Friday, May 4, 2012

About this blog

Ender Ilkay's Marine Trail Resort threatens the natural beauty of the Juan de Fuca trail.  Many hikers and nature-lovers are wondering what he's thinking - I decided to put my thoughts in picture form.  So enjoy my one-frame comics below!

Newcomers: for background, visit any of the following sites:
wildcoast.ca
wildjuandefuca.blogspot.com
wildernesscommittee.org

Monday, August 22, 2011

Ender Ilkay's tree thinning just a clearcut by another name

We all know that Ender Ilkay plans to cut a bunch of trees from his Marine Trail Holdings properties, so that future subdivision dwellers don't have any pesky trees blocking their view of the forest. We know this because his own Marine Trail Resort website says so, and the proposed bylaws support this. 

Of course, no one imagines that Ender Ilkay will cut the trees down himself. If he manages to push his development plan through, he'd obviously hire locals to do the work (and laugh as the community splits itself apart, as those opposed to the sprawling development fight those who are newly employed by it).  I thought it would be funny to imagine what it would look like if developers had to do their own dirty work.

Is that famous real estate developer Ender Ilkay using a chainsaw? He said he wanted to cut down the trees, but couldn't he have just hired someone?
Clearly my photoplasty skills need some work. Probably less than Ilkay's chainsaw skills. You missed a branch there, Ender!

Mary from Langford sent in another laser-eyes picture - gas powered laser mayhem, right here:

We see him rollin, with lasers, all because we know that he's just playin' dirty (look at him he's playin' dirty, holy shit he's playin' dirty)

Thursday, June 23, 2011

The questionable environmental conservation plan of the Marine Trail Resort

This contribution deserves its own post.  Mike D. from Victoria sent me the following picture and text:
Hi Tom,
Much has been said about Mr. Ilkay's promises to preserve most of the Marine Trail properties under a conservation covenant. CRD documents preach that "the proposal addresses protection of the park by dedication and covenanted protection of 86% of the site and would remove the possibility of clear cut logging and resource extraction from the currently permitted uses" [source: report to the Juan de Fuca land use committee meeting of tuesday april 19 2011].   
Sounds great, right? 
Well...I found this text buried in the legal documents for the Marine Trail Resort proposal being considered by the CRD: "no tree of any species, including bushes and shrubs.... may be trimmed, pruned, cut down, damaged, destroyed, moved, harvested or removed, except that a tree may be thinned, trimmed or pruned to preserve forest health or to provide a view from any of the Cabins which has been diminished by natural tree growth"[source: CRD board agenda June 15 2011, page 131]
Thanks for bringing that to our attention Mike! That's messed up.  This is no conservation covenant, its a license to clearcut at will. Mr Ilkay's own website for the marine trail resort confirms this plan for tree thinning (on the "sustainability objectives" page no less!)

"Some of the undeveloped area that is retained within the resort will have the forest thinned to allow light in and encourage understory growth. This will, in turn, provide foraging grounds for a variety of species."

Here's the picture Mike sent in:
Ender Ilkay promises that 86% of his Marine Trail Resort properties will be protected from logging under a conservation covenant.  Unfortunately, the covenant expressly allows for trees to be "thinned" and "trimmed" to maintain the view of the ocean from any of his cabins. This is conservation??
Some more folks have been making use of the ROFLbot photo captioner at http://wigflip.com/roflbot/
It's easy! Upload your picture, type in your caption and their website combines the two. Then you can host your new image on your blog, e-mail it to me, or publish it to http://imgur.com/ (a free, no-registration-needed image hosting service)

Here's some of the latest. These are courtesy of a friend in East Sooke:

Real Estate developer Ender Ilkay displays a chart at a public meeting, proving that he does indeed own all our shit. Charts don't lie! (neither do captioned photos)
We get signal: Developer Ender Ilkay claims ownership over all our wilderness..... we think. It is belong to him? Clearly we have no chance to survive make your time
Then there's this one from Brendan inVictoria:
"Like a deer in headlights, Ender is slow to respond to danger. Watch out Mr. Ilkay! Public opposition is rising!"
I wasn't sure that the public could be any more outraged than they were before, but life is just full of surprises. Maybe the people united can defeat our evil overlords after all?
Thank you for the contributions!

Developer Ender Ilkay and his concrete dreams

This was found on flickr. Seems like developer Ender Ilkay has some competition in the area from "Concrete Dreams Inc."

This real estate company wants to pave the region, evict all the wildlife, and sell a new resort community along the Juan de Fuca trail.

Ender Ilkay now competing with Concrete Dreams Inc??
Click image for fullsize

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Ender Ilkay says "Environmentalists are harassing me!"

Thanks to Zoe for this week's new contributions!


Environmentalists are harassing me (actual quote)
Poor Ender Ilkay. Environmentalists are harassing him by buying the mining rights to his land and trumping his threats to open a gravel mine if he can't build his huge resort on Juan de Fuca trail. It's a sad day when millionaire developers can't even destroy a provincial park in peace. (courtesy of http://wildcoast.ca)

According to Zoe, "environmentalists are harassing me" is a real quote from Ender Ilkay, the would-be destroyer of the Juan de Fuca trail.  If it's true, then we have our first photo that's legitimately captioned with a direct quote. Well done Zoe!

Ender Ilkay, why would anyone want to do business here?
 That's a good question! If I were in business, I'd go where the local market is actually supportive. Does Mr. Ilkay think hostile locals will be good for sales?

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

About Ender Ilkay

Who is this Ender Ilkay character anyway?

Ender Ilkay: getting rich at your expense?
As far as we can tell, Ender Ilkay is a real estate speculator from another planet.  After landing on Earth, he made a name for himself in Toronto's booming real estate industry, and began business coaching for many top realtors across North America. Upon moving to West Vancouver in 2000, Ender began buying land and developing subdivisions, primarily in smaller waterfront communities throughout BC. His companies now own several thousand acres of land.  He lives with his wife Eleana, and their daughter attends Mulgrave school (a private gradeschool with yearly tuition costs of $15,800 per year... for grade 3!). Promoting sprawl in small waterfront communities must be a lucrative business indeed. Mr. Ilkay keeps up normal humman appearances by sitting on the school's board of directors and listing his hobbies as hiking, camping, skiing and mountain biking.

Unfortunately, Ender's successes in the corporate world have not translated into computer skills. He has many web sites, and most of them are broken or outdated.  His personal site is an empty wordpress blog with no posts, and many of his other domain names now forward to this site. Perhaps he's too busy fighting against public opposition to hire a web developer?

Having long since run out of room to expand in Toronto, Mr. Ilkay has brought his big-city attitudes to small communities around Vancouver Island.  His last failed proposal for a development in Jordan River would have increased the town's population by 1000% (assuming any of it sold).  His current development in Shirey (see Sheringham Point) remains a mudpit three years later, as no buyers have emerged.  Undaunted, his next project aims to once again bring sprawl to the Jordan River area, this time planning almost 300 cabins (where "cabin" means a privately-owned 2,000 sq. ft. dwelling) on the huge stretch of wilderness between the towns of Jordan River and Port Renfrew.  There are less than 300 residents in the entire region, yet Mr. Ilkay cannot understand why people are opposed to his development.

Mr. Ilkay is angry at local environmentaists, and has lately been losing his cool in public after hearings and board meetings. He has stated that he is being harassed by groups and individuals opposed to his project, showing no hint of understanding just why people are so against him and his ideas. He has repeatedly threatened to clearcut the entire area if his proposal doesn't go through (let's see him try! There's a reason that Western Forest Products sold him the land for a paltry $2 million dollars... logging it is unprofitable!) and is mad as hell at the wildcoast people, who used BC's mining legislation to scoop up the mineral rights to all his properties.

In Ender Ilkay's world, when citizens defend the public interest it is harassment. Apparently, Vanouver Island residents don't know what they want, and only rich and powerful real estate speculators can tell us what we really need.  There's a word which defines "a person... whose behavior is antisocial and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience." Say it with me: "sociopath"

(While creative license has been taken here, all factual statements are backed up by publicly accessible sources and are true to the best of our knowledge.  While it is doubtful that Ender Ilkay is physically from another planet, his attitudes seem alien enough to us)