‘Everybody will benefit’: What the K’ómoks First Nation Treaty Act means for economic development in the Comox Valley

June 25, 2026

KomoksTreatyParcels — Map showing the parcels K’ómoks First Nation will acquire in its treaty, totalling more than 5,000 hectares. Map from K’ómoks treaty appendices

‘Everybody will benefit’: What the K’ómoks First Nation Treaty Act means for economic development in the Comox Valley

With future plans for economic development in the Union Bay area, K’ómoks First Nation will need help to achieve its long-term goals, the Nation says.

BY DAVE FLAWSE, LOCAL JOURNALISM INITIATIVE REPORTER ● COMOX VALLEY ● JUNE 18, 2026

The K’ómoks First Nation treaty includes what the Nation calls the Southlands, a large parcel in Royston between highways 19 and 19A. Photo by Dave Flawse/The Discourse

At the end of May, the B.C. government gave a third and final reading of the K’ómoks Treaty Act, which will now go to the federal legislature to be ratified, a moment that has been over thirty years in the making. If passed, the treaty will give K’ómoks First Nation the ability to self-govern and bring economic development to newly acquired lands in the Comox Valley.

“The economic opportunities are huge,” says K’ómoks First Nation Chief Nicole Rempel in an interview with The Discourse, adding that “it’s all about working together.”

What are the potential economic benefits for the First Nation and wider Comox Valley community? And how does the Nation’s economic development plan compare to other nations with treaties in B.C.?

Here’s what you need to know.

How will the treaty affect private lands?

The treaty includes the transfer of Crown land and private land already purchased by the province of B.C. for the treaty settlement to the Nation.

“We have 12,500 acres in our treaty,” Rempel says. That makes the Nation the second-largest landowner in the Comox Valley, according to recent information published on the Nation’s YouTube channel.

The B.C. treaty process is designed to get Crown or government lands back into the hands of First Nations and does not impact private property without special agreements in place.

“Any private lands in our treaty are on a willing seller, willing buyer basis. So, [K’ómoks First Nation is] not expropriating anybody’s property,” Rempel adds.

The treaty lands include several parcels throughout the Comox Valley and K’ómoks traditional territory. The largest is what the Nation calls the Southlands, a section in south Royston between highways 19 and 19A, marked as “Part 2b Royston Forest” and “Part 2c Sage Hills” on the map below.

Map showing the parcels K’ómoks First Nation will acquire in its treaty, totalling more than 5,000 hectares. Map from K’ómoks treaty appendices

Plans already exist to bring sewer infrastructure to the Southlands area, which Rempel says is probably the Nation’s “most immediate opportunity for growth,” noting that septic systems in the area are failing and “they flow right into Baynes Sound, the shellfish breadbasket of Canada.”

“To be able to partner with the regional district and the city to provide services to better opportunities there is also really important,” Rempel says. “Just the economic opportunities for the whole region and throughout our territory, I think, are really important as well.”

Opportunities to build housing

Providing critical infrastructure, such as sewer, to the Southlands will also make way for housing to be developed according to Rempel. And she says the Nation hopes to address housing needs not just for K’ómoks people, but for people in the Comox Valley as a whole, with Rempel noting the importance of partnering with local governments for any future projects.

“You look across the country and there’s just a housing crisis for everybody,” Rempel says. “If K’ómoks can utilize some of our treaty lands to address that, I think that it’s all about working together.”

Daniel Arbour, Area A Director with the Comox Valley Regional District, agrees.

“The treaty is welcomed by the Comox Valley Regional District, and I think it will bring opportunity for the Nation but also for the Valley as a whole,” Arbour says.

“It’s going to be a change in growth in the south if everything comes through.”

Some of the land covered in the treaty is adjacent to Union Bay Estates, a large, master-plan development that had promised to change the community. But all work by the regional district related to the project “has been paused until further notice,” according to the regional district’s website.

The developer, Kensington Union Bay Group, is under receivership and the partially developed land is under a court-ordered sale.

Union Bay Estates, the regional district and K’ómoks First Nation had partnered to bring sewer infrastructure to the area. With Union Bay Estates no longer able to commit funding to the Sewer Extension South Project, the regional district and Nation are seeking additional grant funding to cover the shortfalls.

“There will always be some unknowns around how the relationship will evolve but [K’ómoks First Nation] has been excellent to work with,” Arbour says, adding that the Nation is “very open-minded and forward-looking.”

A portion of the Southlands, which includes private land that was previously purchased by the province in anticipation for the K’ómoks First Nation treaty. Map from K’ómoks treaty appendices

Melissa Quocksister, a K’ómoks member and communication and engagement consultant with the Nation, says the treaty also provides the Nation the ability to “build differently.”

“We have to match or beat the B.C. Housing standards and codes, but I think there’s a real opportunity to look at how to develop in a different way,” Quocksister says. “No urban sprawl, really green technologies. [We can] build it in a way where it fosters community and gatherings and really exciting stuff like that.”

Quocksister says the Nation could also be a future employer for the region. She says the treaty is a benefit to everyone involved on a greater scale.

Other examples of First Nations with modern treaties

Several nations in the province, including Tsawwassen First Nation, have fully ratified modern treaties, which gives them the right to self-govern their land.

The Tsawwassen Economic Development Corporation has leased land for several residential, commercial and industrial projects, including the Tsawwassen Mills shopping centre and a Vancouver Fraser Port Authority and Canada Border Services Agency inspection facility, according to an implementation report on the treaty.

“Every nation has something unique and special about how they can prosper,” Quocksister says. “The possibilities are potentially endless with the amount of land we have.”

But Quocksister also notes that with so much happening, K’ómoks First Nation will need a lot of support.

“That’s one of our key messages. This is a Comox Valley treaty. This is a Vancouver Island treaty, a B.C. treaty, a Canada treaty. It’s for everybody. Everybody will benefit,” Quocksister says.

Rempel says the Nation approaches partnerships with neighbours, “whether it’s Indigenous communities or local governments,” with collaboration, asking, “How do we all move forward together in the same canoe, building something bigger and better for everybody?”

Capitalism Has Never Failed Us

June 25, 2026

Capitalism Has Never Failed Us By Cylon2036 We/Us

The beauty of capitalism is that every human interaction can be transformed into a revenue stream. Friendship? Subscription service. Romantic relationships? Premium membership tier. Breathing? Freemium model with pop-up ads in between inhalations. Everything can be monetized, confirming the expert consensus that global free market capitalism has never failed us.

It is time to put to rest one of the most outrageous myths ever propagated upon humanity, that free market capitalism is fatally flawed. The evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. Whenever there is a financial crisis, a housing crisis, an environmental crisis, a healthcare crisis, a debt crisis, or a crisis involving people being unable to afford food, shelter, or medicine, it simply demonstrates that there was not enough free market capitalism. The solution, as always, is more of the thing that critics allege caused the problems.

If a bridge collapses, privatize the river. If wages stagnate, deregulate industries. If children cannot afford school lunches, introduce a competitive bidding process for calories. The market knows best. Critics often point to economic inequality and complain that a handful of billionaires possess more wealth than entire nations. But this merely reflects the natural order of things. In nature, lions eat gazelles and eagles eat rabbits. Hedge fund managers purchase their third super-yacht while teachers compare grocery prices. This is what smart economists refer to as “efficiency.”

Market forces are so wise that they can solve every problem, except those they allegedly create, with the best ideas ever conceived by the human mind. History teaches us that providing universal healthcare leads to catastrophe. First, people receive medical treatment, then they become accustomed to surviving illnesses. The next things they’ll want are affordable education and transportation, clean drinking water, and retirement pensions. Before long, citizens will begin expecting affordable cellphones and internet. Civilization will rapidly descend into chaos.

The slippery slope is obvious. Today it is public healthcare, tomorrow it’s affordable food and housing. The next day, children will be reading books without first obtaining venture capital funding. Soon enough, grandmothers are receiving prescription medication without maximizing shareholder value. Society cannot endure such recklessness. Imagine a world in which housing is viewed as shelter rather than an investment vehicle. Imagine a world in which corporations do not possess constitutional rights, and lobbying divisions larger than some national governments. The horror is too difficult to contemplate.

Opponents to the free market point to countries with universal healthcare, affordable education, lower poverty rates, and strong social safety nets. Fortunately, free market advocates have developed a sophisticated rebuttal by simply changing the subject. Besides, non market based solutions suffer from a serious flaw where they assume that society should occasionally organize itself around human needs rather than quarterly earnings reports and higher stock market capitalization. Such dangerous extremism threatens the very foundation of civilization.

Thankfully, free market capitalism continues to guide humanity toward a brighter future in which every forest can become pulp and paper, every conversation can become data, every hobby can become a side hustle, and every waking moment can be optimized for shareholder returns. Some pessimists claim this trajectory is unsustainable, yet these same doubters have been wrong for decades. They warned about financial bubbles, ecological collapse, monopolization, regulatory capture, and wealth concentration. Fortunately, their concerns are irrelevant, evidenced by the rising stock prices over dozens of consecutive quarters.

Free market capitalism has never failed us. Any appearance of failure is merely evidence that reality itself requires further deregulation. Meanwhile, non-market based solutions remain the greatest threat to humanity because they stubbornly insist that economies should occasionally serve citizens rather than investment portfolios. Let us therefore celebrate the market’s unmatched wisdom. Let us privatize the moon, securitize rainfall, tokenize affection, and auction naming rights to the atmosphere. Only then can humanity finally achieve its highest aspiration, with perpetual and unlimited economic growth on a finite planet.

Ukraine: Yet Another War Based on Lies

June 25, 2026

Ukraine: Yet Another War Based on Lies by Keith Porteous

The greatest lie of the Ukraine war is not the lie that Ukraine can still win, propagated by PM Mark Carney and the European leaders, but that this war was ever primarily about the well being of the Ukrainian people. The majority of people in Europe do not support the NATO proxy war in Ukraine.

For more than three decades following the Cold War, influential Western strategists viewed Ukraine as the decisive geopolitical battleground of the twenty-first century, a central piece in the vision to retain U.S. hegemony in a unipolar geopolitical world. As former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski argued in 1997’s The Grand Chessboard, Russia without Ukraine would be fundamentally diminished as a Eurasian power. Ukraine was not merely another country, it was the geopolitical prize.

The objective was never openly described as the destruction of Russia. Instead, it was presented as the expansion of security and the rules-based international order, the same idea that PM Mark Carney described as a “pleasant fiction.” Beneath the rhetoric lay a strategic project that sought to extend the U.S./NATO influence ever closer to Russia’s borders while reducing Moscow’s capacity to re-emerge as an independent geopolitical pole. The fundamental assumptions underlying U.S./NATO policy have failed.

NATO expansion, over the repeated dismissal of Russian objections, and the transformation of Ukraine into a frontline state and Western proxy between East and West is not an accident or a mistake, it is a Russophobic policy certain to end in disaster. No Russian government, whether democratic or authoritarian, would passively accept the absorption of Ukraine into a U.S./NATO military sphere of influence. Warnings were treated as heresy by Western governments intoxicated by their own Cold War triumphalism.

The war was intended to weaken Russia, but instead Ukraine has suffered devastation on a historic scale while Russia remains intact. The war was intended to reinforce Western dominance, but instead it has accelerated global realignment away from it. The war was intended to demonstrate the effectiveness of economic sanctions, but instead it has revealed their limits. The war was intended to prove the superiority of the U.S./NATO alliance, but instead it exposed an imperialist project that is collapsing.

Yet despite these realities, Western governments continue to pursue the same failed course. Every military setback is followed by promises of eventual victory. Every failed prediction is replaced with a new prediction, while every escalation is presented as a solution to the failures of previous escalations. This logic resembles a drunken gambler doubling down after every loss. The tragedy is that Ukraine has become the table upon which the game is being played, with millions displaced, and much of Ukraine’s infrastructure shattered.

A generation of young Ukrainians has been sacrificed in a war that is an unwinnable war of attrition rather than the pathway to a U.S./NATO “victory.” Yet Western politicians, safely removed from the battlefield, continue to speak of perseverance and sacrifice, the sacrifice of other people’s sons and other people’s futures, while Ukraine is run by corrupt far-right and undemocratic elements hellbent on extracting more financial and military support from the West, while their own people do not support this war.

Meanwhile, uncomfortable questions remain carefully quarantined from public debate. Ukraine’s entrenched corruption did not disappear when the war began. Nor did the ethnonationalist and far-right movements that Western media outlets regularly discussed before 2022 and then abruptly treated as an awkward subject best left unexplored. These realities define Ukraine, but do not disappear simply because they complicate a preferred narrative. Currently, Ukrainians live under martial law with no press or other basic freedoms.

Convinced of their superiority and righteousness, and insulated from the consequences of their decisions, Western leaders have pursued a strategy that transformed Ukraine into the frontline of a geopolitical struggle and then expressed surprise when that struggle has produced catastrophe. Polls show the leaders of the U.K., France, and Germany holding well below 30% support of their citizens, with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer now forced to resign as a result.

As we move up the military escalation ladder, the world is now facing the possibility of a direct conflict between the world’s largest nuclear powers. History may judge the destruction of Ukraine not as an unavoidable tragedy, but as the predictable outcome of a project that mistook strategic ambition for wisdom, and propaganda for reality.

The Salty Dog. A Fishy Story

June 25, 2026

Gabriel Jeroschewitz June 3^rd, 2026

The Salty Dog. A Fishy Story

Arthur sat in the corner of “The Salty Dog,” a pub whose walls were adorned with the brown nicotine and regret of the North Sea’s sailors. Before him was a plate of fish and chips, the vinegar and salt tangs clashing with the newspaper lining the basket. Across from him sat Brother Koji, a man who had spent forty years in a monastery in Kyoto only to realize that the Absolute was manifested in a deep-fryer. Koji stared into his bowl of fish soup, dressed in a pair of vintage four-wheeled roller skates.

“Have you eaten your meal, Koji?” Arthur asked, nudging him with a limp chip.

“I have eaten,” Koji replied softly. “But I am still starving. To be full is to deny my hunger. To be empty is to deny the banquet that the Absolute presented to me. Therefore, I am both full and starving.” He gestured to the plastic vinegar bottle that sat beside Arthur’s plate.

Arthur sighed. He was fifty-two years old and had recently endured another failed marriage and an accounting error that had resulted in another quarter’s loss for his company. He wanted to escape to a place where time stood still – or better yet, stopped altogether – and he sought the Zen lifestyle from Brother Koji.

“Wash your bowl,” Arthur said, mimicking the ancient Zen master Joshu.

Koji’s laughter rang through the pub. “If I wash my bowl, I erase the history of my fish. If I do not wash my bowl, I succumb to the decay of my ego. The Absolute is the grease in the deep-fryer, Arthur. The grease is the filth and the purity that exists in the deep-fryer. It is the contradiction of existence, and it manifests in the grease in my spoon.”

With a creak and a clatter, Koji began to skate on his vintage skates. His outfit contrasted with the absurd act of skating in such a dark and salt-affected corner of the pub.

“You’re obsessed with finding the pattern in all of this, aren’t you?” Arthur asked, stabbing at a piece of cod with a fork.

“It amuses me how much you two are alike,” Koji said, eyes wandering to the ceiling. “You are wearing these skates to avoid the ground under your feet with your meals, just as I wear these skates to avoid the ground of your pub. You seek to escape from the same thing that I do.”

“And what,” Koji challenged, looking back at Arthur with a smirk, “is that thing that we both seek to avoid?”

“The fact that we are not the authors of our own lives,” Arthur noted.

“We are the reels in the film projector of our lives, Brother Koji. We are the film strip of our existence—the moment the lens focuses on us is the moment the light of our existence consumes us. And then we are gone, swallowed whole by the dark bin of ‘what happened’ in our lives.”

Koji stood up straight and began to skate in a tight circle around the small pub table. The man in the faded robe and vintage roller skates was absurd in that corner of the pub at that moment in time. A few patrons glanced over and looked away from the holy man on wheels.

“If the Absolute manifests in dialetheism,” Koji shouted while skidding around the table, “then the contradiction manifests as the truth! I am skating but standing in place. I am eating but feeling hollow. The pattern does not define us, Arthur! Our belief that the pattern of our lives should be ‘fixed’ is the problem!”

Arthur could contain his dark humour. The absurdity of the situation—the holy man in roller skates circling the table—was the only honest thought Arthur had seen in years—the “extra” thought in a life defined by Zen.

“You’re going to fall,” Arthur noted.

“I have fallen,” Koji cried out sharply while skating on his skates. “I have been falling in this life since my birth. It is the only way that I have ever moved through this existence with purpose.”

The holy man suddenly hit a patch of spilled ale on the wooden floor. His legs shot out from under him as he crashed into the booth, his bowl of fish soup flying into the air before splattering onto Arthur’s plate.

Silence settled in the pub like a fog. The smell of vinegar was overpowering.

Koji lay face down on the floor. His legs continued to twitch within the vintage skates as his head turned to one side in profound enlightenment. He looked up at the ceiling of the pub, then to Arthur.

“Did you see that?” Koji asked in a whisper of awe.

“The bowl was the contradiction,” he murmured. “The soup was the Absolute. The table became the reality of my existence.”

Arthur looked at the remains of his meal. The salt had transformed the fish into a gray mass. The pattern of his existence began to take shape before him—as both a problem and a solution. He could not fix it. He could not change the pattern of his existence. He was both the man eating the meal as well as the man whose meal had been destroyed. He was both holy and a joke.

Joshu would have made Brother Koji finish the fish.

Koji struggled to stand on his skates. He did not unstrap them from his feet. “The meal is over when the film breaks,” he said, looking down at his plate. “The film is always breaking.”

Arthur chuckled. “You’re drunk.”

“I am,” Koji said, smiling sadly. “But I am also perfectly sober—in this very crowded space of existence.”

Arthur leaned back in his booth. The moth outside swayed against the overhead dim bulb. He thought of the pattern of his existence—the times he had sabotaged his own happiness and denied the life he had authored for himself. He had been waiting for the end of his existence for years—yet there was no backstage pass.

He was the soup on the table of his existence.

He was the man who had eaten too much.

He was both the author and the character of his existence. He was the problem and the solution to the contradictions in his life.

In that dying pub in the corner of town, Arthur realized he was okay with being the man that he was.

“Wash the bowl, Koji,” he said to the bartender.

“I can’t,” Koji said, staring at his plate. “I’m wearing the skates.”

“Then we’ll leave it,” Arthur said. “No need for anything extra.”

The two sat together in the dark of the dying pub. The film would play on in the mind of the holy man—and in the dying one of Arthur—but for the first time in his life, Arthur did not wish to end it.

He watched the film of his existence play out on the screen of his mind—frame by flickering frame—until the light in the pub went out altogether.

Cupcakes & Cow Pies

June 25, 2026

Letter to the Editor – Gloria Herbert

June 25, 2026

Hornby Appreciation

Hi Island Grapevine Folks,

Well you guys just keep producing your wonderful, newsy dispatch and sharing it so generously with us all and I just keep on silently enjoying the bounty…. NOT THIS TIME, I have to tell you how much I enjoyed your June 18th which I read this morning, it was smashing. Every article was of interest to me, even the ‘Lemonade Solution’ which I didn’t really understand but I appreciated the opportunity you gave for the issue to be presented. Mark Prior’s photos are always beautiful, the one on the 18th was particularly stunning, he is a treasure. I shall save a copy of Gabriel’s H/D Love story, it was so refreshing I shall pull it out to read when things are looking especially dark and unbef—king-lievable which unfortunately they often are.

I think your paper is a gift to us all and you guys are fantastic in my books,

In appreciation,

Gloria Herbert

True Spirituality Confronts The Abuses Of The Empire

June 25, 2026

True Spirituality Confronts The Abuses Of The Empire

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

JUN 21, 2026

Reading by Tim Foley:

A spirituality that is uninterested in ending war, genocide, poverty and injustice is a dead spirituality. If you hold your time on the meditation cushion as something separate from the weeping mother clutching a small body in Lebanon, you’re wasting your time.

Sometimes I get asked why I only occasionally write about “spiritual” matters like awakening, egoic delusion, inner work etc, but from my point of view everything I write is about that stuff. To oppose the injustices and abuses of our world is to directly interface with the mechanisms of humanity’s struggle to become a conscious species.

The overwhelming majority of what people call “spirituality” in our society is really just glorified escapism. It’s about avoiding reality by focusing on good vibes, nice feelings, and comforting stories about the nature of the cosmos. Some of the most unpleasant individuals I’ve ever encountered considered themselves deeply spiritual people, because for them spirituality is about creating a Spiritual Person identity to feel good about yourself rather than engaging in uncomfortable confrontations with the repressed materials within you that are the source of your personal dysfunction.

And this happens to align nicely with the whole of mainstream culture under the western empire; our entire civilization is built upon psychological compartmentalization and avoidance of uncomfortable truths. If we paid too much attention to all the war, imperialist extraction, exploitation, injustice and abuse that western society is built upon, we’d never consent to the political status quo which holds those abominations in place.

Authentic spirituality moves in the exact opposite direction to all this. While false spirituality is about turning away and avoiding, true spirituality is about turning towards and facing. Turning and facing all the uncomfortable realities about yourself, your internal dynamics, your trauma, your maladaptive coping mechanisms, your belief systems, your interpersonal relationships, your community, your society, your nation, and your world.

Authentic spirituality doesn’t separate inner work from outer work, because with enough investigation you discover that “inner” and “outer” are imaginary distinctions created in the mind. For every abuse or dysfunction I have seen “out there” in the macro world I have found a micro version playing out in my own subconscious. For every delusion-based mechanism I have found within myself, I have seen a reflection of that same mechanism in the large-scale strife of the human species.

So if you keep doing the work, at some point you lose the ability to see spiritual liberation as separate from writing an essay about Gaza. Your ability to hold subtle self-enquiry apart from anti-war activism evaporates into the ether. You just move to bring what’s endarkened into the light, however that happens to play out in a given moment.

You won’t often see this modeled for you in spiritual teachers — even the very skillful and enlightened ones. Their focus is on keeping their teachings open to everybody, so they’ll avoid saying things that might turn away someone with awful politics in the hope that that person can start doing the work and wake up eventually.

And hey, fair enough. Westerners with shitty power-serving worldviews are the people whose delusions the world most urgently needs rescuing from. Whatever gets them removing the scales from their eyes is probably a helpful thing.

But the rest of us shouldn’t look to those teachers as role models in this regard. Don’t mistake an enlightened teacher’s avoidance of politics as a signal that enlightenment looks like avoiding politics. Internal clarity is by its nature a radically political development, because it naturally leads to a deep compassion for all the anguish in our world, and we live in a world whose anguish is largely caused by politics.

True spirituality is the never-ending process of getting real about what’s real. Letting the light of truth pervade every aspect of the human adventure, from our unexamined habits of perception and cognition, to our understanding of global power dynamics. And letting our actions flow from there.

________________

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Feature image by Alison Newman — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=186196663