Cortes Currents

Manda Aufochs Gillespie/ Folk U - Carrie Saxifrage, Tianna Hope, and Kiera Tsakonas joined host Manda Aufochs Gillespie for the January 19th FolkU Friday session. An intergenerational conversation about the climate crisis, this episode touches on the importance of human connection, mitigation and adaptation, generational differences in needs and interpretations of environmental changes and response, and empowering environmental futures.

Folk U Radio is taking old school viral every Friday at 1 and Mondays at 6:30 p.m./Wednesday at 6 a.m. @CKTZ89.5FM or livestreamed at cortesradio.ca. Find repeats anytime at www.folku.ca/podcasts.

De Clarke/ Cortes Currents - Over the last few months CCEDA has been working with a Canada-wide but Comox-based consulting company called Tourism Cafe, on proposals for the future of tourism on Cortes Island. The process is nearing its completion, but islanders have one more chance to participate and make their opinions and priorities known.

On January 31st at 4pm, CCEDA will sponsor a “virtual public meeting” — the last in a series that started in Fall 2023 — at which some preliminary findings will be presented and one final round of community input gathered. The end product will be a formal report with an analysis of the local “visitor economy” and recommendations for the future.

Currents interviewed Kate Maddigan from CCEDA, who has been coordinating this effort.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - The Cortes Island Community Foundation is inviting Cortes residents to an update on the Village Commons, 4-6 PM at Mansons Hall on Thursday, February 1st.

“The goal for this Village Commons update is to have the Cortes Island Community Foundation present our design plan for the Village Commons Pavilion, which is going to start construction pretty soon. Then also hear from some other stakeholders like the Southern Cortes Community Association (SCCA), Cortes Housing Society and the Fire Hall to talk about any plans that they have upcoming for the downtown Manson's area,” explained Isabella McKnight, Executive Administrator of the Cortes Island Foundation.  

“It's important for the community because they can learn what the plans are and start to think about how they can utilize the new opportunities to their benefit.  We also hope that it inspires   small business owners, large business owners, and other community members to dream about what  they would like to see for Manson's in the future.”

CC: During the past year, what have been the challenges and what have been the successes as you've been rolling out towards this?  


Isabella McKnight: “Personally, I'm not extremely involved in the Village Commons land. We have Richard Andrews as our project manager for that specific program.” 

“I think one of the main challenges with any large project like this is fulfilling all the grant stipulations. That's a large process, making sure you're crossing all the T's and dotting all the I’s." 

"One of the really beautiful things and successes about the Village Commons, over the past year, has been all the community use that it's gotten.  Such as The Friday Market Music and the Cortes Community Health Association (CCHA) using it for their after school care programs such as Adventures in Leadership and the Teen Szene. That's all been really awesome to see.”  

CC: What’s coming next over the next six months or year?

Isabella McKnight: “Our next step is holding the event and showing the community kind of the sneak peek of what the Cortes Island Community Foundation has been working on behind the scenes in relation to the Village Commons project.” 

“This spring will be breaking ground to build the pavilion.  If you come to the event, you will be seeing the  preview of the design that's going on for that,  as well as the road that's currently being built there.”

“The thing that I'm most excited about is that Ernie Poglis designed and has crafted a traditional Welcome Pole for the space. So he's been working on that for the past I want to say eight months approximately. I think it's on some of the last stages of the painting.  There will be an unveiling and a really beautiful ceremony for that, hopefully in the spring, or early summer.”

“I would really like to encourage people to come to the Village Commons community update. Everybody is welcome. We will be providing light snacks and refreshments.” 

“It's just a really great opportunity to hear from not only the Cortes Island Community Foundation, but all of the partners in the Manson's area, such as the SCCA, Cortes Housing Society, and the Fire Hall, about any of their upcoming projects and updates that they'd like to share. There'll be time after the presentation to ask questions as well.”

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - The We Wai Kai Nation wanted to find out more about their water resources on Quadra Island when the ICAN water security team approached them about a possible partnership. 


“I wanted to find out  how much water we have? Where is it coming from? We want to know if the water's good on Quadra, and protect those watersheds. We want to map out where everything is and get educational pieces out there about our drinking water - 'don’t be polluting this area!'” explained Jason Price, Director of Lands for the We Wai Kai First Nation.

“The ICAN Society was trying to do the same thing for a watershed study. I went over to Quadra to see what the group was about, and what they're trying to do.”


ICAN had just applied for a $50,000 grant from the Real Estate Foundation and been denied. 

Jason Price: “So I was like, ‘I'll keep my eyes open and if something pops up maybe we could jointly submit an application under the Nation's name, because we'll have better chances using the Nation's name. There are millions of societies, but there's only X amount of First Nations.’” 

“We are open to partnerships with any groups that have a common interest with what we're trying to accomplish. If nobody's talking to each other, we're both fighting for the same money, but if we go in together it looks ten times better. They're funding two interest groups with one application, if you're looking at it from a funder's perspective.”   


"I got an email maybe a few months later about a new initiative through the Indigenous Watersheds. So I was like, 'that sounds exactly what we're wanting to do.' I worked with some of the ICAN Society to develop what they're actually going to be doing. Then I submitted it all and  I ended up hearing back later that we got funded for I think it was $280,000 for the entire project.”

Jason Price administers the grant.

Lynne Jordan/ Cortes Currents - At the beginning of the 1900s, Squirrel Cove on the east side of Cortes Island was a hub of activity for homesteaders, loggers, fishermen, miners and trappers. They came from all the surrounding islands for supplies, groceries, mail, repairs, radios and dances in the hall. There were two stores, a post office, church, hall, two machine shops, a boatworks, a marine ways, and a big dock where the Union Steamships stopped regularly. Jim Spilsbury also stopped frequently to install or repair his radios in boats and homes.

The first school classes were overseen by parents and held in a little one-room tar-paper shack right behind the store that still exists today. The first registered Squirrel Cove School was located at the top of the hill going west towards Gorge Harbour. It was a one-room school built in 1916 by locals and was used until 1941. Back in those days, a school needed 9 students for the government to supply a teacher. Residents of Whaletown and Squirrel Cove disagreed over which school was closest to Barret’s Lake (now called Blue Jay Lake) in Green Valley where a number of children lived. Bill Barrett settled the debate by tying a rag to a wheel on his wagon and counting the revolutions on a trip from Green Valley to each school. Squirrel Cove won, so the Green Valley children walked there. The nearby Seaford community had a school that opened in 1921 for only ten years. When it closed in 1931, children from there joined the Squirrel Cove School. The school had just one small room with a tiny cloakroom at one end. There were no washrooms, just outhouses up on the hillside.

No First Nation children attended school here. In centuries past the Salish Klahoose used Squirrel Cove traditionally for harvesting and fishing. Near the end of the 1800s, they moved permanently to Squirrel Cove. After 1915 Klahoose children were taken to Residential School in Sechelt by Union Steamships, returning home for Christmas, Easter and summer holidays. Fred Reedel remembers in the 1940s, “Even though we didn’t go to school together, we all played together.”

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - A joint We Wai Kai/ ICAN Water Security team has been monitoring Quadra Island wells for the past month as part of a much larger project to calculate the island’s water budget.   


"At the moment 13 wells are being monitored, and another three or four will be added from Cape Mudge. So there will probably be 17 deeper wells and  Eileen McKay, particularly, has been saying for a while that we need to add shallow wells.  We'll be doing that hopefully this year," explained Nick Sargent, a former professional hydrologist who is overseeing the well monitoring.


Red Williams Well Drilling Ltd was involved in this part of the project. 

"Just before Christmas, Red Williams offered to help. So we went around and  installed what we call drop pipes, so plastic tubes down in the wells.  Then we drop down, on  basically a fishing line, these little monitoring devices.  They've been running since mid-December, and we hope to do the first reading in the next couple of weeks or so. Once we've read them  and we're okay that they're working and they're set at a reasonable depth,  we'll probably  read them every four to six months." 


This project was made possible thanks to a Indigenous Watershed Grant which is being administered by Jason Price of the We Wai Kai.  Some of the other components are monitoring the island’s rainfall and streamflow, as well as mapping wetlands.

"The water security team was started a few years back, before I joined.  I think with the realization that  issues that had arisen with water supply where there were too many people and too little supply. We're not at that stage on Quadra and probably not on Cortes either,  but it's good to get a handle on the ground water supply before problems arise."

Anastasia Avvakumova/ Cortes Currents - BC Ferries (BCF) is expanding its number of Island Class hybrid-electric vessels, with four more contracted to Damen Shipyards Group (Damen) as per their Jan. 16 press release.

While the six Island Class ships currently operating on various routes across the province use both electric and diesel power, the future ships are designed to run solely on battery, with the diesel engine as a fail-safe.

Two routes are slated to receive a pair of the future ships to operate the respective connections in tandem: Nanaimo-Gabriola and Campbell River-Quadra (Quathiaski Cove). Currently older versions of Island Class vessels operate on these routes. In contrast, the newest ships will be built to run powered solely by rapid-charging technology that will be constructed at the terminals to coincide with the 2027 deployment. The Island Class electrification project is estimated to reduce emissions by 10,000 tons of CO2 equivalent.

BCF President and CEO, Nicolas Jimenez, explained that careful consideration went into choosing the communities that will be the first to support fully-electric ferries. “The nature of the route, the distance, the type of current, the amount of power needed to run the engines through those currents – all of those factors combined can lead us to a decision to understand what route is best suited to run fully electric.”

The deployment of the four new ships in 2027 will allow the vessels on those routes to shift elsewhere, in most cases upgrading the capacity of the route. The Cortes-Quadra connection will benefit from one of the four reassigned Island Class ships, increasing the vehicle load from 26 to 47. The other ships will increase service on the Denman-Hornby and Crofton-Vesuvius routes.

The Dutch company Damen was selected from several international proposals, while no domestic bids came. Damen was the builder of the six Island Class ferries already acquired by BCF. “We have teamed up with the technical staff of BC Ferries now for seven years and together we developed a very efficient series of 10 ferries in total that meet all of the future requirements of safe, reliable and sustainable waterborne public transport,” said Leo Postma, Damen’s Area Director for Americas.

De Clarke/ Cortes Currents - Seniors Helping Seniors, in collaboration with the Cortes Museum and Archives, is once again presenting a series of monthly Literary Afternoons this winter. These events, at which local authors read their work, will be held on the last Sunday of each month at 2pm in the Lakeview Room at Linnaea Farm. The last two Literary Afternoons for this winter will be on January 28th and February 25th.

I spoke with Carina Verhoeve from Whaletown, who has been organising these events since 2011.

In the Fall of 2011 I started them, especially in the fall and winter because that’s the dark season, and we want to have some fun in the dark season, right? So on these afternoons it is approximately five writers, people who live on Cortes or spend their summers here, and they each read for usually ten minutes, a piece from their own work.

Carina emphasises the wide variety of material presented: nonfiction, fiction, poetry, journal entries, published books…. anything and everything.

It’s fun, the variety between the writers. There’s variety also in the tone, the mood, the energy of the writings. Some are funny, some serious, some very deep… We almost always have a full house, and it’s a treat.

As kids hopefully you were read to, right? by parents or other people, and that was lovely. So I find the treat of the Literary Afternoons is that you can be read to as an adult. It’s just a treat to be transported into a different world, another person’s experience, a world not your own.

She explains that the concept of literary afternoons grew out of the mission of Seniors Helping Seniors: “to prevent isolation.”

So Seniors Helping Seniors has a social part; and it has a practical part, like matching people who could use some help with people — seniors too, usually — who want to give some help.

But the social part is to prevent isolation. Because when you have fun together, or listen to something interesting together, and you see each other — then you’re out, there’s other people you can talk to, you get to know each other. So by the time you need help, you might know the other person who’s coming [to assist you]

Although the Literary Afternoons started as a programme for seniors, Carina says it’s not limited to the over-50 crowd. It’s open to any “adult” who wishes to attend.

Roy L Hales/Cortes Currents - The ICAN water security team and We Wai Kai Guardians are getting prepared to map Quadra Island’s wetlands. It is part of a much larger project which also involves monitoring the island's rainfall, streamflow and wells. As you will hear in the interview that follows, this project is also relevant  to surrounding islands like Cortes. Bernie Amell, a recognized authority in the design of constructed wetlands for water treatment, and in the restoration of streams and riparian habitats, is in charge of mapping the wetlands. 


“Three or four years ago, we started being concerned about climate change as it would affect the water cycle. This is a temperate rainforest country and we're already seeing with the cedars, a change in their range and healthiness.  So there's environmental reasons for being concerned, but there's also the human use factors. At what point do you say,  we basically can't have more human use? The sponge doesn't have more water in it,” he explained.


“We hear all kinds of horror stories about Pender Island, Salt Spring, Hornby. They're actually in much more serious immediate trouble as the climate changes because they don't have as good an aquifer development. I'm not saying  that's the point that Cortes or Quadra are at, it's just not knowing is  an uncomfortable place to be. So four years ago, we started looking at that  in the big picture:  climate change,  wetlands, the aquifers.” 


CC: How far have you got in the wetland project? 


Bernie Amell: “Right now  we're developing a field guide for citizen science teams to go out and use mainly plants, but also other ways of looking at the terrain for clues as to where the permanent wetlands are, where the seasonal ones are, where there are impermanent streams.”


“The team has separate project teams. Eileen Mckay is very strongly involved in this and there's a couple of other people who are knowledgeable in native plants and they're providing their expertise in developing this guidebook. Then we'll just hit the ground and go out and recruit people to come and bushwhack with us.”


CC: Should people in the surrounding islands, like Cortes, be interested in this mapping project?


Bernie Amell: “It’ll actually be quite relevant.  The more settled areas of Cortes are in the same kind of terrain that I'm talking about. The land that's farmable,  where there's some soil and you can actually grow things, is  glacial silt deposited stuff. You're probably very very similar to what we've got here and also the plant community is similar. I've been bushwhacking a little bit there, and the terrain and parts of Cortes is very similar  to what we see here.”

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - ICAN’s water security team and the We Wai Kai First Nation have embarked upon an exploration of Quadra Island’s water systems.


While this is a Quadra study, everything they are doing is applicable to Cortes and every other British Columbian island where there is a sizeable population. They are offering a model of how we can prepare for the future.  


“The project started a number of years ago, really centered on the concerns of local people on Quadra about the nature of their water supply. People were really worried about what was going to happen with both climate change, whether it's going to be getting hotter (particularly in the summers) and with development. Every new person that moves on to the island usually sinks a well. If they sink a well, they're pulling quite a bit of water out of the aquifer. We wanted to know, would the aquifer actually meet our needs? Also, what needs does the environment have? And what will happen when things like climate change influences the availability of water,” explained Colin Chapman, who, together with his partner Claire Hemingway, is a key leader in this project. 


"We were the grant writers behind the project. Both of us have PhDs in biology. I was at McGill University for a number of years, and the University of Florida. Claire was working for the National Science Foundation in the U. S.  I'm a tropical biologist, so I have a lot to learn about BC and BC systems, but I'm learning fast."   


"Every time you brush your teeth, take a glass of water, or go to the bathroom, you're using water out of the aquifer. Just imagine an island where water became scarce. We'd all have to not water our gardens. We'd be rationing how we would actually use water, and it just wouldn't be as pleasant as it is now." 


"We use water a lot. The average household uses over 300 gallons a day. So we really have to be concerned about having enough water to meet our needs.”


"Claire and I just moved here a couple of years ago.  We bring  some scientific knowledge about aquatic systems and we bring abilities to write grants."


"We heard the concerns of local people. We looked for grants that we could write and  we teamed up with Wei Wai Kai, particularly Jason Price."  


"It's a concern, of course, of the band. So we teamed up with them, and  wrote a series of grants."

There are three components to the grant. Cortes Currents will be looking at mapping wetlands and well monitoring in subsequent broadcasts. Colin and Claire are involved with monitoring the rainfall and streams. 


Colin Chapman: "We're trying to figure out a water budget for the island.