Fifteen recommendations. Three prioritised. Four and a half years.

2026-09-03

In 2021 the Islands Trust hired outside reviewers. Their job was simple to state: look at how the Trust runs itself, and grade it. The Trust picked the reviewers and paid for the report, so nobody can call this an outside attack. It is the Trust’s own report about the Trust. It came out in February 2022, from a firm called Great Northern Management Consultants. Here is the sentence that sums it up, in their own words.

Put simply, good governance is the art of setting and navigating the course for the institution. Current Trust Council practices, however, do not meet the requirements set by good governance principles.

In plain words: good government means setting a clear course and steering it well. The reviewers said the Trust does not do that.

Nine problems, graded

The reviewers checked the Trust against five big rules of good government and found nine specific problems. Two of them, in their own words: leadership selection “is flawed, impairing informed choice and buy-in,” and under the rule about fairness, “processes are obscure and overly bureaucratic.” Under the rule about holding staff to account, “real performance measures … are largely absent. Consequently, performance targets are virtually non-existent.” All nine, with the full wording, are on our page: the governance review, explained.

Slow, and stuck

The reviewers did not stop at listing problems. They found a pattern — things move very slowly, and some things never move at all.

Initiatives are mired in processes that take much too long, contributing to a sense of inertia and the widely-held belief that the Trust is unwilling or unable to respond effectively to pressing concerns.

The Trust’s main policy document is a good example. It had gone unamended for 25 years when the reviewers wrote their report, and they called it “a dramatic example of Trust Council’s collective leadership deficit.”

What the reviewers said the Trust does well

This part matters as much as the criticism, and it comes before the rest of this story for that reason. The same report says the people who run the Trust believe in it and want it to work. It says the Trust’s openness about its information and its meetings “meets the standards set by the Government of British Columbia.” It says there is “every reason to believe” the Trust’s money is handled properly. And it says the local island committees “have done a very good job at public engagement and representing their communities’ interests.” None of that is ours. It is theirs, and we are not leaving it out.

What happened to the report

The report landed on Trust Council’s table in March 2022. In June 2022 Council asked the Province to review the Trust’s whole mandate and structure, and set up a new Governance Committee to work on it. In September 2022 the Minister said no to a provincial review and told the Trust to use the powers it already had. By November 2023, the Trust’s own Governance Committee minutes record that the report had been shown to the previous Council “but not thoroughly discussed,” and that the Province was asking how the response was going. In September 2024 Council asked the Province for a review a second time. In December 2024 — nearly three years after the report was delivered — Council finally moved to hold one dedicated meeting, in 2025, to talk about it. In March 2025 that review was named one of the highest priorities in the Trust’s new strategic plan.

On 13 May 2025 — three years and three months after the report landed — a Committee of the Whole finally worked through all fifteen recommendations. The chair opened by noting the review “was commissioned by a previous Trust Council.” That same month, the Province gave its answer to the request Council had made twice: the Minister of Housing and Municipal Affairs wrote that he was “not in a position to consider a review of the Islands Trust Act prior to the next general local elections.” In August 2025 the Trust’s own Governance Committee recorded that Council still “has not had a discussion on the topic and has not provided specific priorities or direction.” Every step above is sourced to the Trust’s own minutes and letters on the full page.

Status in records reviewed through June 2026

It is not dead. It is mostly not done. In September 2025 Council finally picked three of the fifteen recommendations to prioritise. The reviewed records document work on one of those three — helping trustees understand their roles. Recommendation 8, a full-time Office of Secretary, is not:

Work on this has not started. As per Trust Council December 2025 resolution to not start new work this term, this item is DEFFERED.

Progress on that recommendation is recorded at 0%. Separately, delegating development permits to staff — also a review recommendation — is being adopted by local trust committees, which does genuinely reduce delay. The records also describe briefing material for the trustees elected in October 2026. A complete recommendation-by-recommendation progress table is needed; this partial account does not establish that all other work is unstarted.

What they recommended

Here is the part that has to be said plainly, because it would be easy to leave out: the reviewers did not recommend getting rid of the Trust. They recommended reform — changing how it selects its leaders, restructuring its committees, briefing candidates before they run and trustees after they win, hiring a full-time Secretary who reports to Council, adding First Nations and province-wide voices to the table, and doing real strategic planning.

Our own view is separate from theirs, and we say so as a separate view, not a finding: every one of those fixes is about making Trust Council work better on the inside. Islanders elect local trustees who sit on Trust Council, but do not directly elect its Executive Committee. Our objection is to that divided accountability and the appointment of the local committee chair, not the absence of any electoral representation. The review diagnosed the illness and prescribed a better committee structure.

What we are not saying

We are not saying anyone acted in bad faith — the report says the opposite, twice, and so do we. We are not saying the Trust’s finances are irregular — the consultants found the reverse. We are not saying the Trust is secretive — the consultants found its transparency meets provincial standards. And we are not saying the consultants recommended abolition. They did not. They recommended internal reform, and this post says so.

The full page, with the complete nine-row scorecard, every quote, and every source: the Trust hired reviewers to check itself. The report itself is public on the Trust’s own site: Islands Trust Governance Review, Final Report, February 2022.