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 He has many web sites, and most of them are broken or outdated.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)

1 comment: