Development Wars in Vancouver Island's Union Bay
Two historical forces that shaped Vancouver Island meet stiff resistance as residents square off against a developer’s vision of leafy residential streets and a coal miner’s plans for a massive underground mine.
Brian McMahon stops the big SUV and opens the door. To an observer unaccustomed to the ways of Union Bay, the yellow sign nailed to a tree alongside the old Island Highway looks like a simple case of guerrilla marketing – a small-time septic company cadging some low-cost advertising – but McMahon thinks he knows better. Pulling the sign from the lone tree standing just inside his cleared property, the developer explains: “Someone keeps telling everyone we’re putting in a septic system, we’re putting in a sewer system.”
McMahon suspects he knows who the provocateur might be, but he’ll only hint at the person’s identity – a bit of circumspection that is probably well advised. After all, there has been more than one trip to court around here, as local residents tried to stop the development or faced off against each other over allegations of defamation and misfeasance. McMahon has the patient air of a high school principal as he describes the myriad twists and turns the process has taken: stacked town hall meetings; approvals followed by reversals; unanticipated environmental landmines; arbitrary behaviour on the part of civic officials; and beyond all of this, the slow grind of a regulatory process that has encompassed four levels of government and as many as a dozen distinct authorities. All in all, McMahon and business partner Jim Youngren have been working on their Kensington Island Properties residential development for more than a decade, and it will be several more months at least before the first basement can be dug – and that’s if there are no more surprises.
And, well, there has been a surprise. A few months prior, yet another developer with a big chunk of land nearby stepped up with an ambitious project, this one of a very different stripe. In tiny Union Bay, the new proposal has blown up an even fiercer storm than did McMahon’s – and perhaps ironically, McMahon is among those with mixed feelings.
As a land developer, McMahon is following in a grand Vancouver Island and B.C. tradition. Indeed, as much as anything else, the leafy mien and unique economy of the provincial capital of Victoria can be traced to its very early role as a retirement haven marketed primarily to British naval officers. Neighbourhoods like Fairfield and Oak Bay are often described as “more English than England” because, way back in the 1880s and ’90s, that’s how they were plotted and hustled. We’ve been parcelling up the province and selling it to people from away since before it was a province.
However, the company behind the newest proposal can claim a historical lineage that is every bit as long and every bit as valid. Atop a bench running behind Fanny Bay, Buckley Bay and the southern edge of Union Bay, Compliance Energy Corp. is planning to mine for coal, and who can forget that for almost a century, until 1966 when the last mine finally closed, coal was by far the dominant economic engine here in the Comox Valley (and, indeed, is still carried on near Campbell River, some 80 kilometres north). Union Bay itself – current population, about 1,200 – was once a city of almost 10,000 people, a bustling coal port from which the black bounty of the mines centred around nearby Cumberland was shipped throughout the world.
In a way, both McMahon’s Kensington Island Properties and Vancouver-based Compliance are dancing to a familiar tune. And for their part, the citizens of Union Bay and neighbouring areas who are up in arms over the proposed developments are following right in step. Unfortunately, in B.C., this three-sided tango – basement diggers versus resource diggers versus dug-in residents – has too often become a dance marathon with few left standing. John Tapics, president and CEO of Compliance Energy, won’t even talk about a timeline for the proposed Raven Underground Project, but McMahon thinks he has a good sense of what it might entail. “We went through 10 years of uncertainty with our development,” he says. “I suspect that the coal mine is going into a process a whole lot longer than that.”
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