Release Notes

What has changed on Mayne Town, newest first. We build in the open, and anything a visitor can notice gets written down here — including the corrections.

• Ferry clocks follow B.C. Pacific time 2026-10-13
  Ferry countdowns and estimated vessel positions now use the same local clock. They keep the correct time through November and winter under B.C.'s year-round Pacific time, including on devices with older timezone data.
• Lighter page downloads 2026-10-13
  Maps, research pages and other tools now load when you open them. The island sites and Abolish the Islands Trust need a smaller initial download before you can start reading.
• Nine of thirteen islands now have an enforcement policy, and three corrections to what we said about them 2026-10-12
  The enforcement page, its share picture and the poster said eight of the thirteen local trust areas had published a bylaw enforcement policy, and listed South Pender among five with none. South Pender adopted one on 28 August 2026. On 12 October 2026 we read the Bylaws page of all thirteen areas on the Trust’s site, and every policy those pages link. Nine link a policy. Galiano, Lasqueti, Thetis and Ballenas-Winchelsea link none. South Pender’s policy opens its priorities with the same sentence as six others: the committee has the power to enforce and “discretion to adopt priorities for enforcement or to defer enforcement”. It puts off enforcement against short-term rentals that were validly operating on 30 April 2024, and says enforcement on any short-term rental “will proceed based on written complaints only”. Reading the copies the Trust posts today also showed three things we had wrong. Correction one: the poster said Hornby had put off “nothing at all”. Hornby’s policy puts off enforcement against non-permitted dwellings, with three exceptions, and on farm stands. Correction two: we said Mayne’s policy listed four exceptions to its rule against acting on short-term rentals, and did not say when staff may act with no complaint. It lists five, and it authorises enforcement on vehicle storage “without a written complaint”. So five of the nine policies say when staff may act with no complaint, and four say nothing either way. Correction three: we said seven of the eight policies opened with the same sentence. On the Trust’s copies it is seven of the nine. Denman’s and Gabriola’s do not have it. The share picture for the enforcement page is redrawn. One more change: North Pender amended its policy on 2 October 2026 to put off enforcement on a concrete batch plant for six months. View
• Correction: Mayne’s cottage rule starts at 0.4 hectares, not 0.6 2026-10-12
  The inequity page said Mayne’s Settlement Residential zone lists a cottage only on lots of at least 0.6 hectares, and that 122 of 1,284 lots were large enough. That was the rule before Bylaw 197, which the Mayne committee adopted on 31 August 2026. On 12 October we read the Trust’s September 2026 copy of Land Use Bylaw 146. New section 5.1(2.1) allows one cottage on a lot of 0.4 hectares or more but less than 0.6, if the house and cottage together are no larger than 232 square metres. Section 5.1(3) still allows a cottage at 0.6 hectares without that combined limit. By our parcel data of 12 October, 232 of the 1,284 lots are 0.4 hectares or more, and 122 of those are 0.6 or more. The Rural zone’s line is unchanged at 1 hectare: 129 of 142 lots. These are counts of lot size, not of permission to build. Suites and some home limits on Mayne still depend on two maps we have not matched to the lots. Our own copy of Bylaw 146 in the bylaw library is the text from before Bylaw 197; the page links the Trust’s copy for the new section. View
• The suite table, checked against two newly adopted bylaws: no number moved 2026-10-12
  The table on the inequity page counts, island by island, the residential lots where the land use bylaw gives no lawful way to add a separate suite. Two islands had adopted bylaws that our count of 5 October had not read. We read both adopted bylaws on the Trust’s file server on 12 October 2026 and ran the count again for all nine islands in the table. No number moved. Galiano’s Bylaw 300, adopted 29 September 2026, moves the boat-access lots into a new Small Island Residential zone. We count 153 lots inside that zone on the Trust’s zoning map. The zone lists a secondary suite (section 5.7.1.4). But section 2.28.1 still requires a lot of at least 0.4 hectares for a suite, as it did before, and 120 of the 153 lots are smaller. Galiano stays at 365 of 1,178 lots. One caution, which we reported on 8 October: the adopted section 5.7.1 gives the zone’s uses to a “Boat Access Only” zone that the bylaw does not create. We counted the lots under the zone’s heading. Mayne’s Bylaw 197, adopted 31 August 2026, adds a suite line to four more zones. It leaves in place the rule that a suite is allowed only inside the shaded area of the Schedule D map (section 3.13(1)). We have not matched that map to the lots, so Mayne is still left out of the table and not guessed. Bylaw 197 also replaced the Schedule E map with a larger one. What we do not know: how many Mayne lots are inside either map. View
• Correction: Mayne Bylaw 197 is adopted, and the housing table now says so 2026-10-08
  The island table on the housing mandate page said Mayne’s zoning Bylaw 197 was “not yet confirmed as adopted”. It was adopted on 31 August 2026 under resolution MA-2026-060, with plan Bylaw 196 under MA-2026-059. The adopted minutes of that meeting record both. The Mayne audit page has said so since 3 October; the table had not caught up. The North Pender row of the same table now says Bylaw 240 was read a first time on 2 October 2026. View
• Twelve bylaw letters reported sent to the Islands Trust 2026-10-03
  Tony Aly confirmed that he personally sent twelve letters on 3 October about proposed or adopted bylaws affecting Denman, Gabriola, Galiano, Gambier, Hornby, Lasqueti, Mayne, North Pender, Salt Spring and Saturna. The all-islands bylaw audit now lists the recipient, subject and prepared text for each letter on its island page; the relevant island-town bylaw pages link to that record. This is Tony's send confirmation. We have not independently checked the exact sent-mail copies or received Trust responses to these letters. View
• The Firestarter now has an edition for every island 2026-09-17
  The paper has moved to /firestarter, and every island site in the network now carries its own edition at the same address: hornbytown.org/firestarter, maynetown.org/firestarter and the rest. A decision that binds the whole trust area, such as a Trust Council or Executive Committee vote, is reported once and appears on every island edition; a local trust committee decision appears on that island's edition only. Syndicated reports are one article shared, not thirteen copies, so a correction to one corrects them all. The reporting job runs every six hours across the islands in turn, rather than once a day for Denman alone. View
• Corrections across the island information and campaign sites 2026-09-10
  A six-perspective review challenged the pages, calculations, articles and downloadable graphics. We corrected claims about housing duties, ALR permissions, governance-review progress and incorporation; separated housing need from zoning capacity; and labelled parcel counts as screening estimates rather than approvals. Farm comparisons now use the same matched records on the data and farm pages. Article corrections retain earlier versions. Share images, signs and PDFs carry the corrected wording. Earlier release notes describe the versions then published; this correction supersedes their affected claims.
• Broken links now say the page is missing 2026-09-06
  A made-up web address on a town site, the pro-Trust site, or Land Intelligence now shows a not-found page instead of repeating the homepage.
• Petition email confirmation repaired 2026-09-05
  Fixed an error that could stop the confirmation button in a petition email from counting your signature. Your private link stays private.
• Easier sign-in and safer petition forms 2026-09-05
  Sign in with a code, even when tracking scripts are blocked. Autofill and private-link recovery work without waiting for the page to notice your email. Spam checks run behind the scenes, with a clear retry message when needed.
• Help getting your petition link 2026-09-05
  Confirmation emails now wait in a retry queue if the mail service is down. The recovery form works separately from signing. Check your email and confirm your signature before it joins the public count.
• Cortes and Quadra zoning citations pointed at a moved domain 2026-08-26
  The Strathcona Regional District moved from strathconard.ca to srd.ca. Every zoning value we hold for Cortes and Quadra — 2,503 lots — cited the old address, which no longer resolves. All of them now cite the district's live land-use page. The zoning data itself is unchanged and still comes from the same Strathcona bylaws; only the address moved.
• Link rot swept out of the citations 2026-08-26
  A full check of every outbound source across the network found six links that had gone dead because the site on the other end reorganised, and all six are now repaired and re-verified. The Province moved its Islands Trust overview, which is the source for the 5,200 km² land-and-water scale on the water study; the Islands Trust renamed its annual-report and financial-reports pages, which carry the Conservancy figures; the Trust also moved the Hornby Island Official Community Plan; the Land Title and Survey Authority moved its title-search page, which is linked from every lot page; Lasqueti's community site moved its ferry page; and the Strathcona Regional District moved to a new domain. In every case the underlying facts were re-checked against the relocated source and none of them changed — only the addresses did.
• A network-wide accuracy and publishing sweep 2026-08-24
  We corrected host canonicals and sitemaps, strengthened no-JavaScript campaign pages, fixed pre-existing map, media-gallery, crawler and route type errors, and regenerated the current social and poster artwork from deterministic source files.
• Every argument can now travel as a sourced image 2026-08-23
  Every petition homepage, substantial argument section, and public post now has a top-right share control. It opens a 1080-by-1350 image made from that exact page heading, excerpt, and deep link. On a phone or supported desktop browser, native share sends the PNG and link to installed apps. The same panel covers Facebook, WhatsApp, Bluesky, Threads, X, Reddit, LinkedIn, Telegram, Pinterest, email, and SMS, with copy-image, copy-caption, PNG download, and print for everywhere else. The four property families keep distinct art direction. Their illustrated backgrounds make no factual claim: every word and source destination is drawn from the live page in deterministic code. View
• Exact petition versions, corrected claims, and ads paused 2026-08-23
  The island-town petition now says exactly what it asks and what it does not: a town with a council residents elect and can replace; current law requires an island municipality while the Trust area exists; abolition is a separate decision. Earlier signatures have not been rewritten or silently moved. They remain attached to version 1 unless their owner reads and explicitly accepts version 2 from the private management page. Public totals now separate current-version signatures from earlier-version supporters, current PDFs include version 2 only, and the full wording history is public. A one-time correction notice shows both texts, contains no cross-petition pitch, and says plainly that doing nothing preserves version 1. The abolition petition demand itself is unchanged. We also retired an 86% water creative after finding that it mixed different land and area geographies; parcel-residual estimates are now labelled with their road and unsurveyed-land caveat. Marine zoning is valid, reference maps and GIS exist, and the narrower demand is to publish the controlling records online. Campaign ad routes are paused while election-period registration and authorization requirements are resolved.
• We broke the petition for several hours. Here is exactly what happened. 2026-08-23
  On the morning of 23 August, every attempt to sign the petition failed. The form returned an error and, worse, printed the database's own error text at whoever was trying to sign. It lasted several hours and we found it because the signature count stopped moving, not because anything alerted us. The cause was ours: a change adding comment screening passed an empty list into a database query in a way that produced invalid SQL, and because almost every signature has no comment attached, it failed for everybody rather than for a rare case. It is fixed, and confirmed working on phones and desktop. Two things follow that matter more than the bug. If you tried to sign during that window, your signature was never recorded — nothing was stored, so we cannot even email you to apologise. Please sign again; it takes a minute. And every release from now on is gated on a check that fills in the real form on the live site and confirms a signature can actually be created, at three screen sizes. Nothing we had — the type checker, the build, 234 tests, the accessibility and mobile audits — could catch this, because a page looks identical whether or not the thing behind it works.
• Rebuilt for the phone, and a way to tell people you know 2026-08-22
  Most people read this network on a phone, so it has been measured on one. Every button, link and form field is now at least 44 pixels tall — the size a thumb actually hits — and no text field renders under 16 pixels, which is the point where iPhones zoom the page in and do not zoom back out. The campaign material page no longer scrolls sideways: the ad previews were rendering at their true widths, up to 970 pixels, and pushed a 320-pixel screen more than 400 pixels off to the right. They now scale to fit at full fidelity. Three of these faults were invisible on a desktop browser and none of them broke the build, so there is now a script that loads each page at phone widths and measures what rendered, and tests that fail if the old traps come back. Separately, after you sign the petition you are offered — once, not pushed — the option to tell people you know. It sends from your own email, everyone goes in BCC, and the addresses never reach our servers: nothing to keep, because we never receive them.
• Every island now shows its census population 2026-08-21
  Until today this network held no population data at all. Each island site now states how many people Statistics Canada counted there in 2021, how that changed since 2016, and how many of its dwellings are nobody's home — each figure with its census year and a link to the StatCan table it came from. Two things worth knowing about the numbers: they cover the Trust Area designated place rather than the island's shoreline, and Statistics Canada publishes no age breakdown at that geography, so anything we say about the adult population is an estimate and is labelled as one.
• You can now choose how often we email you 2026-08-21
  Sign a petition and you can pick a weekly digest, daily, every two weeks, monthly, or no email at all — and change it any time from the private link we send you. The digest covers what changed on the sites, what turned up in the public record, and how the petitions moved, with every figure sourced. If you signed before this existed we will write once to ask what you want; if you ignore that email, you stay off the list. Unsubscribing is one click and never removes your name from the petition.
• Release notes now live on every island site 2026-08-21
  Until today only DenmanIsland.co published a running list of what changed. Every site in the network now has its own Release Notes page, linked from the footer, showing the changes that affected that site. It is the same standing rule we already followed — anything a visitor can notice gets written down — just published where the visitors are. View
• Corrected the land-area figures on the island sites 2026-08-21
  Our parcel totals were counting statutory rights-of-way — leases, licences of occupation and similar interests that are registered over land rather than being parcels of it — as if they were lots. Because they overlap the lots beneath them, they inflated every hectare total, badly in places: Galiano was showing 23,229 hectares for an island of roughly 5,700. They are now excluded from every total. We have also relabelled the figure as mapped parcel area rather than land area, because the parcel fabric covers the whole Local Trust Area including foreshore and marine parcels. Individual lot pages are unchanged — a right-of-way is a real registered interest and still shows on the lot it crosses.
• Zoning now cites its source on every island 2026-08-21
  Gambier and North Pender were showing each lot's zoning with no citation behind it, and 819 of Cortes's 820 lots were citing the wrong island's bylaw — the regional district publishes Cortes and Quadra zoning from one layer whose shapes reach across the channel between them. All three are corrected, so every zoned lot on the network now names the bylaw it came from.
• Water pages now say when the Province has not mapped an aquifer 2026-08-21
  Lasqueti and Texada have drilled wells on record but no provincially mapped aquifer at all. The water page used to say no record was "available yet", which read as something we had not got round to fetching. It now names the gap for what it is, shows the well count and the median depth, bedrock and yield the Province does record, and notes that none of the usual provincial ratings — vulnerability, productivity, demand, water quality — exist for these islands. View
• Every island site now shows who has signed 2026-08-20
  Each island-town site has a public signatures page listing the people who chose to show their name, with the date they signed and any comment they left. Signatures marked private are counted but never named, and email addresses are never published. Islands with no signatures yet publish that honestly too, with an invitation to be the first. View
• Per-island water reports 2026-08-20
  Every island site now has a full water report at /water: each aquifer the Province maps beneath the island, its vulnerability, productivity and demand ratings, wells on record, water licences, and the provincial observation wells tracking long-term levels — plus median well depth and yield from wells actually drilled on that island's lots. Gabriola and Salt Spring lead with written analysis; every other island gets the same data. View
• Lost your petition link? Email it to yourself 2026-08-20
  Every petition form now has "Already signed? Email me my sign-in link". Enter the address you signed with and the private link comes straight back to your inbox — no account, no password. From that link you can switch your name between public and private, edit your comment, or withdraw entirely. View
• Registered wells on lot records 2026-08-20
  Lot pages now show wells registered on that lot in the Province's GWELLS registry — depth, bedrock depth, reported yield, and a link to the provincial record — plus aggregate context for wells within 500 m (count and medians only; individual neighbouring wells are never listed, and owner information is never stored or shown). View
• Groundwater aquifers on every island map 2026-08-20
  The parcel maps now carry the Province of B.C.'s official groundwater aquifer mapping as a toggleable layer — on denmanisland.co and every island-town site. Tap an aquifer for the provincial classification (material, vulnerability, productivity, demand), its mapped size, and a link to the provincial factsheet. Provincial mapping shows a single bedrock aquifer (Aquifer 740, 47.7 km², mapped 2006) underlying nearly all of Denman Island, alongside the confined sand-and-gravel Aquifer 739 on the east side. Every lot record also now notes which mapped aquifer most underlies it. Source: B.C. Ground Water Aquifers dataset, Open Government Licence — BC. View
• Confirm a signature, then share it — and sign both petitions in one click 2026-08-20
  Confirming a petition signature now lands on a share page: your name in a signature card, ready-made posts for X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Reddit and email, a downloadable share image, and QR codes for flyers. Signed the abolish petition? One click also adds you to your island's own become-a-town petition (and the other way around) — no second confirmation email, because your address was already verified. View
• Petition signatures are now email-confirmed 2026-08-19
  Signing the Trust-wide abolition petition or any separate island petition now works in two steps: add your name, then click the confirmation link we email you. Your signature counts the moment you confirm. Every signature made before this change stays counted; nothing was removed. Why the change: it stops anyone else from signing or altering a signature using your email address, and it makes every published count one a skeptic can trust. Each island site now also sends its mail from its own domain. View
• Signature ledger: look up public names across every petition 2026-08-19
  abolishislandstrust.org now has a central signature ledger. It totals the Trust-wide abolition petition and every separate island petition, and lets you look up names people chose to publish. Private signatures stay in the counts only. View
• Camp Denman / Elkhaven interest disclosed; portfolio map published 2026-08-19
  Tony Aly's involvement with Camp Denman (also known as Elkhaven / Elk Haven) is stated on the ownership and transparency pages, the directory, and the Elkhaven archive. The live portfolio — landintelligence.co, denmanisland.co, denmantown.org, abolishislandstrust.org, the island-town sites, and iloveislandstrust.org — is described as a private network, not a federation of local chapters. View