Cortes Currents

Manda Aufochs Gillespie/ Folk U -

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - SRD staff are currently preparing a bylaw that will reduce the residential waste collection charge on Cortes Island from $112 to $86, effective this year. This change has been in development since last year, originating from a shift in the SRD’s administrative policy.

Staff estimate that $121 per user is required to fully fund the service, so the shortfall this year will be approximately $25,000. However, the service currently possesses $103,000 in reserves to cover such gaps.

At the April 28, 2026 Board meeting, Regional Director Mark Vonesch expressed his support for the move, stating: "I just want to remark on the low cost and appreciate staff for working with our local contractor to do this. Efficient use of government resources to get services done is really important, and I am glad to see this part of it. Thank you."

Solid waste collection on Cortes Island is performed by VEM Contracting. There are currently 681 registered users. While residents are not required to put out garbage for collection, every household on Cortes Island contributes to the service through their property taxes.

Roy L Hales / Cortes Currents - Bringing Campbell River's Tyee Legacy to Vancouver's DOXA film festival

A documentary about Campbell River's historic Tyee fishing culture will be screened at Vancouver's DOXA Film Festival on Thursday, May 7. In this morning's interview filmmakers Jevan Crittenden and Nate Slaco talk a little about 'In Tyee Country,' and how it came into being. 

Jevan: "When we started this project we expected certain things and a lot of those assumptions were accurate, but there were some surprising things that came up. To me the community aspect is the surprising thing. Peter Wipper talks about having a greater sense of community and home in Campbell River than he does in his own hometown, and he credits that to the community that's come up around the Tyee Club. It really is a tight-knit group."

Cortes Currents: Where is he from? 

Jevan: He's from Nanaimo.

(Note: Peter Wipper was hired by the city of Campbell River in 1989 and went on to hold several high level administrative positions before retiring in 2021.)

Nate: "Making this film, we really tried to make Campbell River a character in itself and showcase the beauty of that area. I'm hoping that when people watch it, that really comes through. Even if you're not into fishing, being out on the water at that time of year is a beautiful thing."

Cortes Currents: "Where are you both right now?"

Jevan: "We're both in Vancouver."

Nate: "I was actually born in Campbell River. My dad was in forestry, so I lived there until I was five before he was transferred to just outside Vancouver. So, there is a personal connection there as well."

Jevan: "Nate and I met when we were 13 years old. We grew up making videos together; it became a passion for both of us. Fast-forward many years, and we got interested in fishing during the pandemic. Nate's dad had some contacts at the Tyee Club and mentioned it to us as we were getting into the sport. We very quickly realized there was an interesting film to be made about this community."

Nate: "The whole premise behind the club—using these traditional fishing techniques—is visually intriguing. When we started meeting members, we realized there are a lot of personalities and a lot of passion there. It also branches off into other hobbies, like collecting tackle or woodworking projects. Beyond that, there is a deeper level of understanding regarding what has changed in the last hundred years with fish populations."

Cortes Currents: "Tell me about the moment you decided you were going to make a movie."

Jevan: "A friend of ours moved to Campbell River in 2022, and I helped her move. Through Nate's dad’s contacts, we set up meetings with club members Jeremy Maynard and Norm Lee over coffee. Those meetings confirmed what we suspected: there was a story to be told here with compelling characters and a complex world involving ecological questions."

Nate: "We shot for three years and took probably a year to edit. It was also a good excuse to 'write off' fishing! Jevan and I went there every summer for three years to fish on the Quinsam River for Pinks and other species. Combining our passions for filmmaking and fishing was a great motivator."

Roy L Hales/ Beach Clean-up - The 2026 Cortes Island Beach Clean-up is underway. Helen Hall, Executive Director of the Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI), explained:

"The campaign will start on May 1st and run until the end of the month. We're working in partnership with Comox Strathcona Waste Management and Klahoose Aquaculture. We will be placing large 'super sacks' at seven different locations around the island:

Hanks Beach Regional Park

The Recycling Centre

Hollyhock Beach

Mansons Landing Government Dock

Hayes Road Beach Access

Red Granite Beach

Plunger Pass Beach Access (Seavista Road)

"We are encouraging people to pick up any garbage they spot during their beach walks and place it in these super sacks. They will be available for the entire month of May, and we will collect them at the end of the month."

"Klahoose Aquaculture will be hosting an Ocean Legacy bin—a large blue metal bin similar to the ones at the recycling center. All collected garbage will be brought to that central location."

"On Saturday, June 6th, we are also offering residents the opportunity to drop off any beach garbage they may have collected at home. We will sort the waste into different categories on that day."

"We collect a variety of items, including buoys, oyster trays, and rope. Once sorted, the waste is placed in the bin and transported off-island by Comox Strathcona Waste Management to be recycled."

"This is our third year running this program. Last year, we collected over 1,000 kilograms of garbage, which was an amazing result. It was particularly inspiring to see people bringing entire truckloads of debris they had collected themselves."

Unedited audio from the Apr 29 SRD Meeting

De Clarke / Cortes Currents - This article addresses misstatements or deficits in the Management Plan document regarding streams and fish. The document states that "There are no permanent or ephemeral watercourses or wetlands located within the tenure. No water will be discharged to the environment during or post-operation. An unnamed creek runs 15m to the east of site […] There are no aquatic disturbances that will result in any fish habitat being affected by the development. "

Local Streamkeepers Christine and Cec Robinson are not so sure. They feel that the Management Plan misrepresents the situation on the ground in the quarry area. Cortes Streamkeepers have been monitoring and collecting data on Cortes streams and fish spawning patterns for 40 years. This is what they have to say about the quarry expansion.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Ecotrust Canada will be giving a home energy workshop at Mansons Hall on Saturday, May 2, at 1 PM. 

Max Thaysen, from the Cortes Climate Action Network, explained,  "We've got some folks coming over from Ecotrust to talk about heat pumps and help people get some rebates going so they can potentially get 100% of heat pump install and purchase costs covered by some grants that are available. You can just contact them if you want, but if you want to learn about the program and see if it's a good fit for you, there's an in-person meeting coming up."

Michael Anthony Lutfy, Ecotrust's program manager for our area, emailed that since last year, "We have worked with over 50 Cortes Island households, in large part thanks to our Cortes Island partnerships."

He went on to list the organizations that were either involved or are provided funding: Cortes Climate Action Network, Cortes Housing Society, Cortes Community Forest Cooperative, Cortes Community Foundation, the Support Our Seniors Society Better at Home Program, the Cortes Community Health Association Family Support Program, and Strathcona Regional District (SRD)."

In a previous interview, Lutfy said, "Once you register for our program, you'll get an email from me asking for very basic information about your home, like the age of your home and the heating system you have, After that, you will receive a phone call from me and we'll go through more questions about your home. You explain what your desires are, what challenges you're experiencing around your energy bill, and then I can help guide you toward the right rebates and the right renovations or retrofit so that you can achieve that goal." 

"We support households from the beginning of the process all the way to the very end when it comes to selecting contractors, following through with the rebates, ensuring that they received what was expected from the contractor. And we do financial planning, reminders, everything and anything a household needs to complete the process."

Question: Are you selling anything?

"We do not sell anything. Our objective is just to ensure that people are making an informed decision. I do not receive commission. I do not receive any form of financial compensation from contractors, and we do not provide leads to contractors either. We are working for the households while we help connect you with the right contractors because there are eligibility requirements around the rebate system with which contractors are allowed to use."

 Max added, "One of the reasons why we're excited about heat pumps is that they can help people transition off of other more polluting forms of heating. So it's great to do all the things, make your house really efficient. From a climate perspective, which is where I'm coming from, the most important thing is switching from dirty forms of energy to cleaner forms of energy."

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Dr Teresa Ryan is a Tsimshian woman who combines the ancestral knowledge of her people with the cutting edge research coming out of the Mother Tree Project. Her association with Dr Suzanne Simard began when she applied for a postdoctoral fellowship in what is now UBC's faculty of Forestry and Environmental Stewardship. Simard was one of her four instructors and suggested, "We have to talk. I read your dissertation." 

Ryan responded, "You did what?"

Reflecting back on that today, she added, "Who would do that? It's 435 pages, but what she found was that I demonstrated how our indigenous social institutions are connected to our heterogeneous mosaic landscapes." 

Ryan detailed the obligations for stewardship and explained how they were successfully fulfilled through the potlatch system. 

"The missionaries, the early anthropologists and the colonial agents missed these connections, they were more interested in other things.  They had very objective intentions from each of their perspectives, but that actually overlooked the stewardship that was occurring in the forest and with the fisheries and how those stewardship activities increase productivity."

The consequences of this oversight have persisted down to this present day. 

 "Now nobody is taking care of the resources. We're seeing declining numbers in everything, even in the forest industry. You often hear there's no fibre left, that's because it's all cut. The fibre is what contributes to reaching their annual allowable cut, and those numbers are falling because it's been harvested. Fisheries are declining, particularly salmon."

She noted, wryly, that scientists have become so expert at collecting data that "we're counting the fish to extinction."

Instead of looking at these issues as a whole: "It's all these silos. Forestry taken care of here. The salmon are taken care of here, and orcas: we just look at them." 

"That's not the way these systems work. In order for us to have the balance return, we need to have all of these systems functioning."

She used the plight of one of BC's best known Orca pods as an example of the interconnectivity of natural systems.

"The Southern Resident Killer Whales are at risk, but we're not going to be able to recover the Southern Resident Killer Whales if we don't recover the Chinook Salmon, and we can't recover the Chinook Salmon unless we recover the forest." 

"There's some complex things going on in our forests and there's some complex things going on in our waters, whether it's in the rivers, or the snow pack or the ocean. We're impacting those things as humans, but every little bit of learning is helping us to understand that we'll have those things in the future if we do a better job of taking care of them now." 

Dr Ryan is one of Dr Simard's closest colleagues and a key figure in her new book: When the Forest Breathes. 

 "The ideas that are within the Forest Breaths come from decades of investigation into how forests function. What happens in the forest among the plants, among the trees, and how are these things growing? What is the premise behind their growth, and their cycles of renewal?"

"It's been amazing to have a look at the forest at this level, particularly through the Mycorrhizal networks below ground. The connections that trees have through their root systems and the whole network below our feet in the forest is what gives us that strength in the forest."

"I participate with professor Simard in most of our sites. There were originally eight in the interior Douglas Fir forests, and one at Malcolm Knapp, which was our first coastal forest. In the last few years we've been adding sites on the coast. Cortes Island is one of those sites that are added into the Mother Tree Project."

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Nawel Izard is the host of a popular radio program on Cortes Community Radio and the head of the Polaris Law Collective, whose head office is in Campbell River. She was born in Algeria, but lived almost her entire life in Canada. In this morning's interview Nawel describes her motivations and something of her legal practice.  

Cortes Currents:  What motivates you, especially towards law?

Nawel Izard: "A deep curiosity to ask questions, but more importantly I want to help people and if knowing where to find things is a way to help people, why not? Service plays into it as well in that I've always hoped that I would end up a lawyer."

"It's been my focus ever since that citizenship ceremony moment where I see these lawyers participating in something that felt so grand. Making you go from being an immigrant with no status - to now you are Canadian with the pride and a sense of relief in knowing that you are now transitioned. The change was legal and if you have to be a part of that legal bracket, you were a part of this magical institution that made these types of things happen. I think that's where the hook came in."

Cortes Currents: Tell us about the day you decided to be a lawyer.

Nawel Izard: "I was five years old at my citizenship ceremony. My parents were put through all of the tests, paperwork, fingerprinting and whatnot. I remember standing on a chair and not really singing. I would really categorize it more as a toddler yelling the Canadian anthem, and was just so proud!"

"Watching the team of lawyers do this paperwork, it was like live streaming wizardry to take you from being almost 'non status.' You've left your country and you're not really one of us yet and this ceremony makes you Canadian. I just remember thinking and looking at that female lawyer and saying, she's free. I want to be her. I want that."

"As a teenager, I had a very short stray from my lifelong objective of becoming a lawyer. I thought pathology would be really cool and that if I was an autopsy doctor I could always figure out what happened to people. The math component shocked me right back to law. I said, "Nope, I will help people as a lawyer, keep your chemistry for yourselves, and then I carried on."

Cortes Currents: How Algerian are you? You don't have an accent. 

Nawel Izard: "You could never tell from my voice that I'm a polyglot and English is actually my fourth language. I also speak Algerian, I speak Arabic (and French), but I studied in Canada and I did all my post-secondary education in English."

"I'm very close with my family actually, and was just at a cousin's wedding in the summer. They all joke that it's like I never left the village because I'm really down to earth and I love to cook from scratch."

De Clarke/ Cortes Currents - Island United’s proposed expansion of the Whaletown quarry locally known as “The Pit” became public knowledge via minimalist notifications in local media outlets earlier this month. The application to quadruple the Pit’s current footprint seems to be sparking more local controversy as more residents become aware of it. While some residents welcome the quarry upgrade, others are questioning the scale of the proposed expansion and its impacts on environment and community.

A public meeting to discuss these issues is planned for the evening of May 7th, Thursday, at 7pm at Mansons Hall. Organisers say they hope that Mr Nielsen or someone else from Island United will attend to answer some of the many questions being raised.

This Cortes Currents special feature presents some background information on Island United, plus a closer look at some details of the application documents filed by Island United requesting government approval of the expansion project.