Comox Valley 2026 Municipal Election series, Post 3 of 10
Several times a week, my wife and I walk a loop along the Courtenay greenway. For the last couple of years, one stretch of it has doubled as a time-lapse. We turn west toward Crown Isle at the north end of McDonald Road, the line where Courtenay becomes Comox (or Comox becomes Courtenay, depending on your perspective). On that corner there was a clearing. For months after that it was mounds of bare dirt. Now it’s an apartment complex nearing completion.
I personally don’t mind it. A cleared lot becoming homes is what a growing town looks like, and I meet enough people looking for homes to know the Valley needs the doors. But that lot didn’t decide to become apartments on its own. Years before the first excavator showed up, someone drew a line on a map that said this is where the growth goes. That map is the Official Community Plan (OCP), and most people never look at it. It shapes your street more than almost anything else you’ll mark on a ballot.
Nearly all of those maps have just been rewritten. Comox adopted a new OCP in February by the narrowest possible margin. Cumberland adopted its own in January and rewrote its zoning in March. Courtenay adopted its new plan in May. Out in the rural areas, the Comox Valley Regional District (CVRD) has its own plan governing everything the towns don’t. Three town maps, all redrawn in the year before the vote, plus the rural plan behind them, each one a set of decisions about how big, how tall, and how fast the Valley grows.
The last post in this series was about who decides the rules. This one is about where the growth actually lands, and how hard that fight has become.
What an OCP actually does
An Official Community Plan is the long-range picture a municipality draws of itself: where housing goes, where shops and industry go, where parks and farmland stay, and roughly how dense each part of town is allowed to become. It doesn’t rezone your lot on its own. It sets the direction that the zoning bylaw, the one that governs what you can build, is then written to match.
An OCP review turns into the loudest kind of local politics. It’s the moment a community argues, all at once and on the record, about what it wants to be. Every arterial road slated for four-storey apartments, every low-rise node dropped into a neighbourhood of single houses, every line drawn around land that stays untouched, is a decision somebody will love and somebody else will show up to fight.
The province is why all three plans were rewritten within months of each other. Under Bill 44, the same law behind the new small-lot density rules, every municipality had to update its OCP to make room for twenty years of housing by the end of 2025. A council can amend its plan, but this round of updates was mandatory. How much density, and where, stayed a local call.
Comox: adopted by a single vote
Comox passed its new OCP on February 18, 2026, on a 4-3 vote. After roughly 18 months of consultation, this one still split the table.
Mayor Nicole Minions voted against it, saying the setbacks on the five- and six-storey buildings the plan allows weren’t enough to keep new development “human-sized.” Councillor Jenn Meilleur wanted broader consultation with residents, developers and architects before it was locked in. Councillor Jonathan Kerr went furthest, calling it “an official developer plan” rather than a community one. The plan passed anyway, and a companion zoning bylaw followed. Comox’s own Housing Needs Report points to roughly 3,358 new units needed between 2021 and 2041, and the plan is built to make room for them.
That apartment complex my wife and I watch on our walk is called Aspen East, and it came with a fight. Kelowna’s Highstreet Ventures is building around 306 homes across five four-storey buildings on land that used to be the quiet edge of town. That land wasn’t in the town’s growth plan to begin with. The parcels still carried the rural designation they came in with when Comox absorbed them, so the density took an OCP amendment to fold them into the plan as multi-family and mixed-use. In July, council approved a variance letting one building rise to five storeys. Residents packed the chamber to object to the density, the thin buffer between the project and their backyards, the added traffic, the loss of forest and the risk to Brooklyn Creek, and the closure of an informal trail they’d used for years. Highstreet is contributing $728,000 to the town’s affordable housing reserve, and the project is proceeding.
Aspen East is also only the part you can see from the road. The parcel next door at 2077 Hector Road holds a conceptual second phase of roughly 500 more apartments, not yet designed or scheduled. A few doors along, Glacier Reach has been approved for 84 townhouses. What looked not long ago like the edge of town is becoming a new residential node.
Aspen East is a preview of the whole campaign. On paper everything lined up: the town needs housing, the province expects it, and the new plan makes room for it. It still landed on a neighbourhood that didn’t want it there, at that height, at that scale. And many of the most affected neighbours live in CVRD Electoral Area B, just over the town line, so they absorb the traffic and lose the trail but had no vote for the Comox council that approved it.
Cumberland and Courtenay: the other two maps
Cumberland finished its rewrite too. It adopted a new OCP in January 2026 (Bylaw No. 1230), then a new zoning bylaw in March that pre-zones most single-residential lots for up to four units. Mayor Vickey Brown framed the redraft as making the rules clearer and the path to a building permit faster. For a village that spent years as the Valley’s affordable option and is now growing quickly, the OCP is where it decides how much of that growth it takes, and where.
Courtenay, the largest of the three, adopted its new plan on May 27, written, in the city’s own words, to conform to provincial legislation and remove barriers to housing. The new plan sets target densities across residential and mixed-use areas and lays out how the city will use Development Cost Charges, Amenity Cost Charges, Community Amenity Contributions, density bonusing and inclusionary zoning to help fund below-market housing. That’s what decides who pays for the roads, pipes and parks that new density needs, a thread the “Who Pays” post later in this series picks up.
The rural edge: where the line holds, and where it broke
The towns aren’t the whole Valley. Most of the land around them falls under the CVRD’s Rural Comox Valley OCP and the Regional Growth Strategy, which together try to steer growth into defined settlement areas and keep the rest rural. Two developments have tested that line from opposite sides, and what happened to each tells you more than the plan’s wording ever will.
Start with the one the plan refused. For more than a decade, 3L Developments pushed a proposal called Riverwood on its land near Stotan Falls, on the Puntledge River, at its most ambitious more than 740 homes. The obstacle was the map. The land sat outside the settlement area the region had drawn, designated for rural use, and building Riverwood meant amending the Regional Growth Strategy to move that boundary. The Regional Board refused the application in 2018. 3L came back in 2020 with a smaller proposal, 335 lots plus multi-family, townhouse and commercial space, but it never moved the settlement boundary either. The plan is meant to hold growth inside the settlement lines, not follow a developer out into the countryside. 3L stepped back, closed public access to the popular swimming spot at Stotan Falls, and made clear it would rather sell the land than keep fighting the map. The plan did what it was built to do: it held the line, and Riverwood never crossed it.
Now the one the plan approved, which stalled anyway. Union Bay Estates, the Kensington Island Properties project down in Electoral Area A on Baynes Sound, is the mirror image. It’s a designated settlement node in the Rural OCP and Regional Growth Strategy, rezoned back in 2010 to a comprehensive development zone with a master development agreement, and approved for up to 2,889 dwelling units across 309 hectares, an entire new community on paper. It cleared every planning hurdle 3L couldn’t. Then the project ran into financial trouble. A court appointed a receiver over the Kensington Union Bay properties in January 2025, parcels went up for sale through the summer, and the CVRD paused its work on the file. The plan said yes. The financing said no.
Put those two beside each other and you get the real limit of any OCP. One project was refused at the boundary, the other was welcomed through it, and neither one has put a single home on the ground. The plan can keep growth out of a place the community wants left alone, and it can invite growth into a place that then sits unbuilt when the money runs out. Either way, it sets the terms. It doesn’t build the homes.
The question for candidates
Every candidate this fall will have a position on growth, even if they don’t call it that. Some will run on protecting neighbourhood character. Some will run on getting more homes built. Most will try to promise both, because a council has to protect the neighbourhoods that already exist and still make room for the people who need homes.
So when one comes to your door, the OCP is the place to ask questions like these:
Our OCP is the plan for how and where this community grows. Where do you think it gets the balance wrong, and what specifically would you change: more density, less, or in different places?
The rest follow from there. If they want to protect a neighbourhood, which one, and what growth would they redirect to do it? If they want more housing, where does it go, and how tall? Do they think the settlement boundary should hold the way it did against Riverwood, or move? And when a project like Aspen East meets the plan’s own targets but the neighbours still object, what weight should council give each side? A candidate doesn’t need to agree with every project to have a real answer. They need to know the map, and be able to tell you where they’d redraw it.
These maps aren’t carved in stone. Councils keep rewriting them, inside the rules Victoria now sets. On October 17, you decide who draws the next version.
Next in the series: 218 neighbours. Homelessness, the Braidwood project, and what comes next.
Sources:
Province of B.C., proactive planning: housing needs and OCP requirements; Comox Valley Record, Comox OCP adopted by narrow margin, Protesters against Aspen East project and Cumberland adopts new zoning bylaw; The Discourse, “Residents upset with Aspen Road development in Comox”; Town of Comox, OCP adoption and staff report RZ OCP 23-2, 941 Aspen / 2077 Hector; Glacier Reach (2123 Hector Road) development permit drawings, DP 25-5; Village of Cumberland, new Official Community Plan; City of Courtenay, Official Community Plan; Comox Valley Regional District, 3L Developments and Union Bay Estates; MNP Ltd., Kensington Union Bay receivership.