Nanaimo zoning and the Duke Point incinerator fight: what I4 allows

Every seat in the Shaw Auditorium was taken on the evening of April 14, 2014, and people who could not get in watched from the hallways on television screens. Nanaimo city council was there to decide whether it would support a waste-to-energy incinerator at Duke Point, built to burn garbage barged over from Metro Vancouver. The vote was unanimous against it, and the room stood up and applauded, the Times Colonist reported the next day. What the vote could not do was change the Nanaimo zoning that made Duke Point a candidate in the first place, and that gap was still being argued over at city hall more than eleven years later.

A Metro Vancouver plan with a Duke Point site

The proposal came out of Metro Vancouver's search for a new plant to handle its leftover garbage. According to the Watershed Sentinel, the region expected about 700,000 tonnes of residual waste a year even after reaching recycling and diversion targets of 70 to 80 per cent, and it wanted a facility that could burn 370,000 tonnes of it annually. Its solid waste plan, which the Sentinel dates to 2009, allowed that plant to sit either inside the region or in an outside community such as Nanaimo.

In November 2013 Metro Vancouver identified six potential sites. One, on Heather Street in south Vancouver, was dropped in January after objections from its landowner, TransLink, and from the City of Vancouver. Two of the possibilities were on Duke Point, put forward by a consortium of Seaspan, the American incineration company Wheelabrator Technologies and the Spanish environmental firm Urbaser. Seaspan owned the land and would barge garbage across the Strait of Georgia to its terminal there. The only other outside-the-region bid at the time was an Aquilini-backed plan for Port Mellon on the Sunshine Coast.

Six weeks from a 6-3 vote to a unanimous no

Council had not started out opposed. A few weeks earlier it voted 6-3 to hear more about the idea before deciding, the Nanaimo Daily News reported, in a passage quoted by the Council of Canadians. A motion to declare non-support, first put forward by Coun. George Anderson, had been tabled; Coun. Diane Brennan announced she would bring it back.

The pressure in between was heavy. Mayor John Ruttan told the Watershed Sentinel the city had received between 3,000 and 4,000 emails opposed. Most speakers raised health and air pollution; others worried about property values. Ruttan opened the April 14 meeting by attacking Metro Vancouver over what he called inadequate consultation and said he did not want Nanaimo "to be known as the garbage dump for Metro Vancouver," while adding that he had the "greatest respect" for the proponents.

John Lucas of Seaspan thanked council for considering the proposal. Ruttan later said Lucas had told the meeting the company accepted that people did not want the plant and had decided it was not the time to proceed.

Why a council vote could not stop it

The motion was a statement of position, not a land-use decision. Ruttan himself made the point to the Vancouver Sun, in a line the Council of Canadians reproduced: Metro Vancouver could still push ahead, he said, because Seaspan owned the property and it was already zoned for industrial use. The next day, Metro Vancouver's general manager of solid waste, Paul Henderson, told the Coast Reporter he could not confirm the Duke Point site had been withdrawn. The Nanaimo Daily News had reported that the proponents would wait on Metro Vancouver's response rather than pull out immediately.

Paul Manly, then an activist with the Mid Island chapter of the Council of Canadians, drew the obvious conclusion. "The fight isn't over," he wrote, and he urged people to push for the "anything goes zoning at Duke Point" to be changed so the community would not be fighting another proposal there in a couple of years.

The zoning bylaw shows why he was worried.

What the I4 zone in Bylaw 4500 allows

Nanaimo's zoning rules sit in the City of Nanaimo Zoning Bylaw 2011 No. 4500, and the heavy industrial lands at Duke Point are largely in the I4 zone. The bylaw's own description of I4 is short: it "provides for heavy industrial development that is not compatible with residential uses." The permitted-use table in Part 13 then does the work.

The definitions section explains why the word "industry" matters. It covers "the co-generation, manufacturing, processing, assembling, fabricating, testing, servicing, repair, storing, transporting, warehousing, or distributing of goods or materials or things." Nothing in the I4 rows attaches an emissions condition to those uses. A permitted use needs no rezoning, and as Manly later told the Gabriola Sounder, that means no public hearing either.

One detail elsewhere in the same bylaw makes the contrast plain. It is precise about emissions in exactly one setting, home-based businesses. Section 6.20.8 says a home-based business "shall not discharge or emit odorous, toxic, or noxious matters or vapours, heat, glare, noise, vibration, smoke, dust, effluent or other emission hazard" across a lot line or between dwelling units. A business run from a spare bedroom carries that condition; a chemical plant in I4 does not. If you want to see which zone applies to a lot near you, the zoning layer of the city's NanaimoMap shows it, and Current Planning staff will confirm it if the map is unclear.

Metro Vancouver stops looking, December 2015

The incinerator question at Duke Point ended outside Nanaimo. On December 10, 2015, the Solid Waste Association of North America's B.C. chapter published notice that Metro Vancouver had discontinued its waste-to-energy procurement. The reasons given were uncertainty about future waste volumes and a continued drop in residual waste, and Metro Vancouver said it was reassessing how much new disposal capacity it needed. It also said it still regarded waste-to-energy as the best option for garbage left after recycling, which meant the idea was shelved rather than abandoned. The zoning at Duke Point was not touched.

The 2025 motion and the Harmac objection

Manly later won a seat on Nanaimo council, and on November 17, 2025, he brought the zoning question back. His original notice asked staff to prepare a bylaw amendment barring several heavy industry categories. Hours before the meeting he changed it to a request for a staff report with options to exclude emissions-intense industries, such as waste-to-energy incinerators, chemical plants, thermal electrical generators, petroleum refineries and liquefied natural gas export facilities, from existing industrial zones, so that each would need site-specific zoning. The summary of the motion on the Nanaimo Climate Action Hub's voting-record site cites the 2014 incinerator fight directly.

It passed 5-4. CHLY reported that Manly, Tyler Brown, Ben Geselbracht, Erin Hemmens and Hilary Eastmure voted in favour, and Janice Perrino, Ian Thorpe, Sheryl Armstrong and Mayor Leonard Krog against.

The company with the most at stake was Harmac Pacific, the employee-owned pulp mill on the Duke Point shore. As a pulp mill it counts as a chemical plant, and the Gabriola Sounder described it as the largest operator on I4 land, with 200 acres at Duke Point of which 150 are zoned I4. Ryan Prontack, its maintenance and engineering manager, told council the mill wanted to diversify and, in the Nanaimo Bulletin's account, had about 61 hectares of industrial land ready to develop. "We can't make investments based on what Council feels on a day to day," he said. Coverage disagrees slightly on the mill's size: the Sounder put it at 350 employees and NanaimoNewsNOW at roughly 340.

Speaking for the motion, family physician Bethany Ricker said no one had assessed the combined health effects of several heavy emitters in one area. Manly told the Sounder that the current zoning was "carte blanche," and that if an incinerator were proposed under it, Nanaimo, Cedar and Gabriola residents would be forced to accept it. He also said he should have kept a clause exempting operations that burn biomass or gases produced on site, which is what Harmac does.

At the December 15 meeting two Nanaimo Forest Products directors, Bruce Martin and Frank Crucil, asked council to reverse course. Martin said the bylaw, if it became reality, "would threaten the ability of our business to continue." Crucil said a garbage incinerator made no financial sense and that the change came after 75 years of Harmac operating there. Krog said the motion told investors "don't bother going to Nanaimo." Chief administrative officer Dale Lindsay pointed out that the city can regulate land use but has limited power over emission levels.

The forests minister weighed in too. Ravi Parmar wrote to council before the December 15 meeting asking that the motion be rescinded, and acknowledged to the Sounder that the step was not typical. He said he agreed the report was within the city's jurisdiction but had a duty to the forest sector. Manly replied that it was "not typical for a minister to intervene in this manner" and that a bylaw cannot legally take away an existing use.

Where Nanaimo zoning stands in 2026

As of the latest coverage found, from the end of 2025, the staff report had not returned to council, and the amendment would be decided only when it did. The city's consolidated zoning bylaw, dated March 23, 2026, still marks chemical plants, petroleum processing, waste transfer, recycling plants and the broad "industry" use as permitted in I4, with no emissions condition attached.

Meanwhile the I4 map may grow. NanaimoNewsNOW reported that Harmac is trying to rezone two adjacent Phoenix Way lots totalling 244 acres next to the Cable Bay Trail. The city's file for one property on that road, 950 Phoenix Way, which does not name the applicant, was opened on December 14, 2023. It describes a rezoning from Rural Resource to I4 with site-specific provisions on use, density, lot area and lot coverage, plus parkland on the west side of the trail. When last checked, it listed first and second readings as passed and the public hearing as scheduled.

A rezoning like that one goes through readings and a public hearing. Land already zoned I4 does not, and that difference is the whole of what Manly's motion was about. Background on the port lands nearby is in the Duke Point terminal expansion and the Nanaimo Port Authority, and the regional side of the garbage question in the RDN garbage plan and the problem of illegal dumping in the regional district. Other council disputes are collected under Civic Nanaimo.

No published account of the staff report returning to council had turned up by October 2026, so the options it will set out for the I4 zone are still unknown.