In The Truman Show the town is called Seahaven. It is sunny, it is tidy, everyone is pleasant, and none of it is real. It is a television set built to be watched, and anything that might spoil the mood, a real feeling, an awkward fact, a person who steps out of line, gets quietly steered off camera. The whole point of Seahaven is that the happy version is the only version anyone is allowed to see.
That is how the Bowen Island Undercurrent reads to me now. This is about a paper that has settled into one register, one of determined, relentless good cheer, and leaves out whatever complicates it, wherever that thing comes from.
I try not to tell other people’s stories. They are not mine to tell, and it is part of why the example I use in detail is my own: it is the one I can document to the last inch. But this is not a private view. People on the island say the same thing about the paper, quietly, to each other.
Watch what goes missing. Take the cidery.
For anyone who does not know it: a cider business at 620 Laura Road has operated on a temporary permit since 2021, and is now asking to be rezoned so it can stay for good. This summer’s events, with every document I’ve submitted, are here. Two municipal advisory committees, PECAAC and the Advisory Planning Commission, asked for real things: an assessment of the wastewater, a groundwater report, a delay until a watershed study is finished, and a public hearing. None of it was reported. The Islands Trust found the bylaw may breach its own policies on farming and rural character, and asked for more information on water. Not reported either. In 2021 some neighbours took the Municipality to court over the permit, and even that reached the page only because I wrote in and asked why it hadn’t.
None of those things are me. They are committees, a councillor, a provincial body, the courts, neighbours. Every one of them complicates the pleasant story, and every one of them was left out. What survives is the line that stays sunny: good people, a treasured orchard, everyone pleased, moving forward.
There is a small, telling thing in how this gets kept. In print the order was plain. The profile ran on 26 August 2021. My letter ran the following week, on 2 September. The paper added its lawsuit coverage to that same 2 September issue, in response, with an editor’s note under my letter pointing readers to it. Go to the paper’s website today, and the lawsuit story is dated 3 September and the profile 4 September, so the online record now shows the lawsuit appearing a day before the profile, as if the paper had led with it. It did not. Whether that is careless dating or something else, the record it now presents is the reverse of what happened, and it happens to flatter the paper.
And the profile itself was changed. In print, on 26 August, it did not mention the lawsuit at all. It handled the objections in the past tense, some neighbours had concerns, it was challenging, and it closed on how happy and welcoming the place now was. The version on the website, posted the following month, carries an added sentence sending readers to the judicial review in the BC Supreme Court, linked to the lawsuit story. The favourable piece was, online, edited to add the very thing the printed one left out.
source note: I have saved copies of these pages as they stood on 21 September 2026, contents shown in images above.
And when the objection is handed to the paper directly, complete, it still does not run. In July 2026 I sent the editor a letter correcting the errors in the paper’s June story on the rezoning, with a separate note giving a source for every single factual claim in it, from the Municipality’s own records, the applicants’ own application, and provincial records. I sent it through the paper’s own form and then by email. It drew no acknowledgement, it was not published, and the paper’s next story on the cidery, in September, used none of it. I am putting the whole thing here, letter and sources, so you can see exactly what was offered and passed over.
An editor is free to print or not print as they see fit. He does not have to agree with me or print my version. But he was handed a source for every claim, and not one word came back. The next story went on as if the letter had never arrived: nothing on the hearing, nothing on the water, nothing on what is actually being made permanent. That is not journalism.
One thing that letter set out, which no story has told readers, is worth saying here straight out. On 25 May, Council directed notice under section 467 of the Local Government Act, the notice a council gives when it does not intend to hold a public hearing. A hearing is not ruled out, Council could still choose to hold one. But as things stand the bylaw is on course to be adopted without one, and if it is, on the Municipality’s own published notices for the past decade it would be the first rezoning of privately owned land, for a new commercial use, adopted without a public hearing. The only other time in that decade that BIM skipped a hearing on a land use bylaw, it was rezoning eighty-seven square metres of its own land for a walking path. That is not a small procedural footnote, and the paper leaves it out entirely.
The cidery is the clearest example I can present because I have the paper trail. The register is the same everywhere in the paper. Awards, community, celebration, progress. It is toxic positivity carried to the point where the absence of a hard question stops looking like an oversight and starts looking like the format. Complexity does not exist in this universe. And the lack of that erases real people.
Take the old fire hall. Munro Davies gave that land to the fire district in 1969 for a dollar, and a fire hall stood on it for fifty years. In January the Municipality completed its sale to BC Hydro for $900,000. Munro’s estate had gone to court, arguing that the land should come back to the family once it stopped being a fire hall, and had lost the previous June.
The paper reported the sale on 16 January, quoting BC Hydro’s chief executive, BC Hydro’s field manager and the Mayor on what a good thing it was for the island. The court case was not mentioned. A week later it ran a second story on the judgment, written entirely from the ruling, quoting the judge five times and nobody else. That judgment had been handed down seven months earlier.
In neither story did anyone ask a Davies how they felt about the land their family gave away ending up as a utility yard. The judge had the human part of it: the silver dollar handed over to make the deal legal, Mr Davies saying “for you and the good of Bowen Island, yes”, the bottle of rum brought out to celebrate. The paper had the press release.
The Davies are not an exception. It is the same with the cidery. Real life is complicated, and the issues are complicated, but the paper picks a side, and only that side is allowed to be made of real people.
The 2021 cidery profile gives the neighbours’ concerns a single sentence, tourism, traffic, a nearby equestrian business, neighbourhood character and, last, water use, and then hands the answer to Christine Hardie: that was really challenging, she says, but it is such a happy, welcoming environment and a lot of people have really enjoyed coming. From there the piece is all warmth: the opening day, a familiar face behind the tasting room counter who, in the paper’s own word, “gushes”, a place of reunion after the pandemic, “the happiest place on Bowen”. It ends on “I don’t think you could have a bad day here.” Nobody asked the people immediately downstream, on the well, how they felt then or feel now.
The June story this year does it again, and you can see it in who gets to speak. Rob Purdy speaks, twice and at length: the application narrowed “based on the feedback we’ve received”, the cidery “one of the strongest reasons for the orchard to remain viable”. The Mayor speaks. Purdy is heartened, Councillor Fast is heartened, the councillors are pleased. The neighbours do not speak at all. They appear once, in half a sentence, as “feedback from nearby neighbours, who were largely opposed to the guest house component”, and even that is turned into the reason the application got better. They are not people with something at stake. They are an input to someone else’s decision.
The September story is the same, and sharper. At first reading in July only two members of the public spoke, both neighbours. One asked Council for a perpetual conservation covenant on the heritage orchard, with a land trust to monitor it. The closest neighbours had already told the owners they could live with the cidery only on that condition. The story reports the covenant as a debate among councillors, quotes three of them, and gives the owners’ concerns about being bound by it. The two women who stood up and asked for it are not in it. Only Christine and Rob, and the people pleased for them, get to be real.
That is the pattern across all of it. The owners lead the conversation: what the cidery is, why it matters, how everyone should feel about it. What they say goes into the paper as they say it, and there it stands. A good deal of what they say, in the paper and before Council, rests on nothing more than their saying so.
The clearest case is water. Asked in 2021 how the cidery would deal with the waste from production, the owner told Council that water is not an input in making cider. It is an answer about what goes in, given to a question about what comes out, and it means nothing. It has also been the answer every time since. A councillor repeated it at the vote. The paper printed it in its own voice: “The cider itself doesn’t take water, just a few pounds of apples.” This summer the Municipality’s planner said it to Council again. Say a thing often enough, from enough mouths, and it stops being a claim. It becomes fact, and no one questions it, however little sense it makes.
That is deflection, but it is more than that. The whole process has been framed around what suits the applicant. His terms become the terms, and everyone else, the Municipality, the committees, the paper, ends up answering the question he set rather than the one that matters. I will come back to those claims, and to that pattern.
And there is a reason the pleasant version is worth keeping. The Municipality pays the paper. In its Statement of Financial Information for the year ended 31 December 2025, the list every local government in this province must publish of everyone it paid more than twenty-five thousand dollars, Bowen Island Municipality records a payment of $28,958 to Glacier Media Digital Ltd Partnership. Glacier Media owns the Undercurrent. It is the ordinary business a local government puts through its local paper, advertising and public notices, and there is nothing hidden about the payment and nothing improper in it on its face. But it is nearly twenty-nine thousand dollars in a single year, from the body the paper exists to hold to account, and it sits in the Municipality’s own filing for anyone to read.
In the print edition, the fire hall sale story ran on page A3. Facing it, page A2 was a full page of Municipality advertising. Underneath it on A3 was another Municipality advertisement. The paper marks both as paid. That full page is there every week. The Municipality’s own website says its Island Page runs on page 2 of the paper every Thursday, and its archive of them goes back to 2015.
I am not saying anyone is told what to print. I have no evidence of that and I am not claiming it. I am saying something simpler, and to me more troubling. When a paper never complicates the Municipality’s preferred story, and the Municipality is also one of that paper’s steady paying customers, those two facts belong side by side, and readers are entitled to see both and make of them what they will.
None of this is harmless, and that is the part that matters most. The sunny version is not only untrue. It is corrosive.
A community needs friction. The objection, the hard question at the meeting, the correction nobody wanted to print, these are not faults in the machine, they are the machine working. They are how a place disagrees out loud and stays whole while it does. A living democracy is not smooth, and when everything suddenly is, that is the tell.
And the narrative does something dishonest with anything that is not that note. It makes no difference whether a person cannot sing the note, or will not, or simply has another melody to air, a fact that does not fit, an experience that was not lovely, a question with no cheerful answer. All of those things are recast as the problem. Not the thing being raised, but the raising of it. The complication becomes a fault in whoever brings it, rather than a fault in a story too thin to hold it. That is the dishonesty at the heart of the pleasant version. It cannot admit the hard thing is real, so it decides the difficulty is the person.
And friction does not disappear when the pleasant story pulls a veiling curtain over it. It goes somewhere. People who cannot be heard in the room, in the paper, in the process, do not stop feeling unheard. It surfaces later, in worse places and uglier forms. The happy version does not prevent that. It feeds it, by teaching people that the “honest” channels are for show.
There is an easier way to be unhappy about all this, and it is the one a barricaded public square breeds. Take it to social media. Grumble in the comments, snipe from behind a handle, pass it around, let it settle into the low hum of gossip and grievance that no one ever answers and nothing ever comes of. It costs nothing and it changes nothing. It is unhappiness with no address.
The front door is harder, and I would rather use it: say this in the open, by name, on the record, to the paper and to you. The open channel is the thing worth keeping. The place where a community’s hard questions get aired, where an inconvenient fact is printed anyway, where someone who disagrees is answered rather than tidied out of frame. That is the public square, and here it has gone missing. That is part of why this site exists. If the paper did this work, I would not have to.
Seahaven is a lovely place to live. It is a hopeless place to try to find out what is happening to your water.