people have HIV/AIDS, the highest infection rate in Central America.

Later, I Google Mowers. It turns out he was a bad cop. He had at least six disciplinary sanctions on his record when he left the Ontario Provincial Police, including neglect of duty when responding to a domestic violence complaint. On his partial police pension, he now lives like minor royalty in Honduras, a country where more than half the population lives below the official poverty line, and at least two million people live on less than $2 a day.

Sitting in the central park of San Pedro Sula one hot afternoon, I get a text message from a friend who says that the Honduras National Tourism Federation is having its annual meeting in the city tonight. After stopping at my hotel to change from shorts and a T-shirt into my most stiflingly hot, but fanciest, dress, I catch a cab over to the Crowne Plaza Hotel. The downstairs lobby, in from the heat, noise, and chaos of the outside, might as well be in Winnipeg, Los Angeles, or Shanghai. Air conditioning blasts the air, and well-dressed Hondurans sip fancy drinks and drag on cigarettes. San Pedro Sula has long been home to the country’s richest families, and today is the hub of Honduras’s sweatshop industry. I finagle my way into the upstairs ballroom and mingle with the upper crust of the tourism business in Honduras. They’re happy to talk about Canadian tourists. “Canadians are super-important to us,” says John Dupuis, the top representative for tourism in La Ceiba. In some hotels in the region, 70 to 80 percent of the guests are Canadian.

“Tourism from Canada, especially in winter, represents the largest source of income in the tourism sector in the Bay Islands and the north coast of the country,” said Piero Dibattista, who owns and manages several hotels in Roatán.

Canada has always been an excellent ally of the tourism industry, says Juan Antonio Bendeck, the chair of the Honduran Chamber of Tourism. Honduras’ tourism industry is small by comparison with its neighbours: the country welcomed 247,082 visitors in 2001, compared to nearby Costa Rica’s 823,575.

But following the June 2009 coup d’état in Honduras, the already struggling tourism sector took a substantial hit. “I’d like to tell everyone to come to Honduras and that it’s a tranquil place and everything is beautiful, but you think I’d be successful with that message?” asked deposed tourism minister Ricardo Martínez, after showing footage of riots and repression in Tegucigalpa during a presentation to the Central American Travel Market.

“Well, Central America is Central America,” says Jorgensen, when asked about the safety of travelling and living in Honduras. He says Trujillo is a small town, and the “really bad guys” tend to stay away from the area.

Jorgensen’s Campa Vista development in Trujillo is being marketed by Tropical Freedom Properties Ltd., who promise just that for only $85 per square foot. Tropical Freedom is a subsidiary of Fast Track to Cash Flow, a St. Albert, Alberta-based company. The local Better Business Bureau gives the company a D on a scale of A+ to F, expressing “concerns with the industry in which this business operates.”

On this sunny morning in June, I’m attending a meet-up hosted by Tropical Freedom Ltd. in the basement of a Travelodge hotel on the freeway beside the sleepy retirement town of Duncan, B.C. Cindy Storme, a petite blond woman in a gold-accented brown pantsuit, wowed the three dozen or so mostly retirement-age people attending the event with stories about waking up to the sound of howler monkeys, banana boating, barbecues, and life beside the water. As her audience chewed on white-bread sandwiches cut into little triangles, Storme talked about Costa Rica, a much more stable country, which she says is “exactly like the movie Avatar.” At the tail end of Storme’s talk, she spends about 10 minutes talking about Honduras, a country that she says “every Canadian” can afford to buy property in. Not only will investing in Honduras give Canadians a place to get away, says Storme, but there’s no credit check involved. Jorgensen is even offering a travel allowance for anyone to go visit the properties, and there are income-tax breaks to boot. At least a few people in the room signed up for a $500 gold membership with Tropical Freedom, which gives them the right to buy property with Jorgensen’s Honduran project. Jorgensen is making sales. But the global market in pleasant tropical experiences is a highly competitive business, and members of the North American middle class have certain expectations when they purchase their own little slice of a Third World paradise.

Québécois tourists in La Ceiba, with a Garifuna boy. Photo by Dawn Paley.

My mind went to a conversation I’d had with two tourists from Gatineau, Quebec on a beach near La Ceiba. They told me that they found their hotel boring. They were too scared to go into town. The two of them were the closest thing I can imagine to professional beach-goers: deeply tanned, lathered up in oil, laid out on folding lounge chairs with most of their middle-aged skin exposed to the scorching sun. For the money, they said, Cuba is a better deal.

Honduras isn’t for the faint of heart, or stomach, as anyone who strays from their supervised beach resort or walled-in retirement complex to a larger city will soon learn. There were 4,473 murders in Honduras in 2008, giving the country the chilling designation of having one of the highest murder rates per capita in the world.Canadians who ignore the country’s security situation do so at their peril.

But Canadians who choose to ignore the long-standing conflicts over rural land do so at the expense of all who have lived there before, and put themselves at risk as well. Consider the advice of the U.S. State Department: “U.S. citizens should exercise extreme caution before entering into any form of commitment to invest in real estate, particularly in coastal areas and the Bay Islands.” Instead of buying into a smooth sales pitch, Canadians would do well to ask themselves why they expect to land in one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries, which is also one of the most dangerous countries in the world, and be treated like gods.

Slumdog Millionaire Child star Azharuddin Ismail plays in his shanty on May 30, 2009 in Mumbai, India. Ismail's family faced evicition from their dwelling in spring 2009. Photo by Getty.

It can be an eye-opening experience that helps everyone involved move towards greater understanding….

It’s been happening in Rio’s famous favelas for some time. Now slum tourism—which turns a real-life ghetto into a “hot” tourist destination—has spread to Johannesburg, Manila, Cairo, and, in the wake of the blistering success of Slumdog Millionaire, Mumbai. But it’s controversial wherever it goes.

Shelley Seale, author of The Weight of Silence: Invisible Children of India, thinks slum tourism (also known as “poorism”) can be positive for both visitors and locals, but only if it’s done right. Seale toured the Dharavi slum in Mumbai, Asia’s largest slum and the setting for Slumdog, with Deepa Krishnan of Mumbai Magic, a socially responsible tour operator who donates a portion of her profits to local NGOs.

“Dharavi gave me a resounding rebuttal to the myth that poverty is the result of laziness,” Seale says. “I have never seen people work so hard. The place abounded with an industry and entrepreneurship such as I have not ever witnessed anywhere else. “It was an amazing experience, and I believe that things like this can do a lot to eradicate cultural bias and misunderstandings, and also the images of poverty that many of us have.”

…but it can also be exploitative and tarnishing to India’s global image

Indians tend to be very sensitive about their country’s identity. Many didn’t embrace the feel-goodism of Slumdog because they felt the film portrayed their country in a negative light, without offering explanations or solutions for the living conditions in the slum.

Likewise, Indian tourism professionals tend to be wary of slum tourism. They feel it can be exploitative, turning people’s lives into sideshow spectacle and obliterating both the slum dwellers’ humanity and the underlying issues, like India’s unrelenting rural to urban migration.

There are also justifiable concerns about who conducts the tours, and how. Ronjon Lahiri, director of India Tourism in Toronto, says that many of the so-called slum tourism operators are only looking to make a buck and don’t educate tourists on Dharavi and its residents.

He says that many people live there because Mumbai’s property prices are among the highest in the world. Even when residents make money, many don’t leave because Dharavi has become their home, their community.

For Lahiri, “Slum tourism is not to be encouraged. It is not good for India and not good for the people living there.”

One way the region could help divert more waste is by insisting that its commercial and industrial taxpayers start recycling, just as residents have done for years. After all, it’s the out-of-town visitors, and the businesses that cater to them, that are creating the garbage problem. Fewer than three percent of hotels offer recycling bins to their guests and you’d be hard-pressed to find a single bin in busy tourist districts or parks. One of the main reasons for this is that while residents pay for recycling pick-up as part of their municipal taxes, most businesses do not and must pay out of pocket for the service. “We don’t really recycle at all, and I don’t have time for this,” says Frank Taylor, general manager of the Best Western Fallsview, echoing the sentiments of many business owners when asked about their recycling habits.

Whether they wish to or not, all Ontario businesses have been legally obliged to recycle since 1994. But without any follow-through from the proper authorities, it’s been left up to businesses to decide whether to bother. “The Ministry of the Environment is simply not enforcing the regulation because, right now, it doesn’t see it as a priority,” says David McRobert, senior legal counsel to the province’s environmental commissioner.

“We are aware that this is an issue that isn’t being addressed, and we need to have a look at enforcing the recycling regulations,” says Arthur Chamberlain, a spokesperson for Ontario’s minister of the environment. He says the ministry is looking into the possibility of conducting recycling audits of businesses to make them more accountable.

But when that will happen is anyone’s guess. And the outcome may be too late to make a difference. “This is happening all over the place, not just in Niagara Falls. I think we have squeezed all the recycling we can out of city residents,” says Gord Perks of the Toronto Environmental Alliance, who is well aware of the one-sided recycling situation. “It’s time to make the big guys do it. Without big change now, everyone is going to suffer in the long run.”

It started as the sound of rustling underbrush behind the heavily wooded Salt Spring Island hillside where I live. It’s not a deer, I thought. It’s not a cougar. Way too noisy. It must be people. Now it’s highly unusual, you understand, to hear people in this neck of the woods. There are miles of uninhabited bush behind our cabin; I refer to it as supernatural nowhere BC. If Walden had a bush, this would be it.

Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, located 35 minutes by ferry from Vancouver Island and three hours from Vancouver, has a population of 10,000 people spread out among 182 square kilometres of lakes and woods with most of the population concentrated near the bustling town of Ganges. The South End, where I live with my sweetie and son, is far from Ganges and “the last of lawless Salt Spring,” as a friend of mine puts it. For me it symbolizes what west coast life ultimately represents: freedom, a chance to live off the grid as I have done all my adult life, grow vegetables in a Mediterranean climate—and now, continue to do so with my family and create a home.

So when I looked out from the cabin we have rented for three years and saw two men in bright orange work vests pounding stakes into the ground, I was surprised to say the least. A “rich American” had bought the property adjoining our place, one explained, sight unseen, online. These surveyors had been hired to drive a stake into the ground every five feet across five acres of land to mark Mr. Cyber-American’s property line.

The next day I came back, ripped out every single stake and chopped it up for kindling. I left the ones painted white and pounded them deep into mother earth with my sledge.

Salt Spring Island was originally claimed as Coast Salish territory, and still is. Property lines have no place here—it’s all stolen land. No, really. First Nations here never signed treaties surrendering land. Any pacts the natives signed were friendship pacts. To the colonizers they were legally binding documents, and often land deeds.

At the top of Cyber-American’s place is a midden, a garbage dump of bones and shells indicating habitation by First Nations. The Cowichan people have been coming here for more than 5,000 years, collecting oysters and clams, harvesting plants and hunting wildlife. In the 19th century, African Americans came to Salt Spring escaping slavery, and a little later Hawaiians travelled here as shipmates with the Hudson Bay Company and decided to stay. Now I’m adding to the midden heap.

During the early years of transition, nobody questioned citizenship. Even today what does it really matter—we’re all global citizens right? But to understand here, you have to live here in relationship to the land and its people, develop an understanding of its ecology and the effect it has on you. It’s what makes us so damn weird out west. We love the land. A case of nimbyism? Hardly. I don’t own this backyard.

So, yes, ripping out those stakes was incredibly therapeutic. It also, I discovered later, placed me within an intriguing subset of public opinion. It’s the subject of Environics cofounder and social scientist Michael Adams’s Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values (Penguin Canada). Canadians are actually becoming ever more different than Americans. The book is based on interviews with 14,000 Canadians and Americans over a 10-year period and two years’ worth of analysis of trends in more than 100 key indicators of social and cultural values.

Nowhere are these differences more apparent than in British Columbia. Of 16 North American geographic regions, British Columbia is the least driven with consumerism, and the most interested in life’s nonmaterial rewards. The United States, Adams points out, is “lacking in ecological values,” which indicates a detachment from the land. Ecological fatalism is up in the US, he adds, while empathy for your neighbour is way down.

“The whole island is being bought by Americans,” the surveyor working on the property next door—a longtime Salt Spring resident—points out. He should know, they are employing him. Finding out the numbers to support such a comment, however, is a lot more difficult. As of January 1, new provisions in the Privacy Act make it impossible to find out the nationalities of landowners in Canada.

But after talking to a number of real estate agents, one gets a pretty good idea about who is buying property—not only on Salt Spring Island, but on the rest of the Gulf Islands and Vancouver Island as well. One Salt Spring realtor told me that one-third of all waterfront property on Salt Spring is owned by Americans, and there are areas of Salt Spring that are 50 percent American-owned.

On neighbouring Mayne Island, one sale out of 40 went to an American three years ago. Over the past year, one in five properties that sold went to an American. On Salt Spring Island, the buyers are the big-money kind. Goldie Hawn, Al Pacino and Robin Williams own places but don’t live in them. People who don’t have to think twice about the price of a home are driving up land prices. In the past three years housing prices on Salt Spring have increased by half.

There are three types of US real estate refugees: those who immigrate here and gain citizenship, those who seek citizenship but are denied it, and those who simply want real estate holdings here. It is the latter that make up the bulk of purchasers here. “They disapprove of American foreign policy and the current Bush administration, they fear that in America they will be under terrorist attack and they want to have Canada as a safe place to retreat to in the event of such an attack,” says Jan MacPherson, another Salt Spring realtor.

A few days before the border-stake incident, I saw a Humvee with Oregon license plates at the recycling depot. So I was in a certain frame of mind, let’s say, when I chopped up the stakes. While considering my feelings and discussing them with friends, an intriguing bumper sticker started showing up on vans, island beaters, road signs and hydro poles: “USA Out of Iraq and The Gulf Islands.” Apparently I wasn’t alone in my thoughts.

To be fair, the American migration is part of a larger trend of gentrification on the islands. In the 1960s and ‘70s, young people moved here searching for a simpler way of life. The hippie dream was alive and well and the growing conditions for marijuana perfect for a down payment. Today, back-to-the-land has been replaced by back-to-the-bland, comfortable middle-aged city-dwellers investing in country property (preferably on the waterfront) where they can develop estates for weekends and holiday retreats. Here it isn’t often a case of trying to live off the land; more often it’s living off stock options in an expensive second home with a hobby garden and an electric fence.

“I’d like to see an economy where people who are investing their lives here have the opportunity to buy property,” says Ellen Garvie, a community development consultant. Garvie suggests that back to nature at $500-per-square-foot properties such as the one built by Randy Bachman of BTO and the Guess Who (which reportedly employed 400 people) are not sustainable. The effect of
the value of the house outweighs the short-term employment opportunities it provides. And the people who work on the house won’t be able to afford to buy property here.

The island has a zero vacancy rate for renters, and as Garvie notes (and I have experienced) there’s a shocking decrepitude to places available for rent. The last place we rented was 400 square feet, with no tub, for $750 a month and the landlord and his barking dog Bubba adding to the midden pile outside our door.

In the 1996 federal census, 17 percent of locals reported earning gross personal incomes below the federal low-income cut-off level of $14,473 for a single person and $27,235 for a four-person household. Almost half the households on Salt Spring enjoy an income of less than $30,000, with 30 percent of households surviving on less than $20,000. Can one experience “the good life” under such conditions?

To make sure the good life remains accessible to longtime residents, a few have gathered together to form the Salt Spring Island Coalition, whose goal is to develop an independent political entity—an Island State—to ensure a sustainable community. According to Eric Booth, who was born and raised on Salt Spring Island and has raised two children here, chances are that only one or two percent of the 100 children graduating from high school each year on Salt Spring today will be able to remain here and raise their own kids.

Booth, who worked as a real estate agent on the island for close to a decade, bases this statement on the fact that there are only 6,500 subdividable lots on Salt Spring Island, which can support a population of 15,000 to 18,000 people. “After that, the population of Salt Spring will have maxed out,” he says. “There will be no more land available to build. Once that happens the price of real estate here will go through the roof.”

But you can’t stop people from wanting to come here, can you?

“Oh but you can,” says Booth. “What is the current immigration criteria for coming to Salt Spring now? If you have the money you can come. What definition of citizenship is that? If Salt Spring were to become an Island Nation like the Isle of Mann or the Channel Islands we could define what criteria make for a citizen. In the future the people who contribute to the uniqueness of Salt Spring, the artists and craftspersons, the musicians and farmers, won’t be able to afford to live here. Then the Island will be only for the rich. We can insure that there will always be room for a culturally diverse population if we define it by our citizenship.”

Prince Edward Island has taken one small step in that direction. Property owners who were born outside its boundaries pay double the property tax of the indigenous population.

“People who come here from out of country don’t make the same connections to community in most cases,” says Garvie, “If you are younger and raise your children here, you can put a face to the community and invest energy into it. It is in your best interest.”

Four cedars, each at least 500 years old, have already been chopped down on my neighbour’s property. Cedars my two-year-old son and I have placed our hands upon countless times, But it cuts deeper than that. There is now a daily assault of chainsaws outside our rented home. It truly does feel like an American invasion. In just weeks the ecosystem here has been reduced from a relatively undisturbed 10,000 years of post-glacial forest life to a redneck mud pit of man conquering trees. (I have a chainsaw; I cut down four trees a year for firewood. This is not about raving environmentalism.)

The bush is abuzz with the sounds of building another weekend retreat for Americans. And with the silence goes the idea of living on the land and raising your kids here. And, of course, for my sweetie, son and I the question remains where to go next? With all the US immigration headed this way I hear there are some great real estate bargains just south of the border.

Grant Shilling is the author of The Cedar Surf: An Informal History of Surfing in British Columbia. Shilling was the editor and publisher of The GIG, an eclectic news-paper that served the coastal communities of BC. His surf drama “Tough City” is to be produced by True West Films. Shilling surfs a longboard dubbed “The Muff.” He is a lot of fun at parties.