Qualla: James Island (British Columbia)

James Island (British Columbia): Introduction

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

During the Second World War this island shipped nine hundred tonnes of TNT a month. Today it has a private golf course. James Island is 315 hectares of Coastal Douglas-fir sitting in Haro Strait about two and a half kilometres off Sidney, with sea cliffs around most of its edge and a high point 145 metres up, and for most of the twentieth century it was one of the most heavily industrialized pieces of ground in the Gulf Islands. Some eight hundred people lived here at the peak, in a village with no cars. In 1979 the whole thing — plant, cottages, village — was taken apart and removed, and what is left is a ghost town with nothing left to haunt.

James Island (British Columbia): BOḰEĆ

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The island's older name is BOḰEĆ, in SENĆOŦEN, the language of the W̱SÁNEĆ nations, and the island lies within the traditional territory of the Tsawout First Nation. Louie Pelkey, a Tsawout hereditary chief, was born here in 1860 — which is to say the island was inhabited, not em...

James Island (British Columbia): The Governor's Island

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Settlers appear to have started calling it James Island around 1853, after James Douglas — chief factor of the Hudson's Bay Company and second governor of the Colony of Vancouver Island, a man whose name ended up on a considerable portion of this coast. Captain George Henry Richa...

James Island (British Columbia): A Factory Town, Shipped In

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1913 a dynamite plant went up on the island, and it arrived in an unusual way — the plant and many of the workers' cottages were physically moved over from Nanaimo, buildings and all. Its owner merged into Canadian Explosives Ltd, which renamed itself Canadian Industries Limit...

James Island (British Columbia): Dismantled

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The TNT plant closed in 1977. Two years later the buildings and the village were taken apart and carried off the island, leaving the site officially classified among British Columbia's ghost towns and practically indistinguishable from forest. In 1994 Craig McCaw bought the islan...

James Island (British Columbia): Governed by Somewhere Else

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The current arrangement is a set of small oddities. Land use on James Island is administered by the North Pender Island Local Trust Committee under the Islands Trust, even though North Pender is a different island entirely and James has no resident landowners; its official commun...