Welcome to permies! All of Onterrible and BC is a mighty big area to select from! I can't speak for ON but can try and shed a little light on my corner of BC..
What line of work you are/plan to be in may be the main limiting factor.. if you can expect to find employment in a town of 10k, you've got oodles of options. If you need a big city, obviously there's just the one...
I only know of one formal Ecovillage on the island, O.U.R. Ecovillage near shawnigan lake. They run a lot of workshops, neat stuff, but expensive.
The regulatory environment is not at all friendly to multiple dwellings on the same property in most cases, which makes an Ecovillage something of an uphill battle. Particularly for ALR land. This is a damned shame IMO; farms are hurting for workers and people are hurting for affordable housing, and never the two shall meet, legally speaking.
In practice this means more groupings of like minded people with separate properties, and/or folks doing the tinyhome/rv thing in the back of a farm off the
books. Hard to spot from a distance!
There are Montessori, Waldorf, and similar schools, at least through elementary level, scattered around the island. I have heard excellent things about Arrowsmith independent school, which was previously a Waldorf school, near Coombs. There is a Montessori school a few minutes away. There are both Waldorf and Montessori options in Courtenay/Comox.
I know nothing about organized spirituality, I'm afraid.
As far as Van Isle communities go, working north:
Victoria and surrounding regions is overly full, overly expensive, has godawful traffic, and is generally not my thing. I grew up there, and stayed too long... There is certainly permaculturey stuff going on despite this. I felt like a lot of it, especially some of the
volunteer stuff, was more the feel-good category, as opposed to the meaningful-change category... The Highlands has two very
permie types on the council, and seems generally amazing community/politics wise. The Saanich Peninsula is the southernmost of the three proper agricultural valleys, but is pretty overrun with McMansions and Horse People...
I think that the Cowichan Valley probably has the densest concentration of both agriculture and permie-stuff, and when I was there seemed less fussy about annoying bylaws; the farmy sorts were a big chunk of council as I recall. I'd lump shawnigan/cobble hill into this category, just minus the soil.
Nanaimo is... well, once I attended a
cob workshop with quite a few people who lived in Nanaimo, and it appeared that none of them actually liked the place either. The closest anyone would come was 'there are a few kind of neat areas, but they're all really far apart.' There appears to be damned near no permaculturey stuff happening in Nanaimo.
There is a decent pocket of agricultural stuff around Coombs; easy access to qualicum beach and parksville, which are tourism/retirement oriented towns, and then pretty central between port alberni, nanaimo, and courtenay for larger towns.
Port Alberni is a resource town; land is probably cheaper than anywhere else on the island near a decent sized town. Generally considered a bit of a hole, but I really don't know it well.
I'm in the Comox valley; it's less overpriced up here, and quite convenient to be between two small cities. Courtenay seems permy-friendly. Campbell River is a resource town, boom/bust, plenty of bars.
Local government includes the rural area in three sections and the three population centers of courtenay/comox/cumberland; based on population, the townies have a lot more council votes, which is not real optimal imo.
I just moved here, and have been buried in the various urgencies on my newly acquired long abandoned farm, so know less about this area. So far so good. I've had two different complete strangers offer to lend me a
tractor, and two of my neighbours are in the beginning stages of permyish farming ventures.
If your search brings you out this way, I can offer a place to camp: no house, power, or other amenities yet so things are a bit spartan. Would love to have more permie neighbours, and am keen on shared resources. I'm still trying to puzzle through what community looks like in the context of the various local departments of sadness.. getting a feel for how things actually work, vs how the paper-pushers say they work, will take some time.
My area is pretty much the end of the line as far as sizable towns on the island.
Hope something in there helps!
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