Facing a housing crunch, an island’s new dock could offer refuge

On a remote BC island, a community-owned dock could give people who live on their boats a place to tie up for the winter as housing pressures grow.

Many of the residents have lived near Cortes Island, off BC’s central coast, for years and call their boats home, said Jenny Hartwick, the harbour manager for Cortes Community Docks. A secure place to tie up at Whaletown’s newly rebuilt dock would give them an alternative to spending the winter anchored on open water, she said.

“All they want in the wintertime is a place to tie up, where they’re not bouncing around on their anchor in the wind.”

Year-round housing is hard to find on Cortes. A 2024 regional district report estimated the island would need 95 more homes within five years and 270 within 20 years. It put the median home price at $794,600, compared with the about $207,000 a median-income household could afford.

The proposal, which is under consideration by the harbour board, is possible because Whaletown is community-owned, giving the board more flexibility to respond to local needs, as long as any new use meets insurance, safety and provincial requirements. “The sky is the limit for us in terms of what we want to do with the dock,” Hartwick said.

The dock was one of 499 ports that Transport Canada has handed over to local groups across Canada since 1996, which has resulted in savings to Canadian taxpayers of more than $470 million.

Four other public docks on Cortes Island remain federally owned and are operated locally under lease through Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s Small Craft Harbours program, which gives priority to commercial fishing.

“There are so many vital uses for those docks that exist outside of that federal mandate,” Hartwick said.

One of those uses was a floating dental clinic. For years, a licensed dentist arrived by boat about once a month and saw patients in a floating office tied to the dock, saving residents the ferry trip to Campbell River on Vancouver Island.

“You would just pull up, you’d park your car, you’d walk down the ramp,” Hartwick said. “You’d get your teeth cleaned, you’d get cavities filled.”

The dentist has since retired, but the clinic remains an example of how the dock has served the island beyond boating and fishing, Hartwick said.

That freedom comes with a bill: the local group pays for Whaletown’s operations and repairs through moorage and user fees, grants, reserves and volunteer work.

Rebuilding Whaletown dock

The 111-year-old dock was rebuilt ahead of schedule this year, after a 2024 engineering survey found deteriorating decking, concrete footings and wooden supports beneath the dock. The floats were in good condition, but the structure was closed to vehicle traffic because it could no longer safely carry vehicles of variable size and weight.

The project received about $558,000 from British Columbia’s Rural Economic Diversification and Infrastructure Program. The local group also used reserve funds and volunteer hours from its board and community.

The dock was built for Union Steamship vessels — including more than 50 passenger and work boats that connected Vancouver with coastal communities, logging camps and resorts between 1889 and 1959. Most boats using Whaletown today are smaller, she said, and the restoration job shortened the dock.

The change was also designed to simplify future repairs. Replacing some old support posts would have required a large barge and heavy equipment, costing $60,000 to $100,000 just to bring the machinery to Cortes Island, Hartwick said. Crews removed the section those posts supported, so local workers can repair the remaining dock at low tide without divers or extra boats.

“We wanted to make it as easy as possible for us to maintain [the dock] in an extremely remote location,” Hartwick said.

Rob Clarke, the contractor who led the work, said the old dock was built as one connected structure, so replacing one failed support could mean dismantling much of it. The rebuilt dock was designed so individual sections can be repaired or replaced without taking apart the rest, he said. “If there is a need for repair, you don’t have to destroy the structure to repair it.”

Clarke said the project reflects a wider challenge for remote ports across Canada, where the cost of moving heavy equipment can shape a rebuild as much as the engineering. He and his crew worked around the winter tides, sometimes pouring concrete after midnight.

Cortes Community Docks, formerly known as the Harbour Authority of Cortes Island, changed its name to reflect the harbour’s wider role beyond commercial fishing, Hartwick said.

People who have depended on the dock for decades cannot simply find another place to go. “They don’t just up and pack up and decide to use a different dock; they continue on,” she said. Sonal Gupta / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer.