Seven in ten parsable Trust PDFs fail a basic accessibility check

8 sets of minutes are not inaccessible — they are gone

Everything else on this page is a document you can obtain and struggle to read. These are different. We indexed them from the Islands Trust's own document library and the Trust's own URL now returns 404; we hold no readable copy. 8 sets of meeting minutes and 15 meeting agendas — the record of what a public body decided, and the notice of what it was about to decide.

These are not the Trust's private papers. The Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, Schedule 1 defines a “local government body” to include “the trust council, the executive committee, a local trust committee and the Islands Trust Conservancy, as these are defined in the Islands Trust Act”. Each is therefore a public body, and section 4 of that Act — “Information rights” — gives any person a right of access to the records it holds. Taking a page down is not the same as destroying a record: if the Trust still holds these, they are obtainable, which is why each is listed by name and by dead URL.

One of them is the Accessibility Committee's own regular meeting minutes. A broken link is usually a content-management accident rather than a decision, and we make no more of it than that — but an organisation that cannot keep the minutes of its accessibility committee online is describing the problem this page measures.

Minutes

• May 12,2026 Islands Trust Regular Board Meeting Minutes - DRAFT — Islands Trust Area, dated 2026-05-12; 404 confirmed 2026-08-30.
  Dead link: https://islandstrust.bc.ca/document/may-122026-islands-trust-regular-board-meeting-minutes-draft/
• May 12, 2026 Islands Trust Conservancy Board Meeting Minutes - DRAFT — Islands Trust Area, dated 2026-05-12; 404 confirmed 2026-08-30.
  Dead link: https://islandstrust.bc.ca/document/may-12-2026-islands-trust-conservancy-board-meeting-minutes-draft/
• Accessibility Committee Regular Meeting Minutes — Islands Trust Area, dated 2026-01-15; 404 confirmed 2026-06-24.
  Dead link: https://islandstrust.bc.ca/document/accessibility-committee-regular-meeting-minutes-5/
• Islands Trust Conservancy Board Special Meeting Minutes — Islands Trust Area, dated 2025-08-27; 404 confirmed 2026-06-24.
  Dead link: https://islandstrust.bc.ca/document/islands-trust-conservancy-board-special-meeting-minutes-2/
• Trust Council Regular Meeting Minutes - DRAFT — Islands Trust Area, dated 2025-03-11; 404 confirmed 2026-06-24.
  Dead link: https://islandstrust.bc.ca/document/trust-council-regular-meeting-minutes-draft/
• Gabriola LTC Special Meeting Draft Minutes — Gabriola LTA, dated 2024-07-16; 404 confirmed 2026-06-24.
  Dead link: https://islandstrust.bc.ca/document/gabriola-ltc-special-meeting-draft-minutes-2/
• Regional Planning Committee Regular Meeting Minutes DRAFT — Islands Trust Area, dated 2020-11-09; 404 confirmed 2026-06-24.
  Dead link: https://islandstrust.bc.ca/document/rpc-regular-meeting-minutes-nov-9-2020-draft/
• Salt Spring LTC Minutes May 2020 — Salt Spring LTA, dated 2020-01-20; 404 confirmed 2026-06-24. The index dates this 20 January 2020 while the title says May 2020 and the URL says May 2023. We cannot resolve which is right without the document, which is the point.
  Dead link: https://islandstrust.bc.ca/document/salt-spring-ltc-minutes-may-2023/

Agendas

• Lasqueti LTC Regular Meeting Draft Agenda — Lasqueti LTA, dated 2026-05-04 (dead link)
• Islands Trust Conservancy Regular Meeting Agenda — Islands Trust Area, dated 2025-11-18 (dead link)
• Gabriola LTC Regular Meeting Agenda — Gabriola LTA, dated 2025-04-17 (dead link)
• Webinar: Mudge Island: Understanding bylaws - a public forum Agenda 2 — Gabriola LTA, dated 2024-06-25 (dead link)
• Regional Planning Committee Regular Meeting Agenda — Islands Trust Area, dated 2023-11-15 (dead link)
• Gambier LTC Special Meeting Agenda — Denman LTA, dated 2023-10-31 (dead link)
• Denman LTC Regular Meeting Agenda — Denman LTA, dated 2023-09-11 (dead link)
• Denman LTC Regular Meeting Agenda — Denman LTA, dated 2023-09-11 (dead link)
• Thetis LTC Regular Meeting Agenda — Thetis LTA, dated 2023-09-05 (dead link)
• Financial Planning Committee Regular Meeting Agenda — Islands Trust Area, dated 2023-08-30 (dead link)
• Islands Trust Conservancy Regular Meeting Agenda — Islands Trust Area, dated 2023-07-18 (dead link)
• Denman LTC Regular Meeting Agenda — Denman LTA, dated 2023-06-06 (dead link)
• Gabriola LTC Regular Meeting Agenda — Gabriola LTA, dated 2021-11-25 (dead link)
• Regional Planning Committee Regular Meeting Agenda — Islands Trust Area, dated 2021-05-07 (dead link)
• Salt Spring Agenda May 2020 — Salt Spring LTA, dated 2020-02-20 (dead link)

Method. Records this project mirrored from the Islands Trust document index and later found to return HTTP 404 at the Trust's own URL, where we hold no readable copy. Discovered by the link-rot sweep, which walks every document carrying no open failure row and re-checks its source. Two were re-checked by hand. A page that merely redirects is NOT counted as removed, and a document we still hold a readable copy of is not counted either — this is the list of records that are gone from the public record and gone from ours.

What this list cannot tell you. This is what we noticed, not what exists. We can only detect the removal of a document we had already indexed, so anything the Trust published and removed before we first crawled it is invisible to us. The true figure can only be higher.

Excluded by hand. “Contract Opportunity - Islands Trust - Minute Taker (South Pender & North Pender)” — A contract posting for a minute taker, classified as minutes by its title. Not a meeting record, so it is not counted as one.

Measured 2026-08-30. The full ledger of Trust documents whose links no longer resolve, including those we still hold a copy of, is at the broken public-record ledger.

106 of the Trust's own document links are confirmed gone

This project keeps a mirrored copy of almost every document the Trust publishes, and checks every copy against the Trust's own website to make sure the link still works. A first check only flags a link as broken; it does not say why. So every flagged link is re-checked a second time, following any redirect, to sort out three different things: a document that is truly gone, a document whose address changed and our copy is stale, and a handful of placeholder test uploads that were never real records. This section is built straight from that two-step check, not typed by hand, so it can be refreshed any time the check runs again.

Generated 2026-09-03. As of that date we had finished checking 7,161 Trust document links. 106 of them (1.5%) are confirmed gone — a 404 “page not found” even after following any redirect. 0 more looked broken on the first pass but resolved on the second: the Trust moved the document, or the first check caught it at a bad moment. 2 are placeholder test uploads, not real records. Only the confirmed-gone count is the headline; the other two are published and explained separately rather than folded in. 311 more links have not been checked at all yet. To refresh these numbers, run node scripts/refresh-accessibility-ledger.mjs from a machine with access to the production database — re-run it periodically; a count like this is only as fresh as the last time someone ran it.

• 102 confirmed-gone Ordinary Trust documents
• 3 confirmed-gone Local trust committee agenda packages
• 1 confirmed-gone Governing bylaw

Fairness, plainly. A broken link like this is ordinary on almost any large website. Pages get renamed, replaced, or taken down, and the old address does not always get fixed or pointed to the new one. The Trust publishes several thousand documents, and the great majority of them still work: of the 7,161 Trust document links we have finished checking, 98.5% still resolve. Some of what looked dead on a first pass turned out to be superseded — an older document whose replacement is published somewhere else on the Trust's own site — or simply our own stale link, and this check is what found that out rather than asserting it. Because this project holds a mirrored copy of most of the Trust's public record, this count is a measure of the Trust's own link permanence, not of anything hidden. We are not going to make more of that than it deserves.

For every confirmed-gone link, we also checked who — if anyone — still points at it: every other Trust document we hold, and, for governing documents, the Trust's own live website — for the EXACT dead address, not just matching text, after checking the Trust's robots.txt and skipping anything it disallows: it disallows /wp-content/uploads/ for everyone, which this check honoured.

One place is still worth pressing harder. A bylaw, an official community plan, a map, a meeting agenda, or minutes is not like an old news post — it is the rule, or the record of a decision, that a resident is expected to be able to look up and follow. 41 confirmed-gone links are documents like that. They are named below, with the exact dead Trust URL and what we found — or did not find — still pointing at each one, so every claim here can be checked by hand.

The clearest example: “Trust Council Regular Meeting Minutes - DRAFT.” Minutes are the legal record of a public meeting. The link this project has on file for it, https://islandstrust.bc.ca/document/trust-council-regular-meeting-minutes-draft/, returns 404 on the Trust's own website even after following any redirect. Unlike the two examples below, no working copy of this specific document turned up anywhere this check looked — this one is the real thing this page is measuring. No other mirrored Trust document contains this link.

A correction, not a finding: Hornby Island Official Community Plan Bylaw No. 149. This looked, at first, like the biggest story on this page — an official community plan is the rulebook a resident is legally expected to consult before building or subdividing, and the link this project had on file for it, https://islandstrust.bc.ca/document/hornby-island-ocp-2023/, does return 404. But it is not the Trust's plan that is missing: it is this project's own address for it that is stale. The document is still available — our index was stale, not the Trust. This project's own indexed link uses the Trust's old slug. The Trust's document URLs later gained ’-bylaw-’ in the path, and the same plan is published today at the address on the right — already cited elsewhere on this site as the live Hornby OCP, and linked by the Trust's own current bylaws page for Hornby. https://islandstrust.bc.ca/document/hornby-island-ocp-bylaw-2023/ (confirmed working 2026-09-03). The old address still 404s with no redirect, which is a real, fair criticism of the Trust's link hygiene — but the plan itself is not gone, and this page will not say that it is.

A second correction: Gambier Bylaw Enforcement Notification Bylaw No. 116. This project's clean address for it, https://islandstrust.bc.ca/document/gambier-bylaw-enforcement-notification-bylaw-no-116/, redirects on the Trust's own site to an address that itself 404s — that part is a real dead link. But this project's own index holds a second record of the same bylaw under a different, uglier, machine-mangled address, and that second address currently works: it is what the Trust's own live Gambier bylaws page actually links to. The document is still available — our index was stale, not the Trust. This project's own index holds a second record for the same title, under a different, uglier address, and that second address currently works. https://islandstrust.bc.ca/document/https-islandstrust-bc-ca-document-gambier-bylaw-enforcement-notification-bylaw-no-116-gambier-bylaw-enforcement-notification-bylaw-no-116/ (confirmed working 2026-09-03). The bylaw is reachable, just by an ugly address, and that is why it is not this page's headline example even though a cruder check first flagged it as one.

Two more governing documents are confirmed gone: the Denman Island and Hornby Island local trust committee agenda packages for their June 2026 regular meetings. An agenda package is the public notice of what a local trust committee is about to decide. Both links return 404 after following any redirect, and no working alternate turned up for either. A third dead link in the same folder is titled with a literal “test-” prefix and dated 2024 — this check classifies that one as a placeholder test upload rather than a real record, so it is not counted among the two above, though it stays in the full list below for the same reason nothing on this page gets quietly dropped.

Read live from the production `documents` table's mirror ledger (mirror_status, mirror_error) over a read-only SSH connection, filtered to rows whose mirror_error text matches /404/. Every one of those is then RE-FETCHED directly, with redirects followed, and classified as gone, moved (a different address now works), now-resolves (the same address now works — a stale or transient failure), or a test-artifact (title or filename literally starts with "test-"). Only "gone" counts toward the headline number; the rest are published and explained separately, and "moved"/"now-resolves" rows are also written to docs/a11y-audit/moved-documents-for-repair.json as a worklist. For governing documents still "gone", this project's own table is checked for a second record under the same title with a working address, and a short hand-maintained list of known renames is re-verified live — both are how a dead link gets corrected in place instead of presented as a missing governing document. For each dead link, every other mirrored document's extracted text is searched for that link's own URL, path-slug, or filename (not its title text). For governing documents, islandstrust.bc.ca is also checked directly, after robots.txt, for a small set of per-island planning pages that still link the EXACT dead URL. Refresh by running scripts/refresh-accessibility-ledger.mjs again — re-run this periodically; the numbers below are only as fresh as the generatedAt timestamp. The full worklist of addresses this check found had moved is published alongside this file, for whoever repairs this project's own records next.

A different town's council videos, checked while comparing — not a Trust finding

This part of the page is not about the Islands Trust. Bowen Island is its own town (a municipality) next to some of the Trust's islands. It used to be governed by the Trust, but it left and became its own local government in 1999. We looked at Bowen's public meeting videos only to compare the Trust fairly against another small-island BC government — the way you would check a few other schools' report cards before judging one school's grades. What we found is a lesson about how fragile video records are for small BC local governments in general. It says nothing about the Trust, and should not be read as if it did.

Bowen's own council meeting minutes give a web link to a video of that meeting. For 41 meetings, between January 2016 and July 2017, that link points to a web address — original.livestream.com — that does not exist on the internet anymore. This is not a page that loads and says “not found.” The address itself fails at the very first step of finding it on the internet, the way a phone number stops working once its whole area code is retired. We checked this two different ways ourselves on 2026-09-04, and both agree: the address does not resolve.

What we do NOT know, said plainly: whether these videos still exist. We only know the published address does not work. Bowen Island Municipality may still hold every one of these recordings on its own computers. The web service that used to host them, called Livestream, was bought by another company (Vimeo), which later shut down that old version of the product — a company retiring an old service is a far more ordinary explanation than anything else, and we say so on purpose rather than letting a dead link imply something worse. If the municipality still has the files, they remain public records under BC's freedom-of-information law and can be requested.

Two more groups are worth naming honestly, though neither is the main point here. 45 meetings, mostly from 2018 and 2019, can only be reached through a special video viewer built into Bowen's own document website, and that viewer's own rules tell automated tools to stay out, so we did not try to get around it — a person could still watch these by clicking through by hand. 11 meetings have no video link listed in their minutes at all. Even so, 44 of those 56 meetings' minutes still contain the same sentence Bowen uses to say a recording was made — so a missing link is not proof a recording never existed, in either direction.

The per-meeting recording route (youtube / civicweb-media-widget / livestream-legacy / none) for all 224 Bowen council meetings comes from scripts/study/comparator/extract-bowen-recording-links.mjs, which parses PDF link annotations in human-downloaded minutes packages and makes no network request. This script reads that committed output plus the matching extracted-text corpus, both already on disk, and performs exactly one live check: a DNS lookup (not a page fetch, and no request to Bowen Island Municipality or CivicWeb) of the video host named in the minutes, alongside a control hostname on the same registered domain that is still alive today. A DNS lookup asks whether a name exists; it does not fetch a page from it. Data file: docs/a11y-audit/bowen-video-unreachable.json (generated 2026-09-04). To refresh, run node scripts/refresh-bowen-video-ledger.mjs.

And a register that cannot tell you what was decided

The two categories above are documents you cannot read and documents that are gone. There is a third: information the Trust does publish, in a form that answers nothing. For these open files, we cannot tell from the records searched whether an application was ever decided.

Of 139 rezoning applications the Trust lists as open, 31 have not appeared anywhere in its own document library since before 2021, and 14 not since before 2017. GB-RZ-2007.1 has 24 appearances in the meeting record, the last on 2014-07-17, and is still published as in progress. The Trust publishes no decisions register, so there is no second source to check any of them against. Full working on the housing page.

Repair follow-up: availability is not accessibility

On 25 August 2026 we rechecked all 130 open broken-document records. 27 ledger entries, representing 26 distinct PDFs, now deliver document bytes; 103 entries remain unavailable.

Of 25 distinct restored PDFs that could be assessed, 24 still fail at least one basic check. One clears the four-check screen and one produced a parser error. None is labelled fully WCAG- or PDF/UA-conformant; that requires broader automated and manual testing.