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Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - At their May 22 Board meeting, the Strathcona Regional Distrct (SRD) passed 3 important monetary decisions for Cortes Island.

Firstly, the SRD will be increasing the annual fee for waste collection by $10 a year. This will be paid through our property taxes.

Regional Director Mark Vonesch explained, “we're basically being forced to do this because Recycling BC changed their support for the solid waste collection fees so that we're having to make up that loss through increasing our fees, which we're going to be doing over the next couple of years.”

Secondly, the Cortes Island Firefighters Association’s contract with the SRD expired more than a year ago. Since that time, the fire departent has been hired on a monthly basis. Now the SRD is once again offering a 5 year contract.

SRD Chief Administrative Officer (CAO David Leitch) stated, “I just want to acknowledge the Cortes Island Firefighting Association and Sadhu Johnston for their participation and great patience. I think it's been a nice team-building exercise throughout but, as I understand it from Sadhu, the board has endorsed this contract, which is really great. This is a great step forward for both of us.”

Mark Vonesch: “If I could add to that. It has been a year and a half and I'm just really grateful to staff, the Cortes Island Firefighters Association and this board for getting us here. This is a big win for Cortes. It's a big win for the SRD. It's a big win for Cortes Fire Department. I'm just really excited to get this five year deal passed. Now we can all move forward.”

Lastly, the SRD is entering into an agreement with the Cortes Community Housing Society to provide up to $140,000 of the funding available through the Provincial Gas Tax on a road leading into Rainbow Ridge. We’ve actually been hearing about this project since November, but it was approved Wednesday.

The Board passed all of these measures with no opposing votes.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Cortes Island author Carrie Saxifrage made a climate mitigation presentation at the May 22 SRD Board meeting. This is an abridged version of that talk. 

She began with a simple admission, “This is my first time. Thank you so much for having me. If I were to do it again, I'd do it a little differently, but here we are. We're going to whisk through some slides, and I'm going to emphasize what I think is most important.”

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents -There were questions about what can be accomplished, but the SRD will be asking Transport Canada about the safety requirements, noise levels and frequency of planes using the Cortes Island Airstrip.


At their May 22 meeting, Cortes Island Director Mark Vonesch told the SRD Board:

“There is an airstrip on Cortes Island that's been there for a long time. A new buyer bought the land and has  been upgrading the runway significantly.  I've heard numbers: allegedly a thousand gravel trucks. They're paving it and  there's a big concern from the community regarding: safety issues, what kind of planes can now land, frequency of planes that can now land,  whether they need permission from the owner to be able to land. And also further gentrification of Cortes Island as it becomes more accessible.”

“There's a lot of questions that are coming to me from the community around this. I don't have the answers and would really love staff support to engage with Transport Canada and  inform the board  on  what the rules are around safety, frequency and plane size. I have a motion as well.”  

Campbell River Director Doug Chapman questioned whether this would be a waste of staff’s time: 

“If it's a private runway, then the safety requirements are going to be based on the length of the runway. The length of the runway is going to dictate the size of the aircraft - and it's not landing, it's takeoff.” 

“To make it simple, if you had a two engine aircraft  to take off, you have to reach a rotation for one engine, then take off. That's why the length of the runway is important for takeoffs, not landing.  If it's a private runway, as long as they meet Transport Canada requirements for the aircraft operation  and the operator of the aircraft has insurance I don't think we have a lot of input into it.  The Aeronautics Act and the regulations related to it dictate what happens.”

Manda Aufochs Gillespie/ Folk U - On Friday, May 17, Manda Aufochs Gillespie was joined by the Simon Fraser University field school that visited Cortes in the week of May 13-17 to chat about how ecosystem approaches to health can help us understand the implications and impact of climate change through the perspective of rural and remote island communities.

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.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - A new exhibition in the Cortes Island Museum looks at the island’s housing from pre-colonial times up until the present. ‘From the Ground Up: Cortes Island Dwellings And Their Histories’ combines photographs and artifacts from the museum’s collections, stories and images from the community and a display from the Cortes Housing Society. Melanie Boyle, Managing Director of the Museum, took Cortes Currents on a tour of the exhibit. 


“Welcome to the Cortes Museum and Archives. We are standing just inside the museum store, but as you know, the museum once was the Cortes Lodge store, down at Manson's Lagoon. We have a new exhibition which just opened on May 5th and runs throughout the year. I curated the show with Monica Hoffman,” she began. 


“This exhibition looks at dwellings and communities from a historic perspective, not only just the dwellings, but the process behind a lot of them. On Cortes we face a lot of challenges, whether economic, terrain, or just accessing material. Our idea was to look at dwellings from that perspective: how people overcome the challenges; elusive solutions they find, and the connections they make to the land, to one another and the way they build community.”

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - More than 25 people turned out for the ‘Polycrisis Townhall-Party’ in the Klahoose Multi-purpose building on Friday, May 17. Chief Darren Blaney of the Homalco FIrst Nation, his wife, MP Rachel Blaney, and Cortes Island Regional Director Mark Vonesch were among them. The event was put together by Cortes Island’s  Alternate Director, Max Thaysen. Norm Harry, of the Klahoose FIrst Nation, welcomed everyone to the building. The most newsworthy portion was Chief Blaney’s declaration that First Nations need to take back stewardship of their traditional territories. 

An abridged version of his talk follows.

Chief Blaney began by speaking in ayʔaǰuθɛm, which you can hear in the podcast. 

Then, in English, he acknowledged the close relationship of the Klahoose and Homalco First Nations, “It’s good to be in the home of our relatives. I’m happy to be here.”    

“When you were speaking, you made me think about listening to an elder, and the elder talked about a sacred alliance with us and all of Mother Earth, all the animals. We look after them, and they look after us.” 

“I think when First Nations were connected to the land, it was the same. We were part of that cycle and I think it's important that we follow those teachings.”

He spoke of ceremonies from his grandmother’s day. 

“Go to the first salmon ceremony, they were giving thanks and respect to that salmon, making sure it's there for future generations. The first berries and stuff, you give a prayer for that.  You give thanks, respect, and appreciation.”    

“For us, in this time when we have all kinds of climate change issues, with the fires going on up north, I think that our Aboriginal rights are the best protection for the environment.”

He referred to the struggle with fish farms.

“That fight is about saving wild salmon and Homalco has spent about $700,000. I keep telling the fisheries minister, we've spent $700,000 defending your decision to remove the farms because we're protecting our salmon. And it's not just our salmon, it's all our clam gardens, all the rock cod, all the ring cod, snappers, herring. All these things that are part of our ecosystem.”

“I remember early in 2000 we were talking about the coming pandemic. And we were thinking, ‘what are we going to do when everybody's dying?’ And we thought, ‘We'll go back up to Bute Inlet,  but  the way DFO has managed our fisheries: our herring stocks have disappeared, our cod stocks have disappeared, lingcod  disappeared so we don't have any cod eggs anymore. The salmon have just about disappeared because of the fish farms and climate change.” 

“So our voice becomes even more important today as First Nations. What we're doing is we're working to rebuild the stocks, but at some point I'm looking to remove DFO from my territory because they're no help to the wild stocks.They're no help to the salmon.” 

“They're pretty much pro-fish farmers in my mind because every time we talk to them, I feel like I'm talking to a fish farmer. For us to rebuild our salmon stocks, we have to get DFO out of the way, and that's been a big struggle for us.”

“Because of that, we have to build up our revenues. We have to get to the place where our people will be able to defend our rights in court and one of the biggest obstacles of going to court is what's called legal mischief.  Where these corporate bodies keep throwing all kinds of motions at you. Mostly, when they do that to First Nations, they're trying to empty out our bank accounts so we can't fight in court anymore.” 

“So we're working on building up a legal trust fund, so we'll be able to look after our land. The stewardship trust fund, so we'll be able to look after our land. The language, our trust fund for our culture, so that we'll be still connected to that land. All these things are important for us and it does