CHAPTER 3

“Restful Refuge” or “Vancouver’s Bedroom”? The Making of Bowen Island’s First Official Community Plan, 1969–77

The March 1973 editorial in the Bowenian, which was the newsletter of the Bowen Island Improvement Association (BIIA), painted a bleak picture: “Vancouver’s skyline together with West Van’s shoreline viewed from the Gulf of Georgia, resemble nothing so much as the erect tombstones of distant graveyards; and these could well be monuments to vanished benefits – light, fresh air and the view of unparalleled beauty which surrounds these communities.” This description nicely captures the antiurban attitude that had emerged in North America during the 1960s when the mantra for many young people was to drop out of society and go back to a simple and pure life on the land. But because Bowen Island lay at Vancouver’s “front door,” in the words of the editorial writer, who was far from being a hippie, it was “like a ripe plum ready for the speculator’s plucking.” Readers were warned: “Yes, we will have our condominiums, and our charming villas – Our swimming pools and golf courses … But where have the trees gone, those alchemists of nature who purify our air and conserve our water, and to say nothing of beautifying our surroundings?”1

Developed and promoted by two successive Vancouver-based steamship companies, Bowen Island’s Snug Cove had served as a popular summer escape for day-trippers and campers from the turn of the twentieth century to the late 1950s.² After the resort era ended, Bowen appealed to retirees and commuters seeking a refuge from the city, though it was too mountainous to offer the pastoral arcadian refuge that attracted significant numbers of young back-to-the-landers to Hornby, Denman, and the more southerly Gulf Islands with their open meadows and fertile valleys.3 Despite the romantic antimodernist tone of their antiurban rhetoric, then, BIIA members were certainly not countercultural radicals. Rather, most of them were middle-aged, middle-class, politically engaged citizens with a strong faith in the technocratic exercise of community planning.⁴ Given their desire to keep at bay the social problems of the city and the cultural emptiness of the suburbs, Bowen Islanders clearly shared an element of elitism and “NIMBYism” (a term first used in the 1980s). The fact remains, however, that the BIIA was not opposed to the responsible, carefully planned development of what was a challenging physical environment, and it was also in favour of an outdoor-oriented tourism economy. The volunteer group had the support of the great majority of Bowen residents – both year-round and seasonal – as we shall see, but several influential property developers, supported by a few small business operators, did manage to delay the implementation of a restrictive Official Community Plan (OCP) for a number of years. When that plan was finally implemented in 1977, it set the basic blueprint for Bowen Island’s slow pace of development – one heavily reliant on off-island employment but focused on a service, leisure, and artisanal economy.

The Move towards Zoning

Aside from a handful of settler families and the summer communities established on its southern and northern shores by members of the Vancouver elite,⁵ Bowen Island’s population growth began in earnest only in the late 1950s when the resort era of the Union Steamship Company (USC) ended and that of the car ferry began. There was little official government oversight of the Gulf Islands at that time, aside from regulations for forestry, mining, and fishing.6 As a result, because Bowen did not fall within a municipality, the BIIA played a growing role as the island’s informal governing body.⁷ The minutes taken at a 1973 quarterly meeting, for example, reveal that the association’s committees were named transportation and communication, fire, rod and gun, water, planning, and political action.⁸ In the meantime, the USC had turned to subdividing and marketing its property in Snug Cove and surrounding area (see figure 3.1), and – according to an article published in Vancouver’s Province in 1972 – visitors no longer felt welcome: “Whether on foot, bicycle or in cars, they found pathways blocked off with private property signs. Former picnic areas, now overgrown, were uninviting. And dust from the unpaved roads was choking in midsummer heat … A nice place to live, but you wouldn’t want to visit there.”⁹

USC estate agent Grahame Budge had predicted in 1967 that within ten or fifteen years “The Island might well replace West Vancouver as Vancouver’s bedroom.”¹⁰ Budge’s prediction was widely off the mark, failing to take into account, as it did, not only the cost and inconvenience of the ferry ride for commuters but the island’s mountainous and rocky topography. As late as 1971 there were only 351 year-round inhabitants on an island that was nearly fifty square kilometres (12,600 acres) in size.¹¹ As the above-quoted Bowenian editorial suggests, however, development pressures on the Gulf Islands were increasing by the late 1960s,¹² forcing the provincial government to respond to calls for regulation and control. In 1969, when there were 117 applications to purchase Crown land on Bowen alone, the Social Credit administration – evidently bowing to pressure from well-healed supporters who owned seasonal properties on the Gulf Islands – imposed a Crown land sales freeze on all those islands plus a freeze on the subdivision of privately-owned lots that were under ten acres in size, pending land and water surveys.¹³

The Bowenian expressed its gratitude, claiming that “If nothing had been done,” the island would have become “a bald prairie,” for the actual attraction in the eyes of the so-called developers was the island’s “prime timber.” “Imagine coming in on the ferry and seeing those beautiful knolls ahead all cut and covered in slash,” the editor wrote, “Not only would the Island’s beauty have gone but your property and mine would have been worth half today’s value.”¹⁴ The Crown land freeze, which would become permanent for large tracts in early 1971, affected two Bowen interests in particular, for the USC had applied to add 1,325 Crown acres to the 1,200 acres it already owned, and Maui Holding Limited had applied for 540 acres.¹⁵ Both companies had more ambitious plans, however, than simply cutting timber.

3.1 Map of Bowen Island showing Union Steamship Company land, 1981.

Maui Holding’s high-profile Stan James of West Vancouver would become the principal figure in the development controversy during the next five years. His company appeared to be a solid operation, for it included shareholder companies from Honolulu and Nassau, as well as individuals from San Francisco, Wailuku (Hawaii), Seattle, Calgary, and Vancouver. James, nevertheless, had a less-than-impressive record as a developer. According to the Vancouver Sun, during the 1950s he had been a principal in a firm known as Fintry Estates that had sold more than 3,000 lots at Lake Okanagan on a $10 down/$10 a month basis, before going bankrupt. His attempt in the late 1960s to develop a Hawaiian resort through Maui Holdings had reportedly also failed.16 But this did not prevent James from proposing a $6 million recreational–residential development on Bowen that would feature 500 townhouses, an eighteen-hole golf course, buried domestic service lines, swimming pools, shopping centre, and water piped from the mainland.¹⁷ Concerned about the clear-cut logging that was taking place on nearby Cypress Bowl in West Vancouver (as we saw in chapter 2), the BIIA expressed its support of the Crown grant to James’s company only on condition that he submit a bank bond of $500,000 and that “no more than 150 acres be developed at one time,” although the BIIA also stated that the project should be completed within a three-year deadline.¹⁸

The Bowenian called as well for zoning regulations, asking, “of what use [is it to] a taxpayer to build his dream-house and then have it violated by the close proximity of hot-dog stands, or the wanton disposal of garbage or junked cars – to say nothing of undesirable transients?”¹⁹ Approving of the provincial government’s promise to send planners to the island “not only to plan our land but to, at long last, put our watershed into shape,” the Bowenian’s summer 1970 edition proclaimed that the day had passed when Snug Cove’s water supply should be the asset of the USC alone: “Water on this Island belongs to all and the lakes on our highlands should be used for the good of everyone.”20 The survey would, however, be a long time in coming.

That following year, 1971, saw the provincial government transfer its planning responsibility for Bowen Island to the board of the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD), which included one Bowen representative. A distinction was made by the GVRD board between regional and local planning, with the latter contracted to a private firm in consultation with each member community’s appointed six-member Advisory Planning Commission.²¹ Subsequent progress was rapid, for in January 1972 GVRD representatives presented zoning bylaws for discussion at a heavily attended and lively public meeting on Bowen. Attendees were informed that once the revised plan had been endorsed by the GVRD there would be further meetings on the island to seek public approval, followed by a local referendum. Attendees at the meeting were warned, however, that the provincial government might override a negative vote and make acceptance of the zoning bylaw compulsory. The most contentious issue was the minimum acreage that could be subdivided, with the chair of the GVRD observing that there were “two entirely different perspectives – on the one hand, the individual property owner, and on the other, the developer, – both approaching the problem from their own selfish point of view.”²²

The zoning bylaw for Bowen was passed by the GVRD the following June, but at a second public hearing in November the GVRD presented an amendment to increase the minimum lot size in areas with sewage facilities from 6,000 square feet to 7,500 square feet. This proposed minimum, allowing for five houses per acre, still did not satisfy the BIIA, which had circulated a petition asking that it be increased to 12,000 square feet.²³ The reasons given in the Bowenian were essentially aesthetic, for its readers were asked if they wished to see the island’s green slopes above Snug Cove “criss-crossed with black-top roads, and checkered with the houses of over-populated growth.”²⁴ Although the November meeting on Bowen was informed that the requested increase in minimum lot size would require a new bylaw, former USC agent Budge – who was now the island’s GVRD representative – did promise that the 12,000 square foot proposal would be acted upon after the zoning bylaw was passed by the provincial government.25 The growing interest in the minimum lot size was clearly fuelled by the recent purchase of the USC’s strategically located land by Stan James, who was no longer with Maui Holding.²⁶ James had informed the Bowen Advisory Planning Commission that a decrease in density from the 6,000 square feet per building lot originally proposed, and as found in “several villages and municipalities in the Province,” would jeopardize his plan for “clusters of residential units set into the existing forest cover; the majority of which will surround the proposed golf course.”²⁷

In the meantime, property development was still on hold because of the aforementioned ten-acre minimum temporary freeze on subdividing Gulf Island lots, imposed by the provincial government in 1969 in order to provide regional district planning boards with the time needed to prepare formal plans for the islands. The Liberal MLA for West Vancouver–Howe Sound, Allan Williams, assured a public hearing that the freeze would remain in effect until the newly elected New Democratic Party (NDP) government was satisfied with the GVRD’s regulations.²⁸ Budge, who now owned his own real estate agency, nevertheless succeeded in having the GVRD pass a bylaw that lifted the freeze on Bowen.²⁹ The BIIA reacted, in turn, by printing “Save Bowen Island” stickers and circulating a questionnaire soliciting opinions on zoning and the need for a comprehensive study of the island’s resources before the approval of any further property developments.³⁰ Local land developer Donald Cromie claimed to have collected 100 signatures on a petition favouring the GVRD bylaw that exempted Bowen from the temporary freeze, but the provincial government refused to approve it pending the report of the twelve-member legislative committee it had appointed to study the land situation on the Gulf Islands.³¹

Conflicting Visions

If the Social Credit administration had been responding to the concerns of wealthy summer residents on the Gulf Islands, land developers had still more reason to be worried about its social democratic and technocratic NDP successor. Shortly before the committee chaired by Alfred Nunweiler (NDP – Fort George) arrived on Bowen in the summer of 1973, the outspokenly pro-free-enterprise Cromie published a letter in the Vancouver Sun (which he had once owned) warning that “Land values, and the public’s search for a share in our environmentally-delightful vacation and commuter and retirement lands, are at stake.” Obviously referring to Stan James, Cromie admitted that, “among the developers, practically all local people with years of Bowen living, there is one newcomer with plans for a big, rather frighteningly crowded project.” But, despite Cromie’s own elevated social status, he proceeded to associate those who opposed development on Bowen with the members of the Vancouver elite who kept their waterfront properties as a “private reserve” with no public beach access or parking and who opposed any change to “THEIR spooky if effective water system and forbidding roads.” Meanwhile, due to the ten-acre freeze – Cromie concluded – “Our coast and islands sleep nearly empty in the sun, progressively depleted of their unemployed young people,” while “Washington State developers cultivate our market with glee and fill project after project with BC customers.”32 Cromie had in mind his own Tunstall Bay development on the west side of Bowen Island, for he had managed to survey only 131 of 450 planned lots before the freeze was imposed.³³ While he claimed that the BIIA’s proposed “Total Resources Study” was unnecessary because “all of the relevant information already exists,”³⁴ he clearly feared that its findings would jeopardize the further development of his property.

Cromie claimed that an engineering firm had reported that the Killarney Lake and Grafton Lake watersheds provided enough water for 25,000 to 30,000 people and that Josephine Lake held further reserves for the southeast area.³⁵ Bowen certainly has more rainfall than the Gulf Islands that are in the lee of Vancouver Island’s central mountain range where water quality and quantity has underlain all other environmental issues,36 but it, too, has long dry summers. Not surprisingly, then, the BIIA brief requesting an “overall Land Use Study” pointed to water supply as a major concern. It noted that the lakes and streams providing much of the community’s supply were, for the most part, privately owned and that the distribution system for Snug Cove consisted of “old, unrepairable, wood stave pipes” unable to withstand additional pressure. Sewage disposal was another basic problem, according to the BIIA brief, for it was not practicable on many recently subdivided lots “due to the metamorphic rock composition of our island and the precipitous topography.” In short, developers should be required to submit plans for approval rather than having subdivisions continue “in isolated pockets with little, if any, consideration of the Island as a whole.” As for commercial resorts and hotels that “could well prove to be out of character with the island’s tranquil beauty,” the BIIA argued that the expanding population of the Lower Mainland would be better served by improving Bowen’s polluted and mostly inaccessible beaches, opening up the Crown land “with the provision of access roads, camp grounds, parks and wilderness trails” and requiring that any subdivision or other land development “provide adequate areas for recreation.”³⁷

Following the July 1973 public consultation on Bowen, when – according to the Vancouver Sun – “more than 200 people jammed the meeting and another 100 waited outside,”³⁸ the province’s Nunweiler Committee recommended that the local community provide input into the final plan and bylaws that the GVRD would be drafting for the island. In response, the BIIA drafted a plan that recommended a slow-growth policy to ensure that the island remained a “restful refuge” for residents as well as tourists. The proposal’s highlights included a permanent freeze on the further lease or sale of Crown land, conservation of agricultural land, creation of parks, prohibition of roadside advertising, and a ban on logging. The plan also reiterated the request for thorough studies of the water, sewage, waste disposal, and transportation systems, and recommended zoning categories to perpetuate the “rural character of the island,” plus government acquisition of some privately owned scenic sites. Finally, the far-reaching BIIA plan stated that “separations between subdivisions are to be encouraged to prevent them from growing together and creating large patterns of continuous housing developments,” that “no subdivision lots will be allowed to border or cross lakes and creeks,” and that commercial and light industrial development should be “strictly limited to serving the needs of island residents and visitors only.” Such developments would also be subject to rigid design controls to ensure that they “blend with the surrounding features.”39 As Richard Walker writes of the critics of the exploding San Francisco metropolis, the BIIA members were “not simply Romantics recoiling against modernity” but believers in enlightened management “over and above the pursuit of private profit.”⁴⁰

The chair of the BIIA committee informed a Vancouver Sun reporter that the local public response to its report had been generally positive, aside from the proposed ban on cars not owned by islanders. This last proposal was dropped by the committee, though not the one recommending that the village of Snug Cove be restricted to pedestrian traffic only.⁴¹ The BIIA did not represent the views of everyone on the island, however, for a newly formed group known as the Bowen Ratepayers’ Association (BRA) presented its own community plan to the GVRD (bypassing Bowen’s Advisory Planning Commission). As the voice of the island’s developers and large property holders, the BRA opposed zoning regulations entirely and, in the words of a Vancouver newspaper article, favoured “a system of land-use contracts to be worked out between the Island’s governing body and individual members.”⁴² The BRA plan included ecological reserves, at least one major park, neighbourhood and village parks, common land accompanying strata development, and public beaches, but also marinas, hotels, resorts, golf courses, more summer cottages, campgrounds, tree farms, and light industry. Less realistically, it also proposed that six sites be reserved for village shopping centres and that a road be constructed around the island’s mountainous perimeter. In fact, the BRA claimed that it could see no reason why the island could not accommodate 50,000 people (said to be two housing units per acre of private land) by the end of the century.43 (There were only 3,402 residents as late as 2011.) According to the BRA mouthpiece, the Bowen Breeze, there were 12,000 residents – mostly professionals – on similarly sized Bainbridge Island near Seattle, and it had two golf courses, a theatre, two shopping centres, twelve churches, excellent schools, a library, and medical and dental services.⁴⁴ What the author neglected to mention, however, was that the highest point on Bainbridge Island is only 130 metres while Bowen’s Mount Gardner is 762 metres high, and its Mount Collins is 411 metres.

The Bowen Breeze also resorted to right-wing scaremongering, warning that “one way or another the socialists are going to take your property away from you. It may not happen this year or next but already the machinery is in operation. If they don’t get it under regional zoning or building restrictions they’ll get it under land reserves, agricultural reserves, waterfront reserves, park reserves, you name it. They’re chip, chip, chipping away at property rights that have carried since the Magna Carta.”⁴⁵ The short-lived newspaper was shouting in the wind, however, for the BIIA boasted 700 members while the BRA had only 120.⁴⁶ Not surprisingly, the Nunweiler report, which had been tabled in September 1973, was very much in the spirit of the BIIA recommendations. In fact, it concluded that, “the islands are too important to the people of Canada to be left open to exploitation by real-estate developers and speculators.” Clearly fearing that those interests would have too much influence within the GVRD, dominated as it was by suburban mayors and councillors, the commission also recommended the creation of an islands trust “to be responsible for and coordinate the future of the islands.”⁴⁷

In keeping with these recommendations and claiming that “the local governments have not fulfilled their responsibilities concerning the islands,” the NDP government introduced the Islands Trust Act the following April. Characterized by one former trustee as “a bold and visionary experiment in ecologically-based planning and governance of a particularly sensitive, rural area in British Columbia,” the Islands Trust nevertheless lacked the power to plan or regulate development in a systematic fashion.48 Its powers were more negative in nature insofar as it could veto community and regional plans, zoning and subdivision bylaws, land-use contracts, and so on.⁴⁹ This would, of course, include a review of land-use bylaws passed for Bowen Island by the GVRD. Some Gulf Island residents objected to the undemocratic nature of the new body, for even though it would include two elected members from each of the thirteen member islands, the three government appointees would outnumber each island’s representatives in reaching decisions on matters concerning the island in question. Issues concerning more than one island would be in the hands of the three appointees alone.⁵⁰ In response to opposition protests, Minister of Municipal Affairs James Lorimer simply replied that the islands “are loved and cherished by a lot of us,” and the general trustees represent “the rest of the people of BC.”⁵¹

Despite its criticism of the Islands Trust Act, a year after the Social Credit party had returned to power in 1975 it strengthened the body’s authority by eliminating the preliminary role of regional district boards in adopting zoning and planning bylaws. The Islands Trust was, still more surprisingly, also now empowered to adopt special regulations to protect designated areas of “high recreational, scenic or ecological importance.” The head of Victoria’s Capital Regional District complained that the bill was a step back to a time when “the King had absolute powers,” adding that Gulf Islanders were being relegated to “the same category as Indians on reserves.” The chair of the GVRD, on the other hand, welcomed the minister’s decision, saying, “God bless him. If he wants Bowen Island he can have it – it takes up about 20 per cent of our time.”⁵²

Meanwhile, in keeping with the request by the BIIA, Bowen Island became the only community in the GVRD to elect its own Advisory Planning Commission members rather than have them appointed by the GVRD board. The election was not formally recognized by that board, but Bowen’s first representative on it, Patrick Thomas, committed himself to appointing the two winners in each of the island’s five geographic zones.53 Assisted by GVRD planners and the Islands Trust, but without the benefit of the professional study of the island’s “supportive” resources that they had requested,⁵⁴ Bowen’s Advisory Planning Commission members began work on the OCP in January 1975.⁵⁵ After presenting the components at a series of seventeen daylong seminars, the Advisory Planning Commission produced a document in June that, perhaps not surprisingly, closely reflected the recommendations the BIIA had presented a year and a half earlier.⁵⁶ Proclaiming that “Short-sighted planning eventually creates an imbalance between man and nature, with man severely damaging his natural environment,”⁵⁷ the draft OCP stated that bylaws related to future developments would have to preserve watershed and catchment areas, prohibit the discharge of sewage into any water bodies including the ocean, maintain low population density within residential and even commercial areas, prohibit strip developments, limit multiple dwellings and prohibit apartment buildings, limit extractive industry to small-scale operations for the needs of the island, limit road and transportation systems “to a rural size and nature,” discourage the use of motor vehicles, provide for “suitable areas for recreational use,” organize community facilities to avoid decentralization, and retain the agricultural use of suitable land. Furthermore, buildings should be designed to “harmonize with the natural environment and a rural/small village appearance,” and visitor accommodations should be small-scale and “of ‘rural’ or village atmosphere rather than of ‘resort’ or ‘on-highway’ type.”⁵⁸ Bowen might be able to support 5,000 permanent and seasonal residents, the community plan concluded, but “A population above that will force the island community into urban economies of scale and service, and Bowen Island will become a suburb of Vancouver, with the high tax costs and social problems experienced by suburban communities.”⁵⁹ As with other Gulf Islanders, then, members of the BIIA and Bowen Advisory Planning Commission promoted what they considered to be the island’s distinctive lifestyle, one in keeping with the arcadian tradition that had come to be defined as the balance between nature and culture.60

The Stan James Offensive

Although they might appeal to potential clients by depicting the island as a refuge from the city, Bowen’s developers viewed the draft OCP as a major threat to their own interests. Taking the offensive, Stan James warned that if it were implemented his company would be forced to increase substantially the water rates for its 220 customers in Snug Cove because of the $600,000 required for repairs to the water system. Speaking at a meeting on the island’s school grounds, a company representative claimed, further, that permission to develop as few as sixty-six acres would reduce the forthcoming extra water rate charge to each household from $390 annually for a ten-year period to only $100 per year.⁶¹ What James had aimed for since 1969, however, was a considerably more ambitious project than a sixty-six-acre subdevelopment.

Despite his complaint in January 1976 that the proposed OCP “has virtually expropriated our resort,”⁶² James printed a glossy brochure advertising essentially what historian Lincoln Bramwell defines as a “wilderburb,” namely a “traditional-size” subdivision “located far beyond the city’s edge.”⁶³ Close to Vancouver in distance but not in access, James’s subdivision plan featured single-storey houses “located inland in clusters adjacent to lakes and planned golf courses,” as well as being “screened by massive green belts, and completely obscured from the existing government blacktop roads.” The brochure also claimed that “sufficient water, sewage and ecological studies for the proposed development were completed four years ago” and that the zoning bylaw he had complained so bitterly about would allow for 2,000 units on 300 acres. This would generate $1,200,000 in taxes at current mill rates while the USC would remain responsible for private roads, water and sewage systems, outdoor lighting, and storm drains. More than $300,000 per month would be paid in wages to 700 people employed “for maintenance and ancillary services,” “ALL OF WHICH, WITH TRANSPORTATION, CONFORMS TO THE LIVEABLE REGION CONCEPT OF THE G.V.R.D.” While the aim of that concept, proposed in 1975, was to counter the trend toward a concentration of office jobs in the city and housing in the suburbs,64 the transportation system promised by James was the operation of a twenty-four-hour-a-day “hoverferry” service for commuters to and from Vancouver. It would be “operated at cost by a private Bowen Island club” and connected to “a rapid island bus service.” Adding still more icing to the cake, the brochure also claimed that planned “community and recreational facilities and amenities” included “golf courses, winter club [perhaps an allusion to the local ski resort reportedly promised], riding, tennis and squash courts, marinas, plus a medical–dental centre.” These amenities were clearly meant to appeal to an urban middle-class clientele, as was the nod to so-called “USC tradition” by promising, as well, the “immediate and simultaneous restoration of the nostalgic Bowen Island Resort facilities.” In short, at a selling price of from $20,000 for a one-bedroom bungalow to $30,000 for a three-bedroom one, the USC was offering “quality medium priced housing in a country club setting.”⁶⁵ James had already moved ahead by hiring an “internationally famous” golf course designer from Houston, Texas to lay out his much-hyped links between Killarney Lake and Grafton Lake, which happens to be a steeply sloped area.⁶⁶ According to a document written in support, the greenways would “weave through the forest and meadows around lakes, along streams with a view to sea and mountains.”⁶⁷ James tried once more in early March 1976 to have the ten-acre development freeze lifted.⁶⁸ When he was again turned down, he applied pressure by clear-cutting a wide swath on the north side of the main road leading from Snug Cove, claiming that this admitted destruction of “the ecology and aesthetics of a scenic part of the Union Steamships property and the island” was necessary because the wooden stave pipe water system serving the village would collapse if used to fight a fire.⁶⁹ According to an article in the Vancouver Sun, however, most islanders felt that James had “defiled not only the hillside but also the pleasant memory of Union Steamships, the outfit that was government, god and good money for more than 30 years.”70 Finally, James also erected gates at each end of the footpath across the causeway that connected most of the residents of Snug Cove with the ferry terminal and village shops, though he did not go so far as to lock the gates.⁷¹

In order to drum up outside sympathy, James had recruited a sympathetic columnist, Ed Keate, who wrote in February 1976 that readers might finally be able to purchase a Bowen lot for $5,000 or a two-bedroom home for $25,000, “both with some recreational facilities thrown in for good measure … now that saner, less biased heads are looking at the dilemma of the Union Steamships Company and shaking their heads over the bureaucratic run-around the pioneer company has suffered these past 40 months.” Keate then resorted to sensationalism by claiming that unfounded rumours were circulating that James was “fronting for questionable money” and that a summer dweller had disclosed that he and some others “were so concerned about James that they were considering hiring someone to rough him up.” The columnist added that, in addition to the slanderous remarks made about James and his employees and associates, the company’s buildings had been vandalized and “outright frauds were perpetrated to prevent James from making any move with land on which the company has paid taxes for some 78 years.” To take one example, “Lands belonging to Union Steamships that were rock knolls covered with timber were classified as farm lands, making them not suitable for subdivision, but adjacent farmlands belonging to others were NOT classified as farmlands.”⁷²

Keate also echoed the complaint of Bowen developer Don Cromie when he added that “The half dozen families who own large pieces of acreage (the Rogers, Burkes, Malkins, etc.) would just as soon keep it that way, and those in the exclusive community of Hood Point certainly want to preserve the summer lifestyle they currently enjoy.” As for the ordinary people living in Snug Cove and in Cromie’s Tunstall Bay, Keate claimed that they were “of mixed emotions,” not wanting “to water down the supply and demand ratio which currently gives them a handsome profit.” As a result, James was as welcome on Bowen “as a bastard at a family reunion,” and his “quite genuine and honest efforts to improve the hazardous water system” of Snug Cove and Miller’s Landing had been dismissed by the current regional director as “thinly disguised bullshit.”73

In the same scatological vein, Bowen potter Bob Kingsmill replied in the same newspaper that Keate’s column was “vitrolic verbal diarrhea.” After questioning why Keate had not contacted the police upon hearing the threat against James, Kingsmill pointed out that the old Union Steamship Company was not the new property development company of the same name and that it was “illogical nostalgic falderal to infer that the latter has paid taxes for 78 years – and on that premise cry with huge alligator tears that ‘they’ should now be able to ‘move’ on the land.” Kingsmill also claimed that the prices advertised by James (roughly half that for equivalent homes on the mainland) were little more than “an enticing lead” and that his development would have to be much larger than stated if he were to do more than recover the $1,277,000 he claimed to have lost in carrying charges due to the forty-month delay in lifting the ten-acre development freeze.⁷⁴

The GVRD consultant to Bowen’s Advisory Planning Commission tended to agree, stating that major flaws in James’s ambitious plan to develop relatively high-density housing on Bowen included the problem of water supply during the dry summers, the prohibitive cost of running sewers through rocky terrain, and the expense of commuting by ferry to work off-island.⁷⁵ As he had promised, James had taken steps to address the latter problem by contracting with a Pittsburgh company to build three fifty-foot “quiet hoverferries,” each costing $500,000 and each capable of carrying sixty-two passengers from Bowen to downtown Vancouver in fifteen minutes.⁷⁶ The ferries were also to serve his Sechelt development on the nearby Sunshine Coast, but the fact was that James had yet to obtain approval from local regulatory agencies, and a March news release drafted by the BIIA noted that Hong Kong, Sydney, Southampton, and other ports where similar vessels were reportedly used “are free of logs and the kind of flotsam that abounds in our waters.” The news release then asked readers to picture themselves “hitting a telegraph pole at 50 mph with your car and then imagine the damage that could be done to a rudder and propeller; not to mention the hole in the hull.” Even without such mishaps, the article added, the three vessels would be able to deliver only a small percentage of the anticipated 1,500 commuters to downtown Vancouver in a timely manner, not to mention the monthly crew wage of approximately $27,000 plus the cost of insurance, fuel, and maintenance. As had Kingsmill, the BIIA also splashed cold water on James’s promise that he would sell three-bedroom houses for $30,000, noting that building costs for such a house on Bowen would be at least $34,000, added to the minimum land cost of $8,500.77

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Sechelt development that James was basing his figures on was halted by the province’s Superintendent of Insurance a month later, following complaints about contraventions of the Real Estate Act.⁷⁸ Unpaid suppliers and subcontractors had slapped liens on some of the properties with the result that, according to the Vancouver Sun, “About 40 families, attracted by the prospect of low-cost housing, have paid dearly in time and anxiety for their involvement with the Seaside Village project.”⁷⁹ The main problem, as the principal contractor admitted, was that the small houses could not be built for the selling price of $17,000 (not including the land).⁸⁰

In the meantime, however, James fought the BIIA and the Advisory Planning Commission by threatening through an anonymously written document to block resident access to USC facilities and parks, as well as to double the water rates and deny further water hook-ups for the foreseeable future.⁸¹ He also joined forces with other large landowners on the island to sabotage the draft OCP at a public meeting held to discuss it in late March 1976. As we have seen, the OCP’s goal was to protect Bowen Island’s “marine-oriented rural environment,” and its main emphasis was on zoning to prevent unregulated growth. Building lots were to be restricted to one acre (0.4 hectares) in those “limited development areas” that were supplied by community water systems and to three acres (1.2 hectares) for properties dependent upon private wells.82 Burnaby mayor Tom Constable, who chaired the island’s overflow meeting of 260, reported that of the sixteen briefs presented not one supported the Advisory Planning Commission’s restrictive proposals. Constable added that there would “obviously have to be some changes in the plan” before it could be approved by the GVRD board (regional district boards would not lose this power until late in the year) and that another public meeting would likely be necessary.⁸³

According to a Vancouver Sun reporter who had attended the meeting, however, the great majority in attendance actually favoured the draft OCP, though only two of them spoke out. Perhaps cowed by the campaign James had orchestrated, “The rest just watched: spectators to the end, though they may have been witnessing a fatal blow to a way of life most have cherished and would want to pass on to their children.”⁸⁴ Cromie claimed, in turn, that, “the repressives hope to delay recognition of the turn of public opinion on Bowen and the turmoil arising from understanding of the Plan’s devious blockages buried in its morass of amateur expertise.” More than forty Bowen residents and property owners nevertheless wrote letters to the GVRD supporting the draft OCP, and 287 permanent residents signed a petition in its favour.⁸⁵

In addition, the BIIA printed a circular deploring the “unwarranted attempt” of the petitions circulated by the draft OCP’s opponents “to split the mixed population of Islanders into opposing camps. Residents on one hand and offislanders on the other.” The circular rejected what it claimed was the inference that “only residents have the Island’s good at heart, while non or part time residents are the wealthy and indolent, caring nothing about Island affairs.” Noting that “the latter, whether wealthy or poor, pay the bulk of the Island taxes,” the BIIA also challenged the assertion that the community plan meant “no growth” by pointing out that there were “some 600 plus lots already sub-divided and now eligible for development, and, they are presently being built on at an average rate of 50 per year.” Not only did those who opposed the draft OCP “seek the destruction of Island life through urbanization,” the circular concluded, but “Bowen Island has an obligation to the rest of the Province of BC as a recreational area and facility.”86

Supporters of the draft OCP also revealed that North Vancouver mayor and GVRD chair Ronald Andrews was one of Stan James’s forty-three summer-cottage tenants who had not been asked to pay rent during the previous two years.⁸⁷ Not surprisingly, then, the GVRD planning committee voted six to three in favour of the Bowen OCP, though the island’s representative – who was the local gas station operator – was one of those who voted against it.⁸⁸ Approval by the Islands Trust, which added a provision for clustered housing, followed a public meeting on Bowen in May 1976 at which – in sharp contrast to the previous meeting – almost all the presentations were in favour.⁸⁹ The full GVRD board added its stamp of approval later in the month, thereby almost bringing to a conclusion a process that had involved sixty-two planning seminars, two public meetings chaired by the GVRD, and the receipt of more than 200 written submissions.⁹⁰

Almost, but not quite, for the Social Credit government’s minister of municipal affairs, Hugh Curtis, announced the following December that he was returning the plan to the GVRD for further refinement on the rather surprising grounds that it had to be made more environmentally sensitive to Bowen’s physical features.⁹¹ The chair of the GVRD Planning Committee had reminded Curtis the previous month that the OCP was to be reviewed in two years time “when more accurate and settled information on the Island’s capacity for growth will be known.” In the meantime, he added, Bowen’s Advisory Planning Commission had been proceeding with bylaws to implement the plan. Passage of those bylaws involved numerous public meetings and the expenditure of “significant funds,” so that failure on the part of the province to approve the OCP would result in “considerable cynicism about local people taking responsibility for their environment.” Finally, the Planning Committee chair closed with the threat that the GVRD board would refuse to be involved in the drafting of another OCP, and “If the Minister wishes to decide policy for Bowen Island then it would be better if Municipal Affairs again took over responsibility for local area planning.”92

Whether or not the aim of the pro-free-enterprise provincial government was to sabotage the OCP through delay, the island’s developers had not entirely given up on their campaign. Thus, Ted Rogers – a member of the influential Rogers Sugar family and the leading figure behind the prodevelopment Bowen Ratepayers’ Association⁹³ – followed Don Cromie’s example in February 1977 by pointing in a public letter at members of his own social elite, namely the “tiny clique of wealthy and wilful small-lot owners and their planner/supporters.” If their plans were implemented, Rogers claimed rather illogically, “The recreation role of Bowen that goes back over 50 years will finally be completely destroyed.”⁹⁴ At last, after still further discussion by the GVRD, Islands Trust, and Bowen’s Advisory Planning Commission, as well as delegations and letters to the provincial government, the amended OCP became legislation in June 1977 and the ten-acre freeze was lifted soon afterward.⁹⁵

As for the Stan James project, its fate had effectively already been sealed in May of the previous year with the foreclosure of an overdue $275,000 mortgage bearing 24 per cent interest on a 220-acre block near Snug Cove. Furthermore, James had only until the following October to meet the $1.8 million obligation bearing 30 per cent interest on another 400 acres extending to Killarney Lake.⁹⁶ He presumably was able to negotiate a further delay, however, for in February 1977 he stubbornly resumed clearing land for a 200-acre, nine-hole golf course that was legally permitted within the Agricultural Land Reserve. James also announced that the Snug Cove marina would be developed to provide facilities for golfers sailing from the mainland.⁹⁷ In response, Bowen’s Advisory Planning Commission passed a resolution deploring the fact that the company had filed no plans for the development, adding that “There is a strong probability of extreme environmental damage, a danger to the island’s largest water supply system and a complete disregard for the wishes of the citizens and the planning process.”⁹⁸ The land clearing process was then halted by a picket line (see figure 3.2) and a violent confrontation ensued when a bulldozer drove through the forty demonstrators who were of a wide age range. Three people clung to the blade while the operator, despite being pelted with mud, sticks, and stones by a pursuing crowd, drove about 150 metres over rough ground before coming to a halt. The wife of one of the riders (the above-mentioned Bob Kingsmill) then jumped into the cab and grabbed the driver who roughly brushed her aside, only to be punched by her burly husband! Coincidentally, it appears, that same day the provincial government issued a cease and desist order against further clearing, pending an official investigation.⁹⁹ Tensions remained high, for the following evening – according to a newspaper report – the night watchman guarding the land-clearing equipment was struck on the head and left unconscious.¹⁰⁰ But the saga was effectively over, for James’s creditors soon foreclosed on him, and his dream of a golf course and a 2,000-lot subdivision went no further. Given the physical challenges presented by the island, James’s ambitious project was probably too large to succeed even without the restrictions imposed by the Official Community Plan, but local protesters had ensured that it was nipped in the bud and that the environmental damage it would have caused was kept to a strict minimum.

3.2 Picketing Stan James’s clear-cutting.

Conclusion

As noted in a recent environmental history of Prince Edward Island, “Islands are perhaps the most obvious places to teach the lesson of limits.”101 It is not surprising, then, that newspaper reporter Alex Young could write in 1976 that Bowen might be “an island of serene beauty … isolated from the hubbub of the mainland” but it was also “a seething hotbed of politics.”¹⁰² With a small relatively stable population at a time when that of the nearby mainland was growing rapidly, Bowen Island was then at a critical crossroads. According to the Province that same spring, two main questions arose when considering the island’s Official Community Plan and the contrasting vision promoted by developer Stan James. Firstly, “How many ordinary people – representing a wide range of income groups and interests – will have the chance of a share in Bowen’s future?” Secondly, “How many people (and concomitant development) can the island absorb before it loses the flavor and atmosphere that sets it apart from other communities?”¹⁰³

The more crucial question for Vancouverites, however, was whether Bowen should effectively become a suburb or serve as a readily accessible destination for day-trippers and weekenders who wished to escape the crowded city and enjoy a relatively quiet rural environment. This broader perspective was articulated succinctly by student researchers Julie Glover and Peter Chataway who were funded by an Opportunities For Youth grant in the summer of 1973. In their words, “if the provincial government … opts for development, [a] potential recreational playground will be lost for all time and there will be even more traffic congestion on Lions Gate Bridge. And there will be a precedent for development of other islands in the sound.”104 Unlike most provincial parks that “conserve areas of magnificent beauty and rugged nature,” Glover and Chataway argued, Bowen would be “used and not just looked at.”¹⁰⁵ In his capacity as chair of the GVRD, Bowen summer resident and Vancouver mayor Art Phillips – who was then working towards municipal acquisition of what would become the city’s Harbour Park (see chapter 1) – offered to assist proposals for the conversion of the island to parkland. In response, however, prodevelopment Bowen representative Grahame Budge simply charged Phillips with outside interference.¹⁰⁶

A major park on Bowen was still technically feasible in the mid-1970s because 3,600 of its 12,000 acres were Crown land, and another 4,914 acres (42 per cent) were owned by only twenty proprietors, with more than 2,000 acres held by Union Steamship/Bowen Island Estates and Rogers/Touchstone Investments, alone.¹⁰⁷ In practical terms, however, expropriation from those powerful interests would have been out of the question, and there was no public pressure for the province to purchase the large private holdings. Vancouverites had a wealth of nearby outdoor recreation places to choose from, especially in the North Shore mountains but also on the local beaches and in Stanley Park. As for the BIIA, despite its antiurban rhetoric and the heated charges of its prodevelopment critics, the organization was more interested in rational growth based on landscape analysis than in converting much of the island into one large park. Bowen’s mountainside Crown land was popularly (and mistakenly) considered to be safe from logging, but strong local support did develop for a smaller park consisting of the relatively flat and accessible USC land in the area from Snug Cove to Killarney Lake. Because of the subdivision restrictions and depressed market, the GVRD was able to purchase the 600 acres that became known as Crippen Park in 1983.108 As with the campaign to prevent development at the entrance to Stanley Park and on Hollyburn Ridge, then, the protracted resistance on Bowen Island resulted in the creation of a public park, one that each year welcomes approximately 15,000 tourists and day-trippers, many of them first-generation immigrants experiencing their first taste of the west coast’s “wilderness” environment.¹⁰⁹