Who gets to live on the islands?

2026-10-04

Statistics Canada finds that multigenerational living is more common among some racialized and first-generation groups in British Columbia. The Trust's own North Pender housing plan says traditional island zoning has heavily favoured single-family dwellings, and one current North Pender zone expressly prohibits secondary suites. Those records give us a concrete housing-rule mechanism to test.

They do not tell us how many feasible homes the rule prevented or whether protected groups were disproportionately affected on the islands. Our new all-islands investigation puts the official counts, exact geographies, zoning example, competing explanations and next evidence together. We will examine shared homes and separate legal suites across every local trust area, with Cortes, Quadra and Texada as carefully labelled comparison candidates.