It was 12 days before the provincial election.

A note on timing. These remarks were made in October 2024. BC Politics Watch obtained the recording three days ago and is publishing as soon as we were able to verify what it shows. This publication had no knowledge of it before this week.

Kim read from statements by B.C. political parties. According to a recording reviewed by BC Politics Watch, she dismissed portions of Premier David Eby’s statement with “dah dah dah,” introduced the BC Greens’ statement with “even,” and called the BC Conservatives’ statement “a thousand times worse.”

She then raised two individuals. She declined to name a sitting MLA, explaining that person was “elected right now.” But she volunteered that a BC NDP candidate in the city was “publicly in favour of Israel, and it’s something you should know.”

When people asked who she meant, Kim replied:

“Victoria Swan Lake. Just google it. Straight up. Google that person’s name and the word Israel, it will show up.”

There was one BC NDP candidate in Victoria-Swan Lake: Nina Krieger, then executive director of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. She won the seat 12 days later and is now B.C.’s Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General.

Kim did not say Krieger’s name, religion, or ethnicity. But she identified a riding with one NDP candidate and directed the baying crowd to link that candidate with Israel.

Criticism of Israel, support for Palestinian rights, and criticism of candidates’ political records are legitimate. This is not an argument for insulating elected officials from difficult political debate.

But Kim did not identify a Krieger policy, statement, vote, or action for the audience to assess. She told a crowd at an October 7 commemoration to search an identifiable candidate’s name alongside “Israel.”

Statistics Canada reported that in 2024 Jewish Canadians were the most targeted group for police-reported hate crime in this country. They are roughly one per cent of the population. That is the climate any elected official was speaking into on October 7, 2024.

Nina Krieger has since been the target of harassment herself. In June 2025, protesters disrupted a family fundraising event she was holding, an incident she and her NDP colleagues described as antisemitic harassment. She now serves as B.C.’s Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General. BC Politics Watch draws no connection between Councillor Kim’s remarks and that incident and has no evidence of one. Eight months separate them.

That was not necessary to criticize the Israeli government or advocate for Palestinians. It was, at minimum, an extraordinary failure of judgment.

Councillor Kim holds a municipally funded office. Jewish residents of Victoria pay for it, and they are among the people she was elected to represent. Nothing about the war in Gaza falls within the jurisdiction of a city council, and the investigator who examined her earlier advocacy noted its content was unrelated to City business. She used the standing of a municipal office to direct a crowd toward a provincial candidate over an international question, on October 7, fifteen weeks after Council had directed all its members to undergo training on the code of conduct, following an investigation into her conduct paid for by those same residents.

An apology must matter

Kim’s earlier Israel-Palestine advocacy was examined under Victoria’s code of conduct. In a June 2024 report, investigator Marisa Cruickshank found no hate speech, discrimination, or breach of the bylaw’s respect provision. She concluded Kim’s expression was Charter-protected, even if some found it inflammatory, offensive, or repugnant. The report found an inadvertent breach of the requirement to distinguish a councillor’s personal views from those of the City, and recommended no sanction.

Those findings should not be distorted. But a code-of-conduct finding is not a certificate of good judgment, and Charter protection does not settle what voters should think of a representative’s conduct.

In November 2023, Kim apologized after signing an open letter that accused Canadian political parties of complicity in “Israeli-led genocide” and questioned allegations of sexual violence during the October 7 attacks. She asked to have her name removed from the letter. Her apology, published on November 22, 2023, read in full:

“I am writing again to apologize for signing the open letter that has been the subject of much warranted scrutiny over the past days. I have asked for my name to be removed from the letter. I regret not being more careful in understanding the impact of the letter on the community members I represent.

I signed this letter in a moment of immense grief and a felt urgency to call for an end to violence and support the people of Gaza. In the process, I failed to critically assess the impact this would have on community members directly affected - including Jewish and Palestinian community members - experiencing loss and grieving loved ones.

This apology is part of a process of holding myself accountable, to representing the city with more awareness and consideration. I am deeply grateful for Jewish and Palestinian community members who have taken the time to speak with me and offer generous guidance on how to take action in more considerate, collaborative, and accountable ways ahead.

This is a time when so many of us are feeling raw and shaken as we advocate for peace and justice. I am going to continue to connect with all of those impacted by this conflict to better understand perspectives that are not my own. I am committed to this important work, even in such extremely difficult times, and will proceed gratefully in my post working together towards better futures.”

That apology preceded the complaint that later led to the investigation. There is no basis to say it was compelled by that process.

But an apology is a public commitment about future conduct. Ten and a half months later, Kim used a legislature-steps microphone to direct a crowd toward an identifiable candidate by associating her with Israel.

BC Politics Watch cannot know Kim’s private intent. The public record does not show the greater awareness and consideration Kim promised. The promise was not kept.

The public is excluded

Victoria’s Code of Conduct for Council Members Bylaw No. 23-058 also fails residents.

Section 13(1) does not allow the public to file complaints directly. Only councillors, committee members, and City employees may do so.

That mattered in the 2023 Kim investigation. A resident raised the underlying concerns but could not file. Mayor Marianne Alto submitted the formal complaint instead. At the time, the bylaw’s fallback appointment mechanism allowed the Mayor to appoint an ad hoc investigator if Council had not unanimously appointed a permanent one.

There is no evidence that the investigator’s work was influenced by that arrangement. Cruickshank rejected the complaint’s main allegations and recommended no sanction.

But the structure remains indefensible. The formal complainant also held an appointment power, while the resident whose concerns began the case had no established standing or right of reply.

No process can now examine the October 2024 remarks. The 180-day deadline has passed. Victoria’s bylaw also requires the City Clerk to reject any complaint received in the 90 days before general voting day, and separately provides that no investigation report will be released in that period. For the October 17, 2026 election, that window opened on July 19.

The ballot is the remaining accountability mechanism.

What voters and Council should do

Kim is seeking re-election to Victoria City Council and the Capital Regional District on October 17 as part of Victoria for All. Voters should judge that choice, her 2023 apology, and whether her conduct since reflects the awareness and consideration she promised.

The record set out above was sent to Mayor and Council on August 28, 2026.

Victoria should also amend Bylaw 23-058 to permit direct public complaints, guarantee complainants a right of reply, create an independent appointment process where the Mayor is the complainant, and maintain a permanent, searchable public archive of completed investigation reports. It should also reconsider the election-period freeze on releasing them.

Sources:

City of Victoria Code of Conduct for Council Members Bylaw No. 23-058; Code of Conduct Bylaw Investigation Report 2024-01, Marisa Cruickshank, Lidstone and Company, June 17, 2024, and its appendices; minutes of the Victoria City Council meeting of June 27, 2024; Times Colonist reporting, June 2024; Statistics Canada, police-reported hate crime in Canada, 2024; Canadian Jewish News reporting on the June 2025 incident; recording of the October 7, 2024 event on the legislature grounds, reviewed by BC Politics Watch.

BC Politics Watch takes no position in this article on the war in Gaza, on Israel, or on Palestinian statehood. Readers of this publication hold every view there is to hold on those questions and this article does not ask them to change any of them. Its subject is the conduct of a municipal elected official.

Councillor Kim apologised in November 2023 for signing the open letter, before any complaint was filed against her, and asked for her name to be removed from it. That is set out above and it is to her credit.

Code of Conduct Bylaw Investigation Report 2024-01 found no hate speech and no breach of the bylaw’s provisions on discrimination or respect, found Councillor Kim’s expression to be protected under the Charter, identified one inadvertent breach of the requirement to distinguish personal views from those of the City, and recommended no sanction. Those findings are set out above and are not disputed here.

BC Politics Watch does not claim to know Councillor Kim’s intentions, in 2023 or in 2024. Where this article expresses a judgment about her conduct, that judgment is the opinion of BC Politics Watch, formed on the facts stated. Readers are free to reach a different one.

We will correct any error of fact promptly and prominently.

Residents first learned of the proposed changes when the agenda was posted a few days before the Committee of the Whole meeting. BC Politics Watch posts about the rezoning were viewed more than 2,000 times in the days leading up to the meeting. Word spread quickly that the rules governing much of the industrial waterfront were being rewritten without a public hearing and without direct notice to neighbouring communities.

After watching Victoria City Council and City staff decide that the Department of National Defence did not need to be consulted about a harbour that houses both the Pacific fleet and the Coast Guard’s West Coast base, BC Politics Watch wrote to Defence Minister David McGuinty on behalf of harbour residents. The letter asked whether the City of Victoria had consulted the department. McGuinty’s office forwarded the inquiry. Corporate Secretary Taylor Paxton replied that National Defence was not aware of any consultation by the City and that its planner at Real Property Operations Esquimalt was now requesting mapping and details from City planning staff in order to understand what had been approved.

Phase Two of the zoning modernization made several concrete changes to the industrial waterfront. It raised maximum building heights to 25 metres, 30 metres for equipment, eliminated the parking requirement, rescinded the Harbour Road industrial design guidelines, and added ship breaking and marine vessel recycling as permitted uses in the marine industrial zone. Council waived the public hearing under a provincial rule that allows this step when a change is judged consistent with the Official Community Plan. It then gave the bylaw final approval the same afternoon, just before the summer recess. The only area held back was Ogden Point, which was paused pending the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority’s master plan after residents raised concerns about ship breaking. Everything else, including ship breaking as a permitted use across the rest of the marine industrial waterfront, was approved that day. Likely because of precisely BC Politics Watch was raising the alarm on this.

Leaving the federal government out was deliberate. When staff recommended finding the senior governments unaffected, Councillor Marg Gardiner moved to strike the language. Staff advised that doing so would require the City to consult those governments. The majority defeated the amendment and adopted the finding as written.

The Coast Guard base at Shoal Point sits inside the rezoned area. CFB Esquimalt and Transport Canada, which owns and manages the water, also operate in the same harbour.

National Defence have reviewed the amendments found no current impact on federal infrastructure, operations or capabilities, and said CFB Esquimalt has no plans to expand within Victoria Harbour. The review was prompted by residents, and the department is only now seeking the mapping that would show what is being built. Paxton’s letter answered for CFB Esquimalt and the Naval Reserve at HMCS Malahat but said nothing about Coast Guard plans at Shoal Point. The Times Colonist reported on March 12, 2026 that the Coast Guard is planning new infrastructure at the Shoal Point base for a larger fleet the existing facilities cannot handle; its portfolio manager, Aaron Chan, said the upgrades would include shore power so vessels stop running diesel generators at the dock. The department did note that Naval Reserve activity at HMCS Malahat may increase marine traffic, and said it would welcome consultation on proposals affecting small-boat operations, a federal interest in the harbour named by the federal government on a file Council had already closed.

There had already been a chance to talk. In December 2025, CFB Esquimalt invited the municipalities of the south Island to a session on the defence infrastructure it is planning in the region. Other municipalities sent representatives. Victoria did not send anyone. That session was not about the June rezoning, and no one should pretend it was. But it was an open door to sit down with the military and hear what it intends to build on this harbour, and the City walked past it six months before it voted that the federal government had nothing at stake worth asking about.

The rezoning covers Ogden Point, the Coast Guard lands, Shoal Point and Fisherman’s Wharf, somewhere between a third and half of the shoreline that gives James Bay its shape. The people who live along it were not told. The James Bay Neighbourhood Association was not notified, and neither were the immediate neighbours. The City did reach out to some people. Its own report lays out who: 600 postcards mailed to industrial property owners, and one in-person session, held at a private shipyard. The letters of support that came back were from the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority, Butler Concrete, Heidelberg Materials, the harbour society, and the Ralmax Group, signed by its owner, Ian Maxwell. The residents next to the water, and the federal departments that work on it, were not on the list.

Who plans the waterfront

The Greater Victoria Harbour Authority is drafting its own master plan for the lands it controls, due by year’s end. National Defence, the Coast Guard and Transport Canada hold federal land and water under separate authority. Three jurisdictions, three timelines, no single public process. Residents are left to absorb the cumulative changes one decision at a time.

Council’s report called the rescinded Harbour Road guidelines a barrier to the operations and growth of Point Hope Maritime, a Ralmax company. The workshop was held at a Ralmax facility, and the support letter came from its owner. Letters of support and industry workshops are routine, and none of this proves the rezoning was written for one firm. But lifting constraints on public waterfront creates real development value, and the public is owed an account of what it receives in return. Council sought none outside the circle positioned to benefit.

The report sets no job target, wage floor, local-hire expectation, apprenticeship commitment, or benefit agreement. It grants operators more development capacity and fewer constraints and asks nothing in return. This is a region built around the navy’s Pacific base at Esquimalt, with one of the highest concentrations of former service members in the country.

Thousands of veterans live in Greater Victoria, many of them leaving the forces with exactly the trades a working harbour runs on, in the same community that put up a downtown memorial to the Canadians who served in Afghanistan.

Alongside them is a growing cluster of ocean-technology firms that need industrial land and water access to build and test what they make. Council did not consult those firms, and it did not ask the established operators for any commitment to local workers or to the next generation of marine businesses.

Ship breaking and vessel recycling are now permitted on a federally regulated harbour. Whether they belong here, and under what controls, are questions for Fisheries and Oceans Canada and Environment and Climate Change Canada. BC Politics Watch put them to the Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, whose portfolio holds the Coast Guard base at the centre of the rezoning. That office has not answered, and its silence means neither agreement nor objection.

The residents’ correspondence also reached Jeff Kibble, the MP for Cowichan-Malahat-Langford, who sits on the House of Commons defence committee and has pressed the Coast Guard’s move into National Defence. His office replied, directing residents to the City and the responsible ministers and noting that Kibble has raised the integration in committee and that the material may inform his questioning, an acknowledgement rather than a commitment.

None of this is the first consequential change Victoria’s planning system has carried past the public without a hearing. Last autumn, the lots for a 14-storey James Bay tower were shifted inside the Official Community Plan package from the neighbourhood into the Downtown Core Area, which let a plan-consistent rezoning proceed without a public hearing. Different tool, same planning office, same result: a significant change moved through without ever reaching a hearing.

There is a further piece of this waterfront moving through a separate process. Two nearby provincial properties are proposed to become Songhees treaty settlement lands, which would take them outside municipal zoning entirely, another significant change to the harbour that residents have had no local say in. BC Politics Watch will examine that in a coming edition.

2026/08/24

The mortgage was never registered against the title.

Council approved a loan. Six days later it approved a grant. The reasons for the change have not been publicly explained in any document we obtained, and the resolutions authorising it have never been released.

Seven days in April

Mayor Marianne Alto has been open about the City’s move into housing and health services. “Almost everything that we have done, and are still doing,” she has said, “would traditionally be considered in the realm of responsibility for a provincial government.” During debate on this file, councillors described themselves as veering out of their lane.

25 April 2024. In closed session, council approved up to $300,000 from the Financial Stability Reserve toward the acquisition of 2155 Dowler Place, structured as a loan repayable without interest. A motion brought forward by Mayor Alto the following week records the terms. Council, it says, “approved a Motion to support acquisition of a local property by SOLID Outreach Society by approving a loan of up to $300,000 ... repayable without interest.” The proposed mortgage was intended to give the City a secured claim if the property were sold.

26 April 2024. The City’s Director of Strategic Real Estate wrote to Vancouver City Savings Credit Union confirming that the loan was “repayable without interest, which the City will secure as a mortgage against the property, secondary to the first, and priority mortgage, to be held by Vancity.” The letter closed by stating that its contents were “confidential at this time and cannot be made public.”

2 May 2024. In closed session again, a motion from Mayor Alto, headed 24/7 Full Shelter Services Adjustment, recommended that council authorise a grant of up to $300,000 instead. The motion gives the following reasons. “To simplify the allocation of funds in support of the down payment for the building acquisition, and to satisfy requirements of the financial institution engaged in the transaction, VanCity Savings.” The motion does not say what public benefit the change was intended to achieve.

7 June 2024. The sale completed at $1,625,000. Vancity registered a mortgage and an assignment of rents at 10:01 that morning.

Vancity registered two charges. The City registered none. A State of Title Certificate obtained on 21 August 2026 shows no City charge and no discharged one.

The 2 May motion does not say what Vancity required. It says only that the change was needed “to satisfy requirements of the financial institution.”

Council could have left the $300,000 as a loan without registering a mortgage. That would have left Vancity with its first ranking charge and the City without a registered security, but the underlying obligation to repay could have remained. Council changed the contribution from a loan to a grant instead. Under section 24 of the Community Charter a municipality must publish public notice identifying the recipient before lending money. A grant is not among the forms of assistance that section lists.

Other mechanisms existed. A covenant under section 219 of the Land Title Act restricts how land may be used and binds subsequent owners. A housing agreement under section 483 of the Community Charter can be registered against title and regulates occupancy, tenure and rents. Neither is a mortgage securing repayment, and neither is a straightforward substitute for one. No document we obtained shows that either was considered.

Who owns the building

The registered owner of 2155 Dowler Place is not SOLID Outreach Society. It is 1270189 B.C. Ltd., a company incorporated under the Business Corporations Act.

Its director is Mark Willson, who is also the society’s Director of Programs and Finance. He signed the Vancity mortgage on 4 June 2024 as the company’s authorised signatory. Three weeks later he emailed City staff a fence variance application for the property, signing as “Director, SOLID Outreach Society / 1270189 BC LTD,” and telling them the company is “fully owned by Solid.”

Council authorised the money to SOLID Outreach Victoria. Title went to the numbered company. The same man signs for both.

The society’s return to the Canada Revenue Agency reports no land and no buildings. The company owns two Victoria properties, 2155 Dowler Place and the building three blocks away on the Cook Street and North Park corner, bought in March 2021 for $2,050,000. Their combined declared value at purchase was $3,675,000.

The City granted that second building a temporary use permit for cannabis distribution in October 2020, as an ancillary use to harm reduction. The permit expired on 28 July 2025. When a neighbouring business owner asked what that meant, the City’s Manager of Community Services in Community Safety and Bylaw Services replied in writing that “it is the City’s practice to allow for the continuation of activities of a business or non-profit organization previously approved through a TUP if the applicant is underway with the appropriate land use processes.” Not a bylaw. A practice. That address is a separate article and we will publish it in full.

The owner’s name is on a title anyone can order for twelve dollars. Willson’s account of what the company is came from an internal City email chain, released in records and never published.

The grant agreement that would show which entity the City contracted with, and what rights if any it kept, has not been released.

What the public was told

Victoria announced the project on 14 June 2024, a week after the sale completed, describing an “access hub” for people who are unhoused.

Asked directly by CHEK News on 20 June whether the site was an overdose prevention site, the mayor said: “It’s absolutely not. No. It is not an overdose prevention site.”

Residents of North Park objected, citing the lack of consultation and the prospect of the Pandora Avenue situation being relocated into their neighbourhood.

The commitment had been made in closed session on 25 April. The terms had been changed in closed session on 2 May. The purchase had completed on 7 June. By the time the project was announced publicly, the decision to proceed had already been made.

The draft released by mistake

In June 2025 CHEK News published a confidential draft motion written by Mayor Alto and headed CMM: 24/7 Shelter Services. It had been released by accident, attached in error to a freedom of information request, and CHEK has hosted it publicly since.

It is a draft rather than the resolution council adopted, and how much it changed before the vote is not known. Asked repeatedly whether it represented her actual plan, the mayor told CHEK: “I am not going to comment on something which I am bound to protect under the closed legislation of the Community Charter.” She described the document as “an extremely early draft.”

The draft anticipated what the facility would do. It described the service drawing people who “previously accessed ‘services’ and supplies from the westerly ‘stores’” on Pandora Avenue, so that they might “obtain similar, more regulated and supervised ‘services’ and supplies in a controlled environment.” That migration, the document says, would allow the block’s “rehabilitation” and the City’s “gradual boulevard reclamation.”

Setting out the relationship to the City’s Community Safety and Wellbeing initiative, it anticipates “forays into areas of services and policies that have not previously been part of conventional local government operations.” Of Dowler Place, it uses the word explicitly.

“This is such a precedent.”

The draft offers the project to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ campaign for a Municipal Growth Framework as “one example of the new ‘possible’.” It also says the City had by then presented roughly 32 properties to BC Housing as potential sites, of which the province took interest in three.

A former North Park resident and neighbourhood association member, read the draft when it emerged. “The plan in this document is clear. Dowler was to be the new Pandora,” he told CHEK. “The mayor did not have the courage to tell the truth and did not have the courage to defend the city’s real plan.”

In the same report, the mayor said Dowler Place was a success and that the model should be rolled out across British Columbia. CHEK put that to then Housing and Municipal Affairs Minister Ravi Kahlon.

“We will not be funding this site. We have committed to Victoria that we will fund housing, supportive housing. If the city creates its own model and tries to do something totally different, that is just something we don’t have money for it at this point.”

The province said in June 2025 that it would not fund the site. Victoria proceeded with municipal funding.

Where the money came from

The Financial Stability Reserve is a municipal fund, financed through City revenues including property taxes. Reserve funds in British Columbia are created by bylaw under section 188 of the Community Charter, and section 189 restricts what may be done with them. Money in a reserve fund may be used only for the purpose the establishing bylaw sets out.

Victoria’s Reserve Fund Bylaw No. 15-050 establishes eleven of them. The Financial Stability Reserve Fund, at item 7 of Schedule A, exists:

“For funding operating and environmental emergencies, for funding debt reduction and liability claims, for stabilizing the temporary impact of cyclical revenue downturns and cost increases and for funding innovations within City Departments that create efficiencies and enhance the effectiveness of programs.”

Property acquisition is not among the purposes the bylaw lists. The $300,000 went to an organisation outside the City to help buy a building.

Victoria already has reserve funds for housing, for land acquisition and for capital projects. Item 11 establishes the Victoria Housing Reserve Fund, “for funding housing projects.” Item 10 establishes the Tax Sale Lands Reserve Fund, for “funding the purchase and development of land and improvements.” Item 6 covers building and infrastructure capital projects. The $300,000 came from the Financial Stability Reserve. No public document explains the choice.

Three months earlier the City had used a different fund for a comparable transaction. In March 2024 it paid $3,950,000 for the Hermann’s Jazz Club premises on View Street, against a combined assessed value of $3,260,000, drawing on the Land Sale Reserve, which is restricted to acquiring land. No appraisal was released for that purchase either. It was, at least, a property the City would own.

Both transactions were carried through the same City division, Strategic Real Estate, then headed by Peter Rantucci, who signed the letter of 26 April 2024. By October 2025 he had moved to a new portfolio, Director of Community Safety, Wellbeing and Partnerships, the department that administers the programmes running out of the Dowler building and reports to council on how they are performing. On 23 October 2025 he told a Committee of the Whole there had been “definitely no increase” in neighbourhood impacts around the site. In the same meeting the Fire Chief undertook to check whether calls in the area had risen. We have not established that the check was completed.

The question is why council drew this $300,000 from the Financial Stability Reserve.

Council put $300,000 toward a $1,625,000 purchase. The assessment roll dated three weeks after completion valued the property at $1,302,400. The purchase price was $322,600 above the property’s assessed value at the time. No appraisal has been released.

The seller was Foxshire Holdings Ltd., a Victoria company that had bought the property on 15 February 2019 for $963,600. It sold in June 2024 for $1,625,000, a gain of $661,400 over five years and four months. The gain was the vendor’s, made in an ordinary sale at a price the market set, and nothing about it suggests anything improper. It is worth recording only because $300,000 of the money that met that price came out of a municipal reserve fund.

On 1 July 2025 the property was assessed at $992,000, some $633,000 below the 2024 purchase price and within $30,000 of what it had fetched in 2019. The land held its value, slipping from $892,000 to $871,000. The buildings did not. They fell from $410,400 to $121,000, a drop of 70.5 per cent in a single year. Every structure on the lot, including the one housing the programme, is now assessed at a combined $121,000.

By mid-2025 the City told CHEK its total investment in the programme was roughly $1.6 million.

In October 2025 Health Canada announced the Emergency Treatment Fund awards for Western Canada. The Victoria project received $2,051,986 for “SOLID Access Hub Service Ramp-Up.” The named recipient was not SOLID Outreach Society. It was the Corporation of the City of Victoria, which passed the money through. The announcement lists 21 British Columbia projects. The Victoria award is the largest of them, ahead of Kelowna, Prince George and Kamloops. The other Victoria project in the same announcement received $261,300.

That agreement expired on 31 March 2026, and the City’s own term ended on 30 June 2026.

Speaking on 13 June 2026 to two Parksville councillors on the Nonpartisan Hacks podcast, in an episode titled “Municipal Courage,” the mayor described the programme as “being funded by the federal government, who have actually identified it as a showpiece for a particular model and are now extolling its particular service delivery model across the country, and we’re working with them to continue their funding.”

She has also described the City’s role in ventures of this kind in her own words: “We’ve done all the risk taking. We’ve paid up front, and we’ve made it happen, so the easy part is for you just to keep sustaining it.”

The City did not take the risk. Residents did, with money they were not asked about and terms they were not shown.

Now she describes it as a showpiece, identified by the federal government and extolled across the country. If Victoria’s own residents were not consulted before their money was committed, it is worth asking what consultation Canadians can expect before this model is funded federally and arrives in their communities.

What remains withheld

Neither closed resolution has been released under section 91 of the Community Charter. The City cited land acquisition, preliminary service negotiations and confidential intergovernmental funding discussions as the grounds for closing those meetings. The transaction is complete, the programme has ended and the grant has been paid. No current basis for continuing to withhold the resolutions appears anywhere in the public record.

More than two years on, the documents that would explain why a secured loan was replaced by a grant are still not available to the people whose money was committed.

If this was the precedent, who decided Victoria’s taxpayers should finance the experiment?

A note on where we stand.

We believe in safeguards and protections for people who need them. We do not believe that supplying drugs and supervising their use, on its own, gives anyone a real chance at a life without them, and we do not believe a residential street is the place to test the proposition. What there has not been is an argument put to the people of Victoria before their money was spent on it. It was settled for them, behind a closed door. Anyone who tells you that asking where the money went makes you heartless is counting on you to stop asking. Do not. This note is comment, not reporting, and nothing in it is established by the documents cited below.

Sources & Disclaimer

We do not allege that the City acted unlawfully, that any expenditure was improperly authorised, or that anyone named benefited personally. Whether this expenditure fits Bylaw 15-050 is a reading of the bylaw. Ours is that it does not obviously fit the stated purposes. The City may have a different one. The shareholding of 1270189 B.C. Ltd. rests on Mr Willson’s written statement to the City and we have not independently verified it. We do not suggest the building is privately owned. The record of resident submissions and consultation is still being assembled and will be published when complete. Corrections are published promptly and in full. victoriapolitics@proton.me

Sources: Health Canada, “Emergency Treatment Fund for Western communities impacted by the overdose crisis,” October 2025; “Municipal Courage with Victoria Mayor Marianne Alto,” Nonpartisan Hacks, published 13 June 2026, recorded at the AVICC convention; CHEK News, “Exclusive: Victoria mayor’s confidential draft reveals plan to shift Pandora problems into new community,” 11 June 2025, and the draft motion published with it; City of Victoria Reserve Fund Bylaw No. 15-050, Schedule A; Council Member Motion of 1 May 2024 for the Closed Council Meeting of 2 May 2024; City of Victoria correspondence to Vancouver City Savings Credit Union, 26 April 2024; State of Title Certificate and charge documents for PID 009-340-050, Victoria Land Title Office; Freehold Transfer CA7351536; title for PID 001-914-782; City of Victoria Delegated Permit Application, 20 June 2024; BC Assessment roll 01-234-07-508-001.

Corrections: we have previously described 2155 Dowler Place as owned by SOLID Outreach Society, and in an earlier article as purchased by the City. Neither is correct. We have also cited a $633,000 premium on the purchase price; measured against the roll closest to the sale, the figure is $322,600.

Then Caradonna asked: “What recourse would I have to protect myself? What recourse would we have as elected officials?”

The concern is not frivolous. Synthetic media can deceive people, damage reputations and poison public debate. The question is what remedy a city council should ask for, whose interests it centres, and who gets to decide when political criticism becomes unlawful manipulation.

A risk, but not his risk

Caradonna’s stated concern began with his mother, then in her late seventies. She had sent him a video of a political pundit she liked. He watched it, thought it seemed odd, went digging and concluded it was AI-generated. In his account she replied: “Well, how am I supposed to know that? This looks real to me.”

That is a real harm. It isn’t the harm his resolution addressed.

No fabricated video of Caradonna was circulating in Victoria. No constituent had reported being deceived by one. No complaint had been filed. The only synthetic Caradonna presented to council on April 2 was the one he had asked a friend to produce. “I actually had a friend of mine, I asked a friend of mine to produce an AI video of me.”

The video had already gone to Black Press, which ran a March 30 article about a councillor using an AI rendering to call for AI regulation, syndicated from Parksville to Nelson.

His resolution described computer-generated content as “a national security threat that presents risks to all levels of government and the principles that uphold democratic society,” and called on provincial and federal governments to work with local governments on “reasonable, rational, and enforceable regulations.”

That one word does a great deal of work. Enforceable requires an enforcer, a standard and a consequence. It requires someone to distinguish harmful deception from reporting, satire, parody and commentary.

Less speech-restrictive options exist. Provenance and disclosure requirements, political advertising rules, platform labelling, watermarking standards, media literacy funding. Those speak directly to the problem Caradonna described with his mother. A legal remedy focused on depictions of elected officials does not.

The order of concern

“What recourse would I have to protect myself? What recourse would we have as elected officials? What do we do to protect the public? How do we protect our government?”

His mother’s experience explained the risk. The first remedy proposed was recourse for himself and other officeholders.

Victoria City Council passed the resolution unanimously, with Councillor Susan Kim absent. Eight members voted, the mayor and seven councillors. None appears to have asked who would enforce a new regime, against whom, or how it would treat an unflattering but plainly political depiction of an elected official.

Councillor Krista Loughton said as much. She told the room the province was already examining AI risks, that the Premier had been vocal after Tumbler Ridge and had brought OpenAI executives in over questions put to ChatGPT about mass shootings, and that senior governments were the proper level to act. “I think it is their place to do this,” she said. “So it’s a good thing for us to weigh in on, but that’s really all we can do.”

That should have been the end of it. Weigh in through the resolution process, then let other local governments debate the proposal.

Instead, Council sent it straight to ministers.

Sending it anyway

The resolution was bound for the Union of BC Municipalities and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. Councillor Chris Coleman moved to send letters to federal AI Minister Evan Solomon and provincial Minister Rick Glumac as well, ahead of either convention.

He explained why. “As UBCM and FCM go through their deliberations on what makes it to the floor, this might not make it there.” Then: “And then the federal and the provincial minister know that we’re doing it anyway.”

Mayor Marianne Alto objected that the item was a UBCM resolution, not an advocacy letter. Caradonna agreed the letters were “a little bit odd” because doing so “kind of short circuits the whole point of the resolution process.”

Coleman reworked it as a motion arising. Caradonna seconded it. It passed unanimously.

A request for enforceable regulation of synthetic depictions of elected officials reached two ministers months before any delegate could debate it. Other local governments had not yet had the opportunity to debate, amend, reject or support the resolution through the UBCM or FCM processes before the letters were sent.

The September debate may still happen. The letters are already gone.

This isn’t the first time Coleman has voted to narrow what the public gets to weigh. In January 2025, Councillors Stephen Hammond and Marg Gardiner moved that the City present both sides of the Crystal Pool borrowing question, after Hammond objected that City advertising called the project “more accessible, sustainable, modern, more inclusive” while saying nothing about cost or risk. It failed 6 to 2, with Coleman among the six. Eighteen days later voters approved $168.9 million in borrowing on a 21 per cent turnout.

A local pattern

The shortcut was not an isolated thing. Victoria City Council has fought this argument before, over how much access residents get to decision-making and to holding members to account.

In 2023, when staff proposed a code of conduct permitting any individual to complain about a council member’s conduct, Councillor Dave Thompson moved to narrow eligible complainants to members, committee members and employees. Councillors Matt Dell, Jeremy Caradonna, Krista Loughton and Susan Kim supported the change, according to the Times Colonist. The adopted bylaw allows complaints from “any member, committee member, or employee.” Residents are not included.

Councillor Marg Gardiner objected at the time. “We need something, a way that the general public can come forward.”

She raised a related concern during the AI debate.

“Four years ago, before I came onto the council, I didn’t even know what the word gaslighting meant, and then all of a sudden, it became what I hear all the time, and I’m surrounded by it. I see this as an extension of gaslighting, in a way. And I think the gaslighting that we see in our city may be our concern, especially if some of it comes from around our council.”

Mayor Alto stopped her.

“I’m going to interrupt you, because, given that I indicated earlier this morning that this is the penultimate quarter of this particular term, I’m going to be a bit more zealous in interfering with comments that are made about the quality or integrity of the council or its members. So I would urge you to speak in a different manner to make your point.”

On the morning Victoria City Council sought enforceable rules about misleading depictions of elected officials, its chair announced that she would be “more zealous” in intervening when comments concerned the quality or integrity of council or its members, and explicitly connected that approach to the approaching election.

Gardiner is worth pausing on. She moved that voters see both sides of the Crystal Pool question, and lost. She objected when residents were shut out of the code of conduct, and lost. In June 2026 she asked for seventeen minutes instead of ten to discuss a waterfront rezoning carried out with no public hearing and no notice to the neighbourhood, and Caradonna voted against giving her the extra seven. Four years of asking for the thing to be opened up, and four years of watching it close.

Satire needs no permission

This publication made an AI-generated video in June showing Caradonna and Councillor Matt Dell at Crystal Pool in suit jackets and swim trunks, holding piña coladas. Neither man was given fabricated dialogue. Neither speaks.

It ran with our reporting on the Crystal Pool replacement. Both men publicly supported the borrowing referendum. Voters approved $168.9 million on a 21 per cent turnout, repayable over a term not exceeding 20 years, and the replacement is now costed at $209.2 million.

It was made partly to needle them. That is what political satire does. It exaggerates, mocks and makes officials look ridiculous, particularly when the subject is public money.

It is also the problem with an enforceable regime aimed at manipulated depictions. A regulator, platform or court would have to decide whether such a work was permissible commentary, deceptive fabrication, or something requiring a remedy. The journalist doesn’t make that call. Neither does the public.

Political caricature has always been abrasive. Honoré Daumier served six months in prison for portraying King Louis-Philippe as Gargantua. Thomas Nast’s cartoons helped make Boss Tweed infamous. J.W. Bengough caricatured Sir John A. Macdonald through the Pacific Scandal. The technology has moved from lithography to Photoshop to a text prompt. Nobody has yet built the rule that makes the drawings stop.

Legislative tactic

Councillor Caradonna hasn’t argued for banning AI. “For me, it’s not about being pro or anti AI. I mean, I think AI is here to stay. It’s about putting reasonable guardrails on a technology that will have benefits.” He cited a case where AI helped a friend identify a long-standing medical issue doctors had missed. Demonstrating a danger by example is a normal legislative tactic, and a councillor should not have to wait until he is personally harmed before raising a legitimate public issue.

Those are fair points.

They don’t answer why the resolution foregrounded legal recourse for himself and fellow officeholders rather than measures that would help people like his mother recognise synthetic media. They do not explain why Victoria bypassed the UBCM process after Caradonna himself said doing so short-circuits it.

And they do not resolve the question Victoria City Council never asked. Who decides whether a published depiction of a politician is lawful?

This is preposterous

It all felt disingenuous and preposterous. And it raises an obvious question: was the proposal also politically convenient for a councillor seeking re-election?

A sitting councillor asked a friend to produce a deepfake of himself, played it to Victoria City Council, gave it to a newspaper chain, and asked two levels of government for enforceable power over depictions of elected officials. The only example of actual deception he identified was his mother’s experience with an AI-generated video. But the measures his resolution proposed focused on enforceable rules concerning synthetic depictions of elected officials, rather than on the kinds of disclosure, provenance or media-literacy measures that might have helped her identify synthetic media. A colleague then heard the mover say the shortcut short-circuits the process, and took the shortcut anyway.

We think what was requested risks building a censorship mechanism around the reputational comfort of politicians. This publication has reported on Councillor Caradonna in ten separate stories, and we are among the people such a rule would reach. Weigh that as you like.

Caradonna asked two governments for enforceable rules covering depictions of elected officials. Coleman made sure the request reached those governments before the membership had debated it. Alto announced that she would be more zealous in intervening when comments concerned the quality or integrity of council or its members, explicitly citing the approaching election.

Three decisions, one morning. Each raises a different question about who gets to control the boundaries of political criticism.

Numero uno turns out to be plural.

Eight members voted yes. None asked what the rule would catch.

Public officials do not get to choose only flattering depictions of themselves. They run for office. People get to draw the big nose.

Victoria’s UBCM resolutions session opens September 16.

Victoria votes October 17.

A note on sourcing: quotations from the April 2 Committee of the Whole are taken from a transcript of the meeting audio and are lightly cleaned of verbal stumbles. The recording is public and anyone can check them. The vote was unanimous among those present, with Councillor Susan Kim absent. The phrase “national security threat” appears in the written resolution rather than in the April 2 remarks. The August 3, 2023 vote on code of conduct complaints was not tallied by name, and the councillors named as supporting the amendment are as reported by the Times Colonist, the only published account of who did. The operative text of NR22 is not publicly retrievable through the channels available to us and we will publish it in full if the City or UBCM provides it.

Sources: Victoria News, 30 March 2026 · Victoria News, 2 April 2026 · Castanet / Times Colonist · 2026 UBCM Resolutions Book · City of Victoria, Crystal Pool Referendum · Victoria Buzz, 19 December 2025 · Castanet / Times Colonist, 4 August 2023, code of conduct complaints · City of Victoria Bylaw 23-058

Editorial note

Following publication review, we have tightened several descriptions in this piece to distinguish the documented facts from our interpretation. In particular, Caradonna said he “asked a friend” to produce the AI video, so we describe it that way rather than characterizing it as a paid production. The video used Caradonna’s own words from the April 2 Committee of the Whole discussion; the synthetic element was the rendering of his likeness and voice.

We have also narrowed references to the “only” synthetic depiction of Caradonna to the one presented to Council, and revised statements about the UBCM and FCM process to describe the opportunity other local governments had not yet had, rather than suggesting they had legally lost that opportunity.

These changes do not alter the substance of our reporting or our analysis. They are intended to keep a clear distinction between what the public record establishes and the conclusions we draw from it.

The City of Victoria runs water, sewer, roads, zoning, parks, fire services and bylaw enforcement for 92,000 people on 19 square kilometres. Its 2026 UBCM package asks the federal and provincial governments to regulate artificial intelligence, to have BC’s municipal association sue major fossil-fuel producers, and to maintain an oil-tanker ban on a coastline 700 kilometres away. Two other motions, on marine vessel fuel and pickup-truck hood heights, did not make the book at all.

UBCM ruled that Victoria’s post-secondary affordability resolution falls outside local-government scope and struck it from the agenda. Nobody voted it down. It will simply not be discussed.

UBCM also changed its screening rules last year, and has not published how it applies them.

How UBCM works

The Union of British Columbia Municipalities speaks for local governments and member First Nations. It cannot pass laws. Its influence comes from the fact that when the membership endorses a resolution, it becomes association policy, goes to the province, and the relevant ministry has to answer in writing. One council of nine cannot do that. Two thousand delegates can.

So the test is whether a resolution reached the floor, and whether anything came of it afterwards.

Reaching the floor is the hard part now. A bylaw amendment passed at last year’s convention, 2025-ER1, gave the Resolutions Committee the power to decide what the membership sees. Four criteria trigger exclusion: duplication of policy set in the past five years, local-government scope, clarity and format, and whether an issue is regional rather than province-wide.

This is the first year it has been used. Of 229 resolutions, 84 went into an appendix that will not be debated. Another 32 were referred. UBCM has not published a test for what “local-government scope” means, and there is no appeal. Referred resolutions can be brought to the floor only by a three-fifths vote of delegates. Appendix items cannot be brought forward at all.

The convention runs September 14 to 18 in Vancouver. Victoria’s eight motions split as follows:

• Debated: NR22 (AI regulation), NR30 (emissions authority over existing buildings), NR32 (fossil-fuel class action), NR34 (North Coast tanker ban).

• Referred, no debate: RR4 (Community Housing Fund), RR22 (mobility scooters in bike lanes), RR23 (active-transportation grants).

• Excluded: APX52 (post-secondary affordability).

Victoria City Council voted to send eleven items up this cycle, counting the two that never reached the book. Four will be debated. That is a year of staff time and committee agenda space in a city whose mayor is campaigning on housing and street disorder.

The Resolutions Committee

The committee that did the screening has five members, all of them public:

• Councillor Pete Fry, Vancouver, chair

• Councillor Gord Klassen, Fort St. John, vice-chair

• Councillor Kevin McIsaac, Fernie

• Councillor Jenna Stoner, Squamish

• Councillor Trish Mandewo, Coquitlam, listed as on leave

ER1 says resolutions are excluded “as determined by the Resolutions Committee.” There are no published minutes and no per-resolution vote records. So these five made the calls, and that is as far as the record goes. Which of them wanted what cannot be established from outside.

All five also sit on the UBCM Executive, and their own councils file resolutions. Squamish sponsors NR29 on air quality, immediately ahead of Victoria’s NR30. Councils sponsor resolutions rather than individual councillors, so this is overlap rather than conflict. It is a small province.

There is a transparency problem at both ends of this. Victoria cannot show the public who moved most of its resolutions. UBCM does not publish reasons for the exclusions.

It is worth knowing what the new power was used for. AVICC’s member governments, meaning elected local officials voting in a room, endorsed three of Victoria’s resolutions in April. Those were the buildings resolution, the mobility-scooter resolution and post-secondary affordability. UBCM then referred the scooter resolution and struck post-secondary affordability from the agenda. Two items that had won a vote of Vancouver Island’s local governments were pulled, and no reason was given for either.

The AI resolution

Victoria councillor Jeremy Caradonna built this one on a video he apparently commissioned and scripted himself. The production is amateurish. No fabricated clip of him ever circulated. No constituent was deceived, no impersonation occurred, no complaint was filed. He screened it at Committee of the Whole on April 2, and then asked the room: “What recourse would I have to protect myself? What recourse would we have as elected officials?”

He called computer-generated content “a national security threat,” and asked for “reasonable, rational, and enforceable regulations.” He did not ask for labelling, or watermarking, or money for media literacy.

Enforceable rules on manipulated depictions need somebody to sort deceptive fabrication from reporting, satire and commentary. That line has never been clean anywhere it has been attempted. Under a rule written to give elected officials recourse, the journalist is not the one sorting.

Disclosure: this publication made an AI-generated video of Caradonna and Councillor Matt Dell on June 1, raising piña coladas at Crystal Pool, the facility Victoria City Council is replacing at a cost of $209.2 million. It ran with our reporting on that project. Caradonna’s resolution passed two months earlier, so it was not a response to us. The relevant point is scope. Our video is the sort of thing an enforceable rule would have to make a ruling about, and we would not be the ones ruling.

Victoria City Council passed the resolution unanimously. Nobody is recorded raising enforcement, or jurisdiction, or free expression.

Councillor Chris Coleman then amended it to send copies straight to federal AI Minister Evan Solomon and provincial Minister Rick Glumac. His reasoning was that not every convention resolution advances. He was right about that. The amendment guaranteed the text reached two ministers whatever the floor did, three months before the floor sat.

The tanker ban, and the class action

NR34 is Victoria’s. It asks the province to maintain the 2019 North Coast oil-tanker ban, and Victoria City Council passed it on February 5.

On July 2, Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier David Eby announced a multibillion-dollar package that preserves the northern ban, reportedly “in accordance with a proposed route of a new trans-provincial pipeline.” The package included LNG support, a $3.5-billion North Coast Transmission Line, Roberts Bank expansion and a Fraser River tunnel. Behind it sits a November memorandum between Ottawa and Alberta contemplating a bitumen pipeline to the West Coast carrying 300,000 to 400,000 barrels a day.

The northern ban survived. The pipeline question moved south, to the coast Victoria sits on.

Dogwood’s communications director, Christina Smethurst, called the July agreement “a three-way grand bargain for a maximalist oil and LNG agenda,” in which “Eby will get to expand the LNG industry he’s been pushing for with even more federal support, in exchange for rolling over on a possible Alberta pipeline to the South Coast.”

NR34 does not touch that. It asks a convention to confirm what two governments settled ten weeks earlier, and it will pass. There is a cost to that. An endorsed resolution becomes standing UBCM policy, which then triggers the five-year duplication screen. A narrow reaffirmation of the northern ban could block a sharper resolution naming the South Coast or the pipeline until 2031.

NR32, also Victoria’s, revives a strategy Vancouver Island municipalities rejected in 2019. Then-mayor Lisa Helps declined to defend her own city’s climate-cost-recovery resolution at that year’s AVICC convention, saying delegates preferred collaboration. View Royal Mayor David Screech described the outcome as “soundly defeated.” At UBCM that September, Victoria’s companion resolution carried a recommendation to endorse and was never voted on.

UBCM’s screen only bars duplicates within five years. The defeat is seven years old, so the resolution came back. No position changed in between.

One point of attribution, because the two get confused locally: the “Sue Big Oil” campaign belongs to West Coast Environmental Law. Dogwood is one of more than forty endorsing organisations and has no litigation position of its own.

No resolution on LNG

Local governments across the capital region sent 21 resolutions to UBCM this year. None of them mention Ksi Lisims LNG, Canada Infrastructure Bank financing, or BC Hydro’s allocation of power to LNG plants and data centres.

Those are the fossil-fuel decisions the province is making in 2026. Victoria reached 700 kilometres north for a ban that was already safe, and said nothing about the decisions in front of it.

The regional record is no better. Of those 21 resolutions, eleven will not be debated. Four were referred as duplicates. The other seven went to the appendix, and they cluster. Saanich and Central Saanich both filed on team-based primary care. Oak Bay filed on student food security and on student ferry fares. The Capital Regional District filed on fare-free youth transit. Health care and post-secondary costs are not run by local governments. UBCM does not publish its reasons, but the pattern is not hard to see.

The housing fund resolutions

Saanich, Radium Hot Springs, Victoria and the AKBLG Executive each filed a separate resolution asking the province to reinstate the Community Housing Fund. They became RR2 through RR5. Vancouver filed a related motion on housing targets as RR1.

All were referred without debate because they duplicated one another. One jointly sponsored resolution would have been heard.

Who is on the UBCM Executive

Above the Resolutions Committee sits the Executive: President Cori Ramsay (Prince George), First Vice-President Jenna Stoner (Squamish), Second Vice-President Mayor Sarrah Storey (Fraser Lake), Third Vice-President Aimee Grice (Oliver), and Past President Trish Mandewo (Coquitlam). The AVICC seat is held by Vanessa Craig of the Regional District of Nanaimo, who took it from Nanaimo councillor Ben Geselbracht at April’s AGM.

No capital-region municipality holds a seat on either body. Twenty-one resolutions came from this region this year, and nobody involved in screening them was from here.

Gary MacIsaac retires as Executive Director after this convention, after nineteen years. Kim Grout replaces him on September 8. Jamee Justason is the resolutions analyst.

AVICC did its own screening on March 27, under an executive led by Geselbracht. Alison MacKenzie of View Royal was the one capital-region member on it. AVICC does not publish a resolutions committee roster.

What is not on the record

• Movers and vote tallies for six of Victoria’s eight UBCM resolutions are missing from public records.

• Two resolutions Victoria City Council passed vanished before the book was published, and AVICC does not publish a list of what it rejected.

• The city’s meeting software blocks automated searches. Local coverage of these decisions is behind paywalls.

• UBCM publishes no committee minutes and no reasons for individual exclusions.

Compare that with private lobbying, which is a matter of public record. Dogwood’s BC Lobbyists Registry filing names its designated filer, Matt Takach, its registration date, its listed lobbyists including Alexandra Woodsworth, disclosed as a former public-office holder, and every ministry contacted.

Outsiders have very little purchase on any of it. Only member elected officials may speak or vote at convention. Non-members can buy a seat in the plenary for between $1,220 and $1,903, and sit there quietly.

October 17

Victoria City Council chose where to spend its attention this year. It pursued questions that had already been settled while the province was deciding about LNG and pipeline routes. On housing it filed separately from four other councils rather than joining them. It had nobody inside the process that screened the results, and it left no record of how its own councillors voted.

Alto launched her campaign on May 20 on housing and street disorder. Her council spent the year lobbying Ottawa about deepfakes and a coastline 700 kilometres from City Hall.

Four questions for the incumbents, and for the delegates who vote on NR22:

• Which body decides whether a published depiction of a councillor is lawful?

• Would this article and the video that ran with it be covered by the rule you asked for?

• What does NR34 get that the July 2 agreement did not already give?

• Why does no resolution from this region mention LNG?

The resolutions session opens on the morning of September 16. Victoria votes on October 17.

Sources:

2026 UBCM Resolutions Book · UBCM Resolutions Committee · UBCM Executive 2025-26 · 2025-ER1 · 2026 AVICC Resolutions Disposition · AVICC governance · Victoria council · 2022 official results · Victoria News: ‘reasonable guardrails’ for AI · Victoria News: AI regulation using AI rendering · Castanet/Times Colonist: Victoria urges senior governments to rein in AI · The Skeena: reaction to the July deal · Elections BC local election financing · BCGEU 2022 labour-endorsed candidates · Why Dogwood doesn’t endorse · BC Lobbyists Registry: Dogwood Initiative (Forest Futures) · WCEL Sue Big Oil

A note on the record: the UBCM book’s body text is not machine-readable through the channels available to us, so resolution wording comes from AVICC’s book where items ran there first, and from contemporaneous reporting. Movers and vote tallies for six of Victoria’s eight resolutions are not publicly retrievable.

This is Part Two. It is about the money behind it.

A Society, Not a Charity

Dogwood BC is a society under British Columbia law. Not a charity. That single distinction decides almost everything that follows.

A registered charity files a public return with the Canada Revenue Agency every year. Anyone with a browser can open it and see the money in, the money out, the salary bands, and the broad categories of where the cash came from. A society files nothing comparable, no public tax return, no mandatory financial statements. There’s no provincial rule that forces Dogwood to publish a single number about its funding.

So here we have an organization moving roughly $1.9 million a year with no legal duty to account for a dollar of it to anyone outside its own walls. Thousands of BC societies operate under the same light touch. Most of them run curling clubs or community halls. None of them have spent the last decade running a province-wide political machine aimed squarely at elections while demanding that everyone else open their books.

The American money they used to talk about

From Dogwood’s own 2017 annual report: “We caught a U.S. trophy hunting Super PAC funneling money to the BC Liberals to keep the grizzly hunt open, shone a spotlight on the cabinet ministers who personally benefit from the out-of-control real estate market and uncovered $771,168 in oil patch donations apparently intended to buy permits for the Kinder Morgan pipeline.”

American money in a British Columbia election. Dogwood hunted it, publicized it, and turned it into a provincial scandal. Ban Big Money became a campaign frame. The premier dropped her fundraising bonus. The RCMP opened a file. Dogwood’s LinkedIn page still claims credit for helping ban unlimited out-of-province corporate and union donations. No one in this province understands the political power of undisclosed money better than the people who spent years teaching the rest of us to care about it.

Six years later the 2023 report struck a different note: original research on corporate lobbying intensity and the revolving door, followed by volunteers confronting MLAs and generating messages demanding stronger lobbying rules.

Fair enough. Let’s ask Dogwood the question it used to ask everyone else.

For years they answered it without being asked. The 2017 report thanked sixteen funders by name: Mountain Equipment Co-op, Vancity, Patagonia, the Wilburforce Foundation, the Bullitt Foundation, Brainerd, Moore, West Wind, Winky, Timken Sturgis, Climate Solutions, the Salal Foundation, a Canada Summer Jobs grant, and, written exactly this way, “Tides Foundation USA.” Not Tides. Tides Foundation USA. In the same year they were building a national story about American money in BC politics, they listed American money among their own supporters and labelled it clearly.

The 2019 report named fourteen, including Tides Foundation USA again, the Oak Foundation, Wilburforce, Bullitt, Brainerd and the rest. The 2020 report named eleven institutions and went further, thanking eighteen individual major donors by name. It also disclosed public money: Canada Summer Jobs grants, a $350,132 pandemic wage subsidy, and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council partnership grant with University of Victoria researchers.

Named institutions, named people, named public programs, published by an organization that no one could have forced to publish anything.

The 2020 report is the last one that named anyone. No funder list appears in the reports for 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 or 2025. The most recent one mentions institutional money only once, when board chair Ingrid Kastens writes that Dogwood’s work “continues to resonate with individual donors and foundations.” Which foundations? She doesn’t say. No one at Dogwood has said, in any public document, for five years.

Now look at the numbers. In the financial year ending March 2021, grant revenue was $88,435, nine percent of the total. In the year ending March 2025 it was $747,669, thirty-nine percent of the budget, more than eight times higher. Detailed disclosure stopped in the year the grants nearly disappeared and hasn’t returned while those grants multiplied.

In the 2022 report, offered unprompted, Dogwood wrote: “While foundations remain an important source of funding for Dogwood’s work, no single source of funding accounts for more than 10% of our budget, a fact that keeps us independent and resilient.” Grants were twenty-one percent of revenue when they wrote that sentence. They’re now nearly double that share. Whether the promise still holds is impossible to test, because the organization that made it stopped publishing the only information that would let anyone check.

Look at where those earlier donors actually sat. Tides Foundation USA. Wilburforce, Bullitt and Brainerd, all Pacific Northwest foundations. Timken Sturgis, Winky, West Wind, Moore, Climate Solutions, Patagonia. None of those donors vote here, pay property tax here, or live with the decisions made by a British Columbia council. The Oak Foundation, based in Geneva, appeared on the 2019 list; that’s worth noting and doesn’t change the overall picture. The last time Dogwood told the public where its institutional money came from, a substantial share came from outside the country, much of it from a single American city three hours down the interstate.

Then the lists stopped. The grants rose eightfold. What’s come in since, and from which side of the border, is something only Dogwood knows.

Alberta spent two years and roughly $3.5 million on a public inquiry into foreign funding of advocacy inside its borders. The inquiry named Dogwood among the recipients and found no wrongdoing and no breach of any law. Alberta at least treated the question as one a government should be able to answer. In British Columbia no government has asked it, and no statute requires an answer.

No law ever forced those funder lists into the open. That’s precisely what makes the silence significant. Dogwood published for years because it said the public deserved to know. Then it went quiet. In five years it hasn’t offered its donors, its subscribers, or the people filling out its forms a single sentence of explanation.

The same organization that directed volunteers to press their MLAs for lobbying transparency won’t tell you who funds Dogwood.

What a list like this can do

Dogwood isn’t a polite letter-writing club. It’s a capable political operation. Four years ago it described its own reach in language no opponent could have improved upon. From the annual report: “Dogwood volunteers stepped up to phone, text and email our own supporters, encouraging them to join the NDP if they wanted to participate in the process to pick the next premier. Ultimately, the Appadurai campaign reported signing up thousands more members than Eby’s, sparking a panic at the executive level of the BC NDP.”

Thousands of people moved by an outside organization into a governing party to influence who would lead British Columbia. The party’s response was revealing: the New Democrats retroactively rewrote their leadership rules. Dogwood itself recorded the purpose, to exclude “participation by third parties like Dogwood.” Political parties don’t rewrite their constitutions over ordinary civic engagement.

Elections BC opened a review into whether the activity amounted to an unlawful in-kind contribution, then closed the file. The reason should give every voter pause. Anjali Appadurai was never formally approved as a leadership contestant, so the campaign finance rules of the Election Act never applied to her campaign. On 20 October 2022 the agency stated it clearly: “the activities of Dogwood BC in relation to the Anjali Appadurai campaign were not regulated by the Election Act.”

Not cleared. Not blessed. Simply outside the rules the province had written. An outside organization came within reach of shaping who governs British Columbia, and the regulator’s position was that it had no jurisdiction.

Four years later the same organization is collecting names, telephone numbers, postal codes, voting histories and issue rankings from voters across the province. No rule reaches that either.

The machinery that makes it possible

Canada isn’t casual about political influence. Candidates file campaign finance disclosures. Election advertising sponsors register and report. Provincial lobbyists register, name the officials they meet, and record the subjects. MLAs file conflict-of-interest statements. And as of 4 August 2026 the federal Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act is in force, complete with a public register, penalties up to a million dollars, and a commissioner who until recently was British Columbia’s own Chief Electoral Officer. Arrangements that predate the Act have sixty days to be declared, landing on 3 October, two weeks before British Columbians vote in local elections. The Act explicitly reaches municipal races.

What it captures are arrangements with foreign states. After all that legislative effort, it won’t touch a single organization working ordinary political influence on your October ballot. Ottawa has shown, at considerable expense, that this country knows how to build a public transparency register when it decides something matters. It has built one that reaches Victoria City Hall while covering a category of influence that barely exists at the municipal level. The influence that actually shapes your council remains outside anything a resident can look up.

The federal Lobbying Act goes further still. An organization doesn’t need to meet a minister to trigger reporting. Paid grassroots campaigning, appeals to the public through media or direct contact that urge people to pressure a public office holder, is registrable in its own right. Ottawa decided years ago that mobilizing the public is itself a form of influence the public is entitled to see on the record. Dogwood does this work and describes it in its own reports. Aimed at Ottawa, that kind of organized pressure is a matter of public record. Aimed at the legislature in Victoria, Dogwood registers and files properly. Aimed at your city council in the middle of a general local election, it is nothing at all. Not exempt after consideration. Simply outside every regime this country has built.

At the municipal level in British Columbia almost nothing else applies. The Lobbyists Transparency Act stops at the provincial door. An organization can meet your mayor, your councillors, your chief administrative officer and your entire planning department as often as it likes, on any file, for any purpose, and no registry in this province records that it happened. Victoria keeps no municipal lobbyist registry. Neither does Saanich, Oak Bay, Esquimalt, View Royal, Colwood, Langford, Vancouver or Burnaby. Surrey and Kelowna operate voluntary ones, a polite way of saying registries nobody has to use. Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton and Brampton have run mandatory registries for years at trivial cost.

The responsibility for that gap is traceable. Under provincial law a BC municipality may create a voluntary registry but has no authority to compel registration. Only the legislature can change that. The cities have asked. Saanich pressed for a province-wide system. The Union of BC Municipalities formally requested one that municipalities could opt into. In September 2025 Victoria council directed legal staff to report on the viability of a registry or of pushing the province to extend the existing legislation, on a motion moved by Councillor Jeremy Caradonna. David Eby’s government hasn’t moved. The gap that remains is the exact gap a province-wide political operation is currently using. A government that wanted municipal lobbying on the public record could put it there in a single legislative session. This one hasn’t, while its own party was rewriting its constitution to keep the same organization out of its leadership races.

In March 2023 Saanich council voted five to four against a motion that would have done nothing more than direct staff to examine what a registry might involve. Five elected officials decided the question of who is lobbying their own government wasn’t worth the staff time. Those decisions were taken in public by people whose names are in the minutes. They’re choices, made repeatedly, and their combined effect is that municipal political influence in British Columbia is among the least visible political activity in the country.

The one name that appears

Follow Dogwood’s public obligations and they converge on one person. Matt Takach is Operations Director. He’s the senior officer named on its Lobbyists Transparency Act registration. He’s the Privacy Officer named in the policy governing the survey now collecting telephone numbers across British Columbia. He signed the Elections BC third-party sponsor filing in 2014, signed it again in 2022, and is the Authorized Principal Official on the 2026 register of sponsors published 4 August. Four sets of statutory duties, one name.

At the provincial level you can see exactly what he does, because the law requires him to write it down. Activity reports record contacts with MLAs and ministers across parties: Adam Olsen of the Greens, opposition members Greg Kyllo, Kevin Falcon and Mike Bernier, and New Democrat ministers Mitzi Dean, Josie Osborne and Bruce Ralston. Lobbying Activity Report 3244-40436 records a contact on 7 March 2025 with the Hon. Diana Gibson, Minister of Citizens’ Services. Name, date, subject, filed under statutory obligation. A functioning transparency regime produces that kind of record. Dogwood complies with it.

Take the same organization, the same officer and the same methods down one level of government, to the council that decides your zoning, your policing and your taxes, and the entire record disappears. Not because anyone hid it. Because at the municipal level no one is required to write anything down. The same person may meet your mayor as often as he likes and nothing is logged: no report, no name, no subject. No citizen has any practical way of finding out.

Elections BC’s contributions database holds three entries under that name: five dollars on 10 March 2022, fifty dollars on 3 October 2022, and $77.42 on 8 January 2023. All three went to Jeremy Caradonna, elected to Victoria council in 2022 and now also a Capital Regional District director. They total $132.42. A search returns those three records and nothing else, in any jurisdiction, ever.

A hundred and thirty-two dollars buys nothing and isn’t meant to. Read it as a measurement instead. That figure is the complete extent of what the disclosure regime in this province will show you about how Dogwood relates to the people sitting on your council. Every meeting, every call, every conversation about a file before it comes to a vote falls outside any registry that exists in British Columbia. What the public gets is $132.42, disclosed only because a provincial statute happened to reach it, and nothing else.

The front door of Canadian democracy has guards, cameras, a visitors’ book, and, as of this week, a federal commissioner carrying a million-dollar penalty. The back door doesn’t even have a latch. An organization can build a province-wide file of identified voters aimed at a municipal election, promote it with paid advertising, work it through the campaign, keep it afterwards, and walk into the office of any councillor in British Columbia without a single municipal disclosure obligation attaching to any of it.

In 2009-10, foundations, businesses and organizations made up 63 percent of Dogwood’s total revenue. The annual report named all sixteen of them, right down to “Tides Foundation USA – Tar Sands Fund.” In 2025 institutional grants are 39 percent of a much larger budget, and they won’t name one.

Part Three is about sovereignty.

Sources

Every factual claim is drawn from public documents: Dogwood’s annual reports for the years ended 31 March 2010 through 2025; its privacy policy, LinkedIn profile and website; the Instagram survey advertisement and linked form captured 4 August 2026; Elections BC’s 20 October 2022 news release, third-party sponsor register for 2026, and political contributions database; the BC Lobbyists Registry; BC Registry records; minutes of Saanich council (March 2023) and Victoria council (September 2025); UBCM resolutions; municipal lobbyist registries in Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton and Brampton; the Lobbyists Transparency Act, Local Elections Campaign Financing Act and Personal Information Protection Act of British Columbia; the federal Lobbying Act and Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act; and the Alberta Public Inquiry into Anti-Alberta Energy Campaigns.

Disclaimer

The documents, figures, dates, quotations and filings above are matters of public record. The characterisations and judgments built on them are the opinions of the writer, offered as fair comment on a matter of public interest, the general local elections of 17 October 2026. No person or organization named is alleged to have broken any law. The central argument is the opposite: that the conduct described is lawful, and that its lawfulness is the problem. Matt Takach is named solely in his public capacities. The three contributions total $132.42; no improper purpose is alleged. Jeremy Caradonna is named as an elected official; no claim is made that any contribution influenced any decision. The Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act is cited for comparison only; no suggestion is made that Dogwood holds an arrangement requiring registration under it. Dogwood is registered with Elections BC as a third-party advertising sponsor for the 2026 general local elections.

AUG 05, 2026

To our loyal readers,

We are asking for your help to restore public comments to the City of Victoria’s social media accounts.

Signing the petition takes less than a minute.

Turn The Comments On

BC Politics Watch is a Victoria-based civic accountability publication. Since May, we have published 28 investigative articles into the decisions of Victoria City Council, reporting on matters local media has not covered in detail. This message is being sent to businesses across Victoria as part of a public campaign. It was not sent from a subscription list, and you will not receive any further messages from us.

The City of Victoria, under Mayor Marianne Alto, has kept public comments turned off across all of its social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram and X. With the municipal election taking place on October 17, residents and businesses should be able to engage with one another on the public platforms funded by their own tax dollars.

A comment section is more than a way to speak to Council. It is a public forum. It is where residents and business owners hear one another, where a shop owner on one block discovers another three streets away is facing the same problem, where someone who has read the staff report can correct someone who has not. Private frustration becomes public discussion. That exchange is part of how democratic accountability works, and it disappears when comments are turned off.

Every alternative the City offers is private. An email, telephone call or direct message reaches only a staff member and no one else. A business can object to parking changes, patio permits, street closures or zoning decisions, and no other business will ever know the concern was raised.

The remaining opportunities for public participation have narrowed as well. Speaking to Council requires registering days in advance, attending City Hall during a weekday meeting and speaking for only a few minutes. On a growing number of matters, public hearings have been eliminated altogether. When asked to justify keeping comments disabled, the City’s Director of Communications and Engagement described the City’s social media accounts as “operational,” not political, and said that if a resident “just wants to complain about a council decision,” then “that’s not the channel to do that.”

The justification does not withstand scrutiny. Facebook, Instagram and X all provide automatic moderation tools that filter abusive language, spam and harassment. The comments could be restored with a single decision of Council.

If you believe City Hall should allow public discussion on its own public communications, please sign the petition. We would also be grateful if you shared it with another Victoria business, friends, and family.

Sign the petition: https://www.change.org/TurnTheCommentsOn

Read the full investigation:

BC Politics Watch

Turn the Comments Back On

A note to readers. We began this publication out of concern for civic accountability in Victoria. What we found was a troubling pattern: major decisions taken with little scrutiny, and a local press that too often reprinted the City’s press releases instead of asking the hard questions. Taken together, it amounts to a steady erosion of the democratic pr…

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Disclosure: No contributions are solicited and none are required. Any payment prompted by change.org is retained by change.org as company revenue and does not reach this publication. Subscription to BC Politics Watch is free. No email addresses or personal information are retained from this list. The most effective form of support is circulating the petition among residents of Victoria directly.

“British Columbia is a resource colony founded on land theft, white supremacy and genocide.”

That sentence sits at the top of the Indigenous Rights page on Dogwood BC’s website, published under its own name, and has been there for anyone who cared to look. It is what the organization says about this province when it is speaking to people who already agree with it.

Here is what Dogwood pays to put in front of people who have never heard of it. The advertisement running on Instagram this month is plain, headed Elections Survey: Cost of Living, and the copy underneath is the most reasonable thing you will read all week. Do you want affordable housing and cheap transit? Municipal governments have the power to address the cost of living crisis. Take our short survey about BC’s 2026 municipal elections. It could have come from a public library, and it looks it.

Picture a young woman scrolling. A Tuesday evening, at home, and there it is between holiday photographs and a pair of shoes she looked at once. There is nothing in it about resource colonies, nothing about what the organization behind the survey believes, and nothing to suggest she is doing anything other than answering a survey about her rent.

She is not answering a survey. She is being recruited, and the form is built to make sure of it.

Before it asks her a single question about voting, about housing, about transit, about the cost of anything at all, it takes five things: first name, last name, email address, telephone number and postal code, every one mandatory, with no way past. Only then do the questions begin. Has she voted municipally before and in which years, does she turn out provincially and federally, will she vote on October 17, what might stop her, what would help, and which five local issues matter most to her. Then, at the very bottom of the page, after everything else has been extracted, a dropdown listing every municipality and regional district in British Columbia from 100 Mile House to Zeballos, asking where she actually votes.

That question, alone on the entire form, is optional.

Her municipality is the one piece of information anybody would need in order to help her vote. It fixes the date of her election, the address of her polling station and the names on her ballot, and without it nobody can send her so much as a useful reminder. Dogwood made it optional. Her telephone number, which reveals nothing about where or when she votes, is compulsory.

A postal code already resolves to a municipality, so they did not need to ask. They made optional the one field they could derive for themselves and mandatory the one field they could not derive at all, because a telephone number is the only item on that page that cannot be reconstructed from anything else she gave them. No campaign in history has paid money for anonymous opinions, which cannot be phoned, texted, canvassed, scored, segmented by turnout probability or matched against a voters list. What campaigns buy is a name welded to an opinion welded to a live number. The survey is not the product. She is.

The impartiality con

An organization holding an uncompromising political view of this province has bought advertising that presents itself as neutral civic information, and aimed it at people chosen because they have never heard of Dogwood. Anybody who has heard of Dogwood does not need to be handled this way.

Dogwood is filed with Elections BC as a third party advertising sponsor for the 2026 local elections, it has hired a Municipal Elections Campaigner, and it has announced a campaign to run through the municipal cycle. But the woman on Instagram is not consulting a register she has never heard of. She is looking at a red square about her rent, and the red square does not tell her that the people asking hold views she might find extreme, or that answering will enrol her in a list, or that she is going to be telephoned. It presents as information and it works as extraction. Every mechanism underneath it is built to keep her from noticing the difference, which is what you call a vehicle that gets inside the gates by looking like something else.

Press submit and you land on a page at dogwoodbc.ca/your-subscription/survey-complete-pb/. Look at the words in that address. The page itself says only “Your survey answers have been submitted. Thanks again!” and mentions no subscription, names no list, and offers no way to leave whatever has just been joined. The form is not even running on Dogwood’s systems. It runs on tfaforms.com, an American platform, and where the personal information of British Columbians travels after it leaves her phone, and whose laws govern it once it lands, appears on the form nowhere, in the privacy policy nowhere, and on the website nowhere. She is not told, she is not asked, and she cannot find out.

The privacy policy, which the survey does not link to and almost nobody will hunt down, states the purpose without embarrassment. People who “subscribe, or take an online action” may be contacted afterwards, and the methods are itemised: “We may e-mail, phone, text or mail you to talk to you about making a donation or taking further actions.” That is what her telephone number is for. She surrendered it to get information about voting, and its function is to let them ask her for money. The same document explains how her answers are bolted back onto her name, and Dogwood is describing surveys specifically when it writes: “URLs contained in e-mails may contain an ID that enables us to correctly identify the person who takes an action using a web page. We use these URLs to simplify the process of signing petitions and filling out surveys.” Correctly identify the person. This was never anonymous and was never meant to be. The policy is equally clear about where parts of her record travel afterwards, providing that postal addresses belonging to smaller donors and to newsletter subscribers “may be made available to like-minded organizations doing good work unless you request otherwise,” with the burden of refusal falling on her and requiring a telephone call to an office in Victoria.

Then, having taken her name, her email, her telephone number, her postal code, her voting history and her politics, they ask her for money. “I’m asking you to be the agent of change we all need in 2026. Together we’re working to stop the Ksi Lisims LNG terminal, and go toe to toe with the fossil industry. Please chip in today!”

Read what she was invited to fund. Not a turnout drive, not a housing campaign, not cheap transit, and nothing to do with the municipal election the advertisement was about or the cost of living crisis it promised to address. She is asked to bankroll a campaign against a liquefied natural gas terminal eight hundred kilometres up the coast, on a subject she was never asked about, by an organization whose name she may still not know. The advertisement was about her rent. The invoice is for something else, and the distance between the two tells you how much the opening pitch had to do with the purpose.

What is in the file at the end of it is her identity, four separate ways to reach her, her voting history, her stated intention this October, the thing most likely to keep her at home, and a ranked list of the arguments that move her.

The omissions settle the question more completely than anything the form does contain. The survey does not ask her age. It does not ask her date of birth, her gender, her income, her household, her occupation or her education. It collects no demographic information at all.

Anybody who has commissioned research knows why that is disqualifying. Demographics are not decoration on an opinion survey, they are the instrument that makes one work. Without age and gender at minimum you cannot weight a sample, you cannot correct for the fact that the people who answered are not the people who did not, and you cannot say one defensible thing about the population you claim to be measuring. A pollster who reported findings from an unweighted, self-selected online form carrying no demographic fields would be finished in the trade. Whatever else this instrument is, it cannot generate valid research about British Columbian opinion, and it was not built to.

So consider what it does measure. Stripped of everything else, the substantive content of that form is which five issues move her, whether she has voted before, and whether she will vote again in October. It is not asking who she is. It is asking what she believes and whether she can be relied on to turn up, which are the only two variables that matter to an organization deciding where to spend its effort. Sorted on those axes, a name becomes a category. Persuadable, committed, unreachable, worth a phone call, worth a door.

And it will be a door. Her postal code, six characters, resolves in any urban area to roughly one side of one street, and sometimes to a single apartment building. Set that beside a named individual who has volunteered that she intends to vote and has ranked the issues that would move her, and the result is not an opinion. It is a canvassing target, accurate to the block, with a telephone number attached so somebody can establish who is home and receptive before anybody bothers walking it.

The form is missing exactly the fields a survey cannot function without, and contains exactly the fields a canvass cannot function without. This is not a research instrument that happens to have contact details attached. It is a canvassing tool wearing the costume of a research instrument, and the costume is the only reason she filled it in.

British Columbia has a statute directly on point. The Personal Information Protection Act requires an organization to tell you why it is collecting your information at or before the moment it collects it, limits collection to what a reasonable person would consider appropriate in the circumstances, and prohibits demanding more than is necessary as the price of a service. It binds societies like Dogwood, and the Information and Privacy Commissioner enforces it. Nobody has put a word of this in front of her.

Epilogue

The form is live as you read this, and it is not a Victoria instrument. It covers the whole province, and the election it points at is seventy-four days away.

Turnout in a British Columbia local election runs near a third of eligible voters. The people who show up decide it for everybody who stays home, which is why an organization able to identify, sort and telephone even a few thousand reliable voters in the right postal codes is not doing something marginal at the edges of a campaign. It is doing the only thing that reliably works.

So if you have not filled it in, don’t. If you have, that Act gives you three things you can do about it. You can withdraw your consent, on reasonable notice, which ends the basis on which they hold and use what you gave them. You can ask what personal information they hold about you and how it has been used or disclosed, and they are obliged to answer. And you can ask that it be corrected, or destroyed once the purpose it was collected for has passed, because an organization is not permitted to keep personal information longer than is reasonably necessary.

Those requests go to the Privacy Officer, and every organization caught by the Act must designate one and make the contact available. Dogwood’s policy names Matt Takach. Which is the last thing worth noticing about the whole arrangement. He is the only individual a British Columbian can identify anywhere in this operation, and finding him means going through a policy the form never showed you.

None of which answers the question sitting underneath all of it. Somebody paid for that advertising. Somebody is paying for the campaigner, the platform, the province-wide reach and every week of work between now and the vote. For eleven years Dogwood published exactly who that was, name by name, with the countries attached. In 2020 it stopped, and it has said nothing since.

Part Two is about the money.

Sources

Dogwood BC’s Indigenous Rights page, for the quoted sentence. The “Elections Survey: Cost of Living” advertisement on Instagram, the linked form hosted at tfaforms.com, and the confirmation page at dogwoodbc.ca/your-subscription/survey-complete-pb/, all captured 4 August 2026, for field requirements, mandatory and optional status, question wording and the absence of any demographic field. Dogwood’s published privacy policy, for all quoted passages on contact methods, respondent identification, address sharing and the designation of the Privacy Officer. The Elections BC register of third party sponsors for the 2026 general local elections, published 4 August 2026. The Personal Information Protection Act of British Columbia.

Disclaimer

The documents, figures, dates and quotations above are matters of record. The characterisations built on them are not. Where this article describes the survey as a canvassing instrument, or describes the advertising as presenting itself as something it is not, those are the opinions of BC Politics Watch, offered as fair comment on a matter of significant public interest, namely the general local elections of 17 October 2026.

No person or organization named here is alleged to have broken any law, or to have committed any offence, breach or regulatory contravention.

Dogwood is registered with Elections BC as a third party advertising sponsor for the 2026 general local elections, and the Instagram advertising described here carries the disclaimer Meta requires for political and social issue advertising.

Demonstrable factual errors will be corrected promptly and the correction noted. Write to contact.bcpoliticswatch@proton.me

Switching off public comment is part of that same erosion, one more way residents have been shut out of their own civic life. What Victorians still have is an election, and even that arrives crowded with entrenched interests. If our work has been useful to you, we are asking you to do more than read it. Please sign our petition, below, and send it to others who should see it. We demand that the City of Victoria turn the comments back on. If it refuses, it will have shown plainly how little regard it holds for democracy and for the public, and it will confirm the erosion we have spent this publication documenting. We will be alerting democracy watchdogs across the country.

Sign the petition: Turn the Comments Back On at Victoria City Hall

Since August 2, 2024, the City of Victoria has run its social media as a one-way broadcast. On Facebook, on Instagram, on X, the public cannot leave a comment. The City still posts several times a day. It still spends public money to announce what it has decided about housing, streets, parks, taxes, and how each councillor voted. And it permits no reply of any kind. Residents can read what the City says and can say nothing back to it, and nothing to one another, on the channels the City controls.

The City calls this protection. Its own record says otherwise. Sheldon Johnson, its Director of Communications and Engagement, has pointed to a racist reaction under a Family Day post and a heated argument under a post about EV chargers, yet by the City’s own account staff were already moderating those channels through the workday, hiding comments and enforcing the rules, the ordinary work of running a public account. Rather than keep doing it, the City switched off every resident on every platform, permanently. Where a paid post will not let comments be disabled, staff now go in and delete them by hand. The City of Victoria employs people to erase what residents write.

What the City cannot explain away is the reason its own communications director gave. Asked to justify the shutoff, Johnson did not confine himself to hate speech. He described the City’s platforms as “not political channels” but “operational,” and said that if a resident “just wants to complain about a council decision,” then “that’s not the channel to do that.” The accounts the City uses to tell residents what council has done are, by the City’s own explanation, closed to residents who want to contest what council has done. The offer Johnson holds out as compensation, that there are “more ways to contact the city than at any time in our history,” describes only private channels. You can send an email, and no other member of the public will ever see it. You can phone, or send a direct message, and it reaches a staffer and no one else. Every avenue the City has left open is one where you speak alone. It is hard not to see the point of an arrangement built that way, one that keeps you from ever learning that a neighbour three streets over is worried about the same decision. Governments have always had far more to fear from residents who find each other than from residents kept apart.

The shutoff was never really about keeping abuse off the City’s pages, and the City has shown as much. At a Committee of the Whole meeting on July 23, 2026, council spent roughly forty minutes on an amendment to have staff answer public concern about an Old Town development by treating it as misinformation. Councillor Dave Thompson brought the amendment:

“There is a ton of misinformation on social media right now. If anybody’s not aware of that, just Google it. ... It is incumbent now that so much has been misunderstood about this that we clarify the actual facts.”

Asked how the City would push that message out, its Director of Communications and Engagement, the same Sheldon Johnson who had switched the public’s comments off, answered:

“Cost would be minimal to nothing. As you’re aware, we have many social media channels, like Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, that sort of thing. As well, we would make use of our website and our media relationships that we have as well, and make sure that we point people to... the source of truth.”

Then Mayor Marianne Alto took the pen to the wording herself, to make the directive broader rather than narrower:

“Is it necessary for there to be a recitation of examples of different media, or is it sufficient for it to simply say via multiple usual channels?”

“The reason that I asked is because often when we begin to cite examples we miss something. And so rather than limiting this to the one, two, three, four, five items that you’ve identified, if we simply said via the city’s usual multiple channels of communication and then left it to our staff, they would access all of those. Would that be sufficient for you?”

The specific list came out. An open-ended mandate to use every channel the City has went in.

Put that beside the shutoff. A government that has closed the channels where residents could answer back spent the better part of an hour of a public meeting deciding to brand residents’ concerns as misinformation and to cast itself as the source of truth. It means to tell the story, to decide what counts as true, and to leave no public place where either can be questioned. This is the mayor of British Columbia’s capital lending her own hand to it, refining the motion that brands residents’ concerns as misinformation and sends the City’s version out through every channel it owns, while the public’s replies stay switched off everywhere the public could see them.

The hypocrisy is not subtle. City staff will step into a community Facebook group of some 18,000 residents to attack a publication that questions City Hall, but will not let a single resident leave a comment on the City's own pages. We documented one such case: a member of Mayor Alto's office warning that group against this publication, which sources and documents everything it prints. City staff will use an open comment section when it belongs to someone else. They just will not allow comments on their own pages.

A comment section is more than a way to speak to government. It is where residents discover they are not alone, where someone who has read the staff report corrects someone who has not, where private frustration becomes public discussion. That is precisely what disappears when the comments are switched off.

This pattern is well documented, and not only in outright dictatorships. When researchers reconstructed how China polices its own internet, they found a state that tolerates a great deal of ordinary complaint and moves hardest against anything that helps people coordinate. The posts that get scrubbed are less the ones that insult the leadership than the ones that might gather a crowd. What a government like that fears is not criticism but assembly. Analysts who track authoritarian states online describe switching off comments as the softer edge of the same instinct, a method that leaves nothing to point at, no deleted post and no visible hand, only a conversation that never takes place. It is worth asking who refuses to use it. Inside China, the American, Australian and Japanese embassies keep their comments open, posting from within an authoritarian country, because a government that answers to its public has little reason to fear the reply. The accounts that fall silent tend to be the host state’s own. A government that broadcasts to its citizens around the clock while the channel to reply stays closed is not running a debate but a bulletin, and Pravda, too, printed letters from its readers once the editors had settled which ones would run. Victoria has taken that same route, talking at residents day and night while the one channel that would let them answer, and hear each other, stays shut.

The scale of the office changes none of this. An elected government draws its legitimacy from the governed being able to speak, to be heard, and to hear one another, most of all when they disagree. Take that away and what is left is the shell of a democracy without the substance of one: elections still held, meetings still minuted, press releases still issued, and no open room in which the public can answer back. A government that believes it governs with the public’s consent leaves that room open. A government that bolts it shut is telling you how little it thinks that consent is worth.

The invitation to come to council instead collapses on contact with the process. To speak, a resident must register in advance, travel downtown at a fixed hour on a weekday, and speak for about five minutes, usually while council listens without responding. On a growing list of decisions the public hearing has been removed outright, under provincial rules the Council adopted, taking away the one forum where an ordinary resident once stood on equal footing with a developer. For a shift worker, a parent doing school pickup, a senior who does not drive at night, or a resident with a disability, that room was never especially open. The comment section was the most accessible door left, and the City closed it.

They were switched off two years ago, and they have stayed off through two years of contested decisions, right into an election year, the very stretch when a city ought to be arguing with itself most openly, as residents decide who represents them. Every objection now goes into a private inbox where it can be logged and set aside. Whatever the shutoff was sold as, in the weeks before a vote it shields not staff but the people on the ballot. The City announces a council decision, and the resident who believes it a mistake can post nothing beneath the announcement, nor learn whether a thousand neighbours share the doubt. The message goes out; the reply has no address. Every day, at public expense, Mayor Marianne Alto and the councillors seeking re-election appear in that feed with their record on display and the public’s response switched off beneath it, free, on the same platforms, to buy whatever campaign advertising they please. The officeholder reaches the voter. The voter reaches no one, not the official and not the neighbour who shares the doubt. A platform fit to broadcast the City’s decisions, and to run a re-election campaign on, is fit to let a resident leave a comment. Open the comments.

The claim that the City could not keep slurs off its pages collapses on its own terms. Every platform it uses already includes free controls built for the exact abuse it describes. Facebook and Instagram can automatically hide slurs and harassment through a word filter that is switched on by default, with no staffer and no judgment call required to strip a racist term off a page. The technology to keep the worst language out already exists and runs for nothing. And this is not a city short of staff or money in any case. Between 2016 and 2024, while Victoria’s population grew by roughly 8 percent, its ranks of exempt managers nearly doubled, from 56 to 111. Its city manager’s total compensation has climbed above $300,000, reaching roughly $350,000 in 2023. In one summer the City found $10.35 million for a program it branded “community safety and wellbeing.”

But cost was never the real question, and moderation is not really the issue either. The deeper problem is that City Hall cannot be trusted to moderate fairly. A government that already brands residents’ concerns as misinformation and casts itself as the source of truth is the last body that should decide which comments are allowed to stand. Hand it that discretion and it would use it to make criticism disappear. The answer is not to trust the City to police the conversation, but to take that discretion away from it. Let automation filter out the slurs, and otherwise leave the comments wide open, all the way through the election, so residents can say exactly what they think about the people asking for their votes. Making sure residents have a voice, and can hear one another, is the kind of wellbeing the City claims to be funding.

This is not a mayor and council with a light record to answer for. The same council that switched off the comments has pushed major decisions through with little or no public process. It rezoned the working harbour in a single day, with no public hearing and no public notice. It settled the Dowler Place shelter in a closed session, and when the anger came the mayor conceded that early engagement never happened because the council “knew what the comments would be from the public.” Alongside that has run a decade of spending that beggars belief: the Johnson Street Bridge sold to voters at $63 million and delivered at $105 million, the Crystal Pool conceived near $69 million and now above $209 million, the downtown bike network budgeted around $37 million and run past $65 million. A council with a record like that has the most to lose from an open public square, and the most reason to want it closed.

Set the comment shutoff in its full context, because it is not the only door that has closed. One avenue of public accountability after another has been removed or hollowed out.

• No independent auditor. British Columbia shut down its Auditor General for Local Government in 2020, so no dedicated watchdog now examines how a city hall spends public money.

• No independent check on conduct. British Columbia has no province-wide integrity commissioner for local government, and Victoria has appointed none of its own, so complaints about how a councillor behaves are judged by council itself.

• No lobbyist registry. Lobbying a BC city council does not have to be disclosed anywhere. The province’s lobbyist registry covers only provincial officials and expressly excludes local government, so who is pressing councillors, and for what, stays off the public record.

• No public hearing. On a growing list of decisions the hearing where residents once spoke on the record has been removed, under provincial rules the Council adopted.

• No public comment. Across every City social media channel, the public’s ability to respond, and to see one another respond, has been switched off since August 2024.

Set side by side, they describe a city government that has stripped out, one avenue at a time, nearly every public place where a resident could stand and question it. None of it happened by accident. Each door was closed by a deliberate vote, a budget line, a bylaw, and what is left is power with almost nothing to check it.

This Thursday, July 30, council meets again, and part of it will happen where residents cannot follow, behind closed doors, off camera. It is the whole method in one morning: the announcements public, the decisions private, the people who pay for both shut out of the room. None of this is hard to reverse. The comments go back on with a single decision, and a council that still refuses is telling you the silence was always the point. It is counting on a public it has kept apart to forget by October. This record is here so it will not, and the petition is where the public finds itself again. Turn the comments on. Open the doors.

We will keep publishing.

BC Politics Watch

Sign the petition: Turn the Comments Back On at Victoria City Hall

Sources

Sheldon Johnson, Director of Communications and Engagement, City of Victoria, remarks to a CPRS Vancouver Island Lunch and Learn on the decision to disable comments, quoted from the recorded session. Gary King, Jennifer Pan and Margaret Roberts, "How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression," American Political Science Review (2013), which found that vitriolic criticism of the state was left up while posts with collective-action potential were censored. “Weibo diplomacy and censorship in China,” Australian Strategic Policy Institute, on disabling comments as soft censorship and on democratic embassies keeping comments open. “City of Victoria shuts down public comments on social media, citing rise in hate,” Times Colonist, on the August 2024 shutoff. Staffing and pay figures (exempt managers rising from 56 to 111, 2016 to 2024; city manager base remuneration above $283,000 in 2024 and total compensation near $350,000 in 2023) are drawn from the City of Victoria’s Statements of Financial Information, as compiled in BC Politics Watch, “City Coffers.” The $10.35 million community safety and wellbeing package was approved by Council in July 2025 (City of Victoria; CBC News). The harbour rezoning without public hearing or notice, the Dowler Place closed-session decision and the mayor’s quoted concession on skipped engagement, and the capital cost overruns (Johnson Street Bridge, Crystal Pool, cycling network) are documented in BC Politics Watch, “No Public Hearing, No Public Notice” and “City Coffers,” drawn from council records, adopted budgets, and CHEK News freedom-of-information reporting. Platform moderation tools per Meta’s Facebook and Instagram Help Centre documentation on comment controls and the Hidden Words filter. Councillor Dave Thompson’s direction to staff regarding misinformation and Sheldon Johnson’s “source of truth” remark are from the City of Victoria Committee of the Whole meeting of July 23, 2026, per the public meeting recording. The Auditor General for Local Government was closed by the Province of British Columbia in 2020 (Times Colonist). British Columbia has no province-wide municipal integrity commissioner regime, and councillor conduct is handled internally by each council; Vancouver, under its own charter, is the exception (CBC News). British Columbia’s Lobbyists Transparency Act applies only to provincial public office holders and expressly excludes local governments; the Union of BC Municipalities has called for a municipal lobbying registry, none currently existing (Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists for BC; UBCM).

Old Town is the oldest quarter of Victoria, a protected heritage district of brick warehouses and nineteenth-century storefronts that is one of the reasons people come to the city at all. On Thursday, City Council decided that residents worried about its future were spreading “misinformation,” and voted to spend public money to tell them so.

The document at the centre of it hides all of this behind a bland title: a July 10 planning report called “Economic and Employment Land Solutions.” Inside were proposals to loosen the rules for downtown development. Raise density in the central business district without requiring a rezoning. Offer new hotels a property-tax holiday of up to ten years. And rewrite the Downtown Core Area Plan so that taller, denser hotels could be approved in Old Town, above the limit that has long protected its scale. Residents read it and mobilized. Many wrote in. Critics were in the gallery.

Council’s response, on July 23, went past advancing the plan. It set the Old Town rewrite aside for a later process, then turned on the people who had raised the alarm. Council directed city staff to produce a public rebuttal to those residents, to push it out through the city’s social media and a letter to the editor of the Times Colonist, and, in the words of the motion as first written, to correct their “misinformation.” On the same file, council voted 4-5 to waive the public hearing, the one forum where those residents could have answered on the record.

A city closing the channels its critics use to speak, while spending public money to become the only voice they hear is the story here, and it is bigger than a zoning number.

This is a direction council passed, not something the city has yet carried out. The FAQ and the letter may not have appeared by the time you read this. What follows is drawn from the meeting record and the motion sheet shown on the council chamber screen.

BC Politics Watch is independent. We take direction from no candidate, party, or campaign. The findings below are drawn from the public record of a public meeting.

What The Motion Said

The instruction came from Councillor Dave Thompson. His motion, item 7 on the council motion sheet, was edited live on the shared screen. As first written, it read:

“Direct staff to communicate via an FAQ via multiple channels, e.g. city website, e-newsletter, HAC, a letter to editor of Times Colonist, and social media accounts, the fact that no height or density changes are proposed to the old town district zone, and more generally correcting common misconceptions and misinformation in emails received by or forwarded to staff.”

Read what that authorizes. City staff, on the public payroll, would write a letter to the editor of the daily paper and post to the city’s social media accounts, to correct “misconceptions and misinformation.” Not a response to a single false statement. A standing instruction to place the city’s version of a contested decision in the press.

Then the record shows the wording change. Councillor Stephen Hammond objected to branding residents’ concerns as misinformation:

“I did not find any misinformation. I found people had a very negative reaction… because they were concerned about what was going on in Old Town.”

Hammond moved to strike the word. Council backed him, 8-1. The lone vote to keep officially labelling the public’s speech “misinformation” was Thompson’s, who argued the label should survive in some form: “if we can’t use words like misconception or misinformation, let’s call it something else.”

On the screen, the motion was sanded down. The named channels, including “a letter to editor of Times Colonist,” were generalized to “the City’s usual media channels.” The “misconceptions and misinformation” clause was struck through. The plan survived intact. Only the language that exposed it was removed.

What Was Said In The Room

Thompson was direct about who he blamed. Not the sixteen-page staff report released days before the vote. The public:

“I don’t think that it was confusing actually in the staff report. I think what was confusing is that people were receiving a ton of information from a variety of sources other than the staff report…people were misled by that information.”

“There is a ton of misinformation on social media right now.”

Even Councillor Marg Gardiner, no ally of the online critics, put the confusion on the city, not the residents: “I and a lot of other people, very learned people, misunderstood what was there because of the information gap in that paper.”

Councillor Susan Kim asked the city’s Director of Communications and Engagement, Sheldon Johnson, what channels the rebuttal would use, and what it would cost. His answer:

“Cost would be minimal to nothing… we have many social media channels — like Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram… As well as… our website and our media relationships that we have as well, and make sure that we point out people to… the source of truth.”

Start with the two things Johnson said in the same breath. The cost: “minimal to nothing.” The reason: the city already owns the platforms, and it counts the press among its “media relationships,” a channel it can point people through, toward “the source of truth.” That is the phrase a public official used, on the record, to describe the city’s own account of a contested political decision, to be pushed across social media and handed to the local press before council had finished voting.

Kim asked whether it might inflame tensions. Johnson: “no, I don’t perceive that as a risk.” He conceded it broke practice: “it’s not typical for us to do things like that before the ratify… a step out of what would be a normal process.” Council took the step.

Councillor Jeremy Caradonna, explaining why he would deny the public a hearing, said:

“…through the number seven that was added in, in which an FAQ will go out, and through this conversation that I assume will be reported on by the media today and tomorrow.”

A councillor voted down the hearing and reassured himself the public would get the city’s version anyway, through the FAQ and through the press, which he assumed would carry it. The motion had just named the Times Colonist. He was not worried the paper would test the city’s account. He was counting on it to print it.

There is an old word for a state apparatus that manufactures an official line and pushes it out through every channel it controls. The Soviets called it agitprop, short for agitation and propaganda. Victoria is not the Soviet Union. But a government directing its own employees to write an FAQ, post it across the city’s accounts, and place a letter in the local paper is doing, in miniature, what agitprop was built to do, produce the approved version and carry it to the public through the machinery of the state.

What The City Turned Off A Year Ago

This is not the first time the city narrowed the public’s voice. Records of a recorded professional talk this year show that on August 2, 2024, Victoria switched off comments on its Facebook, X, and Instagram accounts. Every post. Where paid posts would not allow it, staff would “proactively go in and delete” comments.

Johnson’s stated reasoning: the accounts are “operational, not political,” so if a resident “just wants to complain about a council decision… that’s not the channel.” Most people who commented, he said, “didn’t actually have real questions… they just wanted that platform to air whatever.”

The city has 66,000 followers on X alone. That comment section was one of the few public places a resident could see that a neighbour three streets over shared their worry and say so where others could read it. The city closed it.

Then came July. Residents raised the Old Town alarm anyway; on the platforms the city had muted and in posts they signed with their own names. The city’s answer was not to switch the comments back on. It was to write its own version of events, push it out across those same accounts and into the Times Colonist, and brand what residents were saying “misinformation.” First the city took away the public’s microphone. Then it kept the loudspeaker for itself.

The Hearing They Waived

On the same file, council voted 4-5 against a public hearing. It was legal and discretionary. It was also a choice. Councillors Caradonna, Dell, Kim, Loughton, and Thompson removed the one formal moment where residents are answered on the record. Councillor Chris Coleman named the alternative: “this could be achieved if we just got rid of number two and didn’t waive the requirement for a public hearing.”

Consider how the time was spent. By Councillor Dell’s own math, members had “ten minutes” each, “ninety minutes total,” before council voted to extend it to fifteen, none of it counting the staff presentation. By our count, roughly forty minutes went to the communications motion alone. The argument over how to tell the public it was wrong. Council spent that time drafting a rebuttal to residents while voting down the venue built to let those residents speak. As Coleman put it, waiving the hearing loses “the opportunity for the public to weigh in.”

Comments off. Hearing waived. Public money set to fund the official version. Three moves, one direction: fewer places the public can speak, one louder place the city speaks back.

Section 2(b) of the Charter protects freedom of expression, including freedom of the press. It binds municipalities. Nothing in it stops a government from correcting a factual error. But closing the public’s comments, then funding a “source of truth” and feeding it to the press, is not correcting the record. It is trying to own it.

Staff Are Meant To Be Neutral

Public servants in British Columbia are meant to be impartial. A city communications department exists to tell residents when a road closes and how to comment on a plan. It does not exist to referee a live political dispute on the government’s side, to label residents’ concerns “misinformation,” or to place the city’s rebuttal in the newspaper. When council directed staff to do that, it pointed a neutral public function at the government’s own critics. The staff did not invent the assignment. Council handed it to them. The failure was the elected officials’.

The calendar sharpenss it. This is an election year; council seats go before voters on October 17. The formal election-advertising rules under BC’s Local Elections Campaign Financing Act apply only in the final 28 days before the vote, so a July motion breaks no law. But those rules exist to protect a principle that holds all year. That principle is public money and public platforms should not be used to tilt political outcomes or shield officeholders from criticism. A taxpayer-funded rebuttal, aimed at the officeholders’ critics, sits against that principle whether or not the clock has started.

The Critic Is A Candidate

One of the leading critics of the Old Town changes is Arthur McInnis. He is a former construction and projects lawyer. Land use and the rules that govern a downtown rezoning are precisely adjacent to his expertise. The “misinformation” the city set out to correct came, in part, from a qualified critic.

His pre-meeting post, signed in his own name and headed “No Ceiling. No Hearing. No Appeal.,” is the critique the motion was very likely written to answer. McInnis too is a declared candidate for Victoria City Council in the October 17 election. He did not post from behind an anonymous account. He put his name to it, and on the day of the vote he sat in the City Hall gallery from 9 a.m. Council did not reach the item until the afternoon. He waited the day to hear his city decide.

He was not the only qualified person in that gallery, and not one of them was heard. A Committee of the Whole takes no public submissions on a report like this. The venue built for residents to speak on the record, the public hearing, was the one council waived. The room held the expertise to test the staff report, and the procedure to keep it silent.

The councillor who moved the rebuttal, Dave Thompson, is seeking re-election this fall, in the same race McInnis is running in. He is, in plain terms, a competitor of the candidate whose public arguments he moved to have city staff counter with public money.

Strip away the procedural language and what remains is plain. A council spent public money to counter the arguments of a declared candidate running against its own members, then shut the venues where he could answer. By any fair reading, that is the use of public resources to discredit a political opponent. The record is not ambiguous: the motion, the waived hearing, the candidate left silent in the gallery. The question council has not answered is why a councillor running for re-election moved and voted to spend public money against a rival at all, instead of declaring the conflict and stepping aside.

By His Own Standard

There is one more document, and it is Thompson’s own. On June 3, seven weeks before the vote, he published an op-ed in the Vancouver Sun, “We are living through a crisis in the quality of public information.” He warned voters about misinformation ahead of the October 17 election and told them what to do: “Check the source. Look for original documents, city staff reports, council minutes.” He warned of the “liar’s dividend,” the way bad actors “dismiss genuine information as fake.”

McInnis did exactly what Thompson prescribed. He checked the staff’s statements against the original documents, the staff report, the zoning bylaw, the Downtown Core Area Plan, the Official Community Plan, one by one. His conclusion was careful. By the councillor’s own published standard, the critic did the work right. The motion moved to call it misinformation.

The Tool Itself

Freedom of Information is the instrument citizens use to check any government. In the same season Councillor Thompson moved to have his city brand critics “misinformation,” the provincial minister responsible for FOI was narrowing it.

That minister, Diana Gibson, the NDP Minister of Citizens’ Services, is Thompson’s spouse and his former co-founder of the consulting firm the two built before politics. On May 28, 2026, Gibson carried Bill 9, the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Amendment Act, to passage. It did not pass quietly. The bill drew a filibuster that kept MLAs in the legislature until nearly four in the morning; the house rose at 3:54 a.m. The B.C. Conservatives moved to delay it six months for public consultation, and lost. It cleared its final reading on the session’s last day only on the Speaker’s tie-breaking vote, after the House divided evenly. The bill expands officials’ authority to refuse records requests they say would be too difficult to fulfil or would interfere with government operations, and softens the duty to respond “without delay” to “without unreasonable delay.” Critics from CBC to The Narwhal to Democracy Watch, and a detailed Sitka Media column by Dr. Yerzhan Dosmukhamedov, make the same case. It hands officials more room to delay and refuse, and shifts the burden onto the citizen.

We draw no conclusion about coordination between two people who are married. We note the record. At the province, a bill critics say weakens the right to know, carried by the responsible minister. At the city, her spouse moving to spend public money branding critics “misinformation.” Both narrow the same thing and that is the public’s ability to find out what its government is doing, and to say so.

Why It Reaches Past Victoria

Municipal politics is where this machinery is tested first. It is the level with the fewest reporters, the smallest audience, the least scrutiny. What a council does on a Thursday in July is the rehearsal.

It is also why trust in the press is draining. When residents watch a government spend public money to become “the source of truth,” and watch outlets carry that version unexamined, they stop believing any of it. The concern is not one side’s. On July 23, the same day as the Victoria vote, a Toronto Sun column by Brian Lilley warned that a federal plan to give the CBC a role in “combating misinformation” would turn a broadcaster into “an information gatekeeper for the governing party.” From a different corner, Democracy Watch and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association warn of the same thing: “combating misinformation” can become a tool for officials to manage what the public is allowed to hear. When institutions across the spectrum reach for the same phrase to decide what counts as truth, the people tuning out are not paranoid. They are paying attention.

There is an irony buried in the word the city reached for. “Disinformation” came into English from the Russian dezinformatsiya, a term of Soviet statecraft. The language of “combating misinformation” carries an authoritarian pedigree, and it is worth remembering who first found it useful for a government to decide, on the public’s behalf, which information counts as false.

The direction now goes to bylaw drafting and back to council for readings. The questions that remain are simple. Will the FAQ and the letter to the editor be published, and at what cost to taxpayers. Whether a councillor running for re-election should be spending public money to answer a rival. And whether a city that closed its comments, waived its hearing, and moved to buy the last word still means it when it calls itself accountable.

Victoria votes October 17. That is the one comment the city cannot delete, and the one hearing it cannot waive.

The city has the media relationships. The city can point people toward “the source of truth.” The man who did the sourcing, and told it honestly when a lie would have served him better, is the one they called misinformation.

BC Politics Watch. We hold documentation for every factual claim in this piece and will provide it on request. Where we offer opinion, we label it as opinion; where we rely on others’ reporting, we name the outlet.

Three neighbourhoods, and in each the thing the hearing would have slowed was building the city’s donors and lobbyists wanted moving. What makes it work is the smallness of each step. Nothing arrives as a single outrage you could organize against; it comes in fragments, each too dull to make the news and too technical to fight, drafted by staff who can count on almost no one reading as far as the page that matters. When a resident finally does, and asks how an entire neighbourhood was rezoned without a word to the people who live in it, the councillors who arranged every step of it will look that resident in the eye and say, with feeling, that the province left the city no choice. So do not let the mayor and council fool you. They did this themselves, all of it, and they are gaslighting an entire city into believing the province made them do it. The province did no such thing, and the three cases below show it.

Old Town, This Morning

Begin with the one under way as you read this. At nine o’clock this morning, in Council Chambers at City Hall, council is sitting in Committee of the Whole with Item G.2 before it, “Economic and Employment Land Solutions,” a title that nowhere contains the words Old Town. The report beneath it does.

Understand what Old Town is before you read what is being done to it. Its brick and stone streetscapes run from the 1850s to the 1890s, gold-rush storefronts and Victorian warehouses that make it one of the oldest intact commercial districts in Western Canada, and it stands in the provincial capital, which is to say it belongs to every British Columbian and not to Victoria alone. This is the postcard the city sells the world: the harbour, the old brick, the sense that one corner of the province still wears its own history. Old Town became British Columbia’s first Heritage Conservation Area, and it earned that title through loss. In the late 1980s two of its blocks were pulled down, the 1892 Driard Hotel among them, and rebuilt as hollow facades, a mistake the city swore never to make again. The protections that followed are the reason nothing inside a Victoria heritage conservation area has been demolished since. For sixty years, under councils of every political stripe, one bargain has held on these streets. Builders pay their way, and the public gets to speak. And a streetscape like this cannot be un-lost. Overbuild a heritage block or gut a facade, and no future council can ever vote it back, which is exactly why the hearing matters more here than almost anywhere in the city.

Item G.2 rewrites that sixty-year bargain, and it is the public’s half of it that vanishes. The staff report asks council to waive the hearing on a zoning amendment that raises non-residential density in the Central Business District to five and a half times the lot area with no rezoning required, and to fold industrial, laboratory, and veterinary uses into the core, Old Town included. It asks council to rewrite the heritage-density policy of the Downtown Core Area Plan so that Old Town and the Inner Harbour may carry hotel towers above the limit that has governed them for years. And it asks council to grant new hotels a holiday from municipal property tax of up to ten years, a break the report itself concedes “does shift the tax burden to non-exempt properties,” which in plain speech means onto the small downtown businesses already scraping to hold on.

The Old Town manoeuvre is the subtle one, and the one to watch. The report does not raise the density outright. It rewrites the plan that governs Old Town, and it does so not by an Official Community Plan amendment bylaw, which would drag its own public hearing behind it, but by ordering a planning official to “revise and publish” the plan. A revision published in that manner carries no hearing and no notice. The city means to change the rules for the oldest streets in the province by memo, so that the hotel-density rezonings can follow one at a time, each already treated as consistent with a plan the public was never allowed to argue. Since 2011 that added density had been a price, granted only through a rezoning and a public contribution toward parks, plazas, the Harbour Pathway, and heritage conservation. The proposal converts the price into a policy, and the policy into a memo.

And whose names sit on the document that accomplishes all this? Not one councillor’s. Item G.2 is a staff report, dated July 10, signed by Malcolm Maclean, Senior Planner, Citywide Planning, and Alec Johnston, Acting Director of Planning and Development, and stamped “Report accepted and recommended by the City Manager.” The City Manager is Jocelyn Jenkyns, the most senior unelected official at City Hall, who runs an administration of some eight hundred people and answers to council alone. The sentence “Council waives the requirement for the holding of a public hearing” was written by staff, endorsed by Jenkyns, and laid before council to ratify. No elected official has to author the line that takes your hearing away. They need only raise a hand, and the last one is gone.

The Rule That Opens The Door

How can a council do any of this? All of it rests on one change in provincial law, so give it thirty seconds. A council in British Columbia was once required to hold a hearing before it rezoned your land. Bill 44, the province’s 2023 housing law, ended that requirement wherever a rezoning is consistent with the Official Community Plan, and then went a step further, making a hearing on such a rezoning not merely optional but forbidden. Everything now hinges on a single word: consistent. Once a building is declared to fit the plan, the public’s hearing is not weighed and set aside. It is prohibited outright, and the argument is finished before a resident is permitted to open it.

Which turns the Official Community Plan into the only document that matters, and quietly hands whoever writes it a veto over whether you will ever speak. The people who write it are the council that adopts the plan and the planners who draft it, and the distance between what they decide and what the public is allowed to contest is where this entire story lives.

James Bay

None of it began with Old Town. It began last October, in James Bay.

On October 2, 2025, council adopted a new Official Community Plan. For James Bay it meant six storeys across most of a neighbourhood that is already the densest in the city, by its own residents’ count forty percent denser than any other, and seventy percent renters. Its consultation came to a single two-hour workshop, on a plan that had given earlier neighbourhoods years to be heard.

The one councillor whose job was to carry James Bay’s objection into that chamber, its liaison Matt Dell, was not in it. Nine seats, eight councillors that night, and the empty chair was his. He missed the most consequential land-use vote of the term, the vote that rezoned his own neighbourhood over its protests and, as it would emerge, moved the ground beneath it.

The ground moved on page 194 of Appendix C, a greyscale map buried in a document of roughly eleven hundred pages. There, the lots for a fourteen-storey James Bay tower had been slid across a boundary and into the Downtown Core Area. A parcel inside that boundary counts as consistent with the plan, and a consistent rezoning cannot go to a hearing. So the line did more than permit the tower. It sealed the tower off from public objection before a single resident had learned it existed.

James Bay’s lots were not the only ones to travel. In the seven weeks before the vote, more than a dozen residential blocks in Fernwood, along with parcels in Burnside-Gorge, North Park, Fairfield, and James Bay itself, were lifted from their residential zones and into the expanded downtown zone, each one now placed beyond the reach of a hearing. By March the James Bay lots were listed for sale. And council did not grasp the scale of what it had passed until October 16, a full two weeks after voting it into law, because it had adopted a plan it never finished reading.

Read that once more, slowly. The people who govern this city rezoned whole blocks of it, shut the public out of the decision, and only worked out what they had done a fortnight later. Whether that is carelessness or something colder is a question for them. To the family whose street it was, the distinction is academic, because their hearing was already gone, deleted by a line on a page not one of the people who voted for it had turned to.

The Harbour

Eight months on, the same logic came for the waterfront, and this time the city did not trouble itself to manufacture consistency at all. It simply waived the hearing.

On June 25, 2026, in one afternoon, with no public hearing and no direct notice to residents, council rewrote the zoning along the James Bay industrial waterfront. Ship breaking became permitted as of right. Height limits were lifted. Parking requirements were struck. The Harbour Road design guidelines were cancelled. The consultation that preceded the vote had run almost entirely through the harbour businesses that stood to profit from it.

We reported this in June. What we did not yet possess was the private correspondence of the councillor at the centre of it, and the emails turn a procedural story into a portrait.

In the days before the vote, the James Bay Neighbourhood Association was doing the councillor’s own work for him, reading the dense rezoning report against a deadline it had been given no time to meet. Somewhere in that file, its president came upon a detail on Dell’s own council webpage. The man assigned to speak for James Bay to the harbour authority had, the entire time, been the city’s official representative to that same authority, and had never once said so, through a year of public meetings at which the harbour authority rose and briefed residents with Dell seated among them. So the association wrote and asked him plainly. When were you appointed. Did you ever mean to tell us. And with this rezoning days away, will you press for consultation, or for a delay.

His reply, on June 23, gives him away. “My reading of the report suggests this is most administrative,” he wrote, and would bring “no major changes to the existing marine zoning usage,” and “at this stage I don’t see any cause for delay.” A rezoning that legalized the tearing apart of ships was, in his telling, a tidying of two definitions. Two days later, when a colleague moved to grant councillors a few more minutes to question staff, seventeen in place of ten, Dell voted the minutes down. His single contribution to the afternoon was to congratulate staff on their “comprehensive work,” on a report that Councillor Chris Coleman, in the same meeting, said had scarcely weighed the neighbourhoods it would remake.

Residents fought it regardless, and council flinched, sending the changes back for more work. It was the very outcome James Bay had pleaded for and Dell had dismissed as unnecessary. Three weeks later, it had become his triumph. “I was really happy to move the motion to have that work delayed, which passed 9-0,” he wrote to those same residents, “and I received a lot of thankful emails.” On June 23 there had been no cause for delay. By July 11 the delay was the thing he was proudest of. Nothing had shifted in the interval but the direction the room was leaning, and Dell had leaned with it.

The Excuse

Cornered on any of this, the governing bloc reaches for the same sentence: the province tied our hands. Councillor Jeremy Caradonna put it in writing to a constituent. The province, he wrote, “has made changes to the Local Government Act that prevent us from holding public hearings on development projects that align with the Official Community Plan, so there are fewer public hearings than before.”

It is the kind of statement that is accurate and profoundly misleading at the same time. The provincial rule strips the hearing only after a proposal has been found to align with the plan. Nothing made a fourteen-storey tower on those James Bay lots align with anything until council slid them into the downtown zone. Nothing opens Old Town to hotel towers until council rewrites the heritage plan to permit them. The province did not draw the boundary on page 194, and the province is not the body revising and publishing the Downtown Core Area Plan this morning. The city does that, with its own hands, and then gestures down the highway to account for a silence it built itself.

Readers of our earlier work will recognize the manoeuvre. In Licensed to Kill, the City of Victoria spent years pleading with the province to abolish a property right the city had itself created, licensed, and taxed, and then presented the result as something the province had done to a helpless little city. The sequence here is only tighter. Engineer the outcome at City Hall, and then blame the building at the other end of town.

It Does Not Stay In Victoria

There is a reason to watch this city even if you live nowhere near it. What is tested on Victoria’s residents has a habit of travelling up to the province and back down onto everyone else. The short-term rental crackdown was piloted here, and its architect, former mayor Lisa Helps, walked directly from City Hall into a post advising the Premier on housing, carrying the approach with her. The people who run this city sit unusually close to the people who run the province, and not by rumour. Dell draws a provincial paycheque. Caradonna is a former provincial staffer. Mayor Marianne Alto is a past executive of the BC NDP. Councillor Dave Thompson is married to a sitting provincial cabinet minister. What that proximity means in practice is simple enough: when a council here works out how to rezone a neighbourhood without asking it, the lesson does not stay in the neighbourhood, or in the city.

Who Profits

Ask the question that clears the fog. When a hearing vanishes and a rezoning grows easier, who walks away richer?

The landowner, chiefly. The instant a parcel is placed beyond a hearing, whether by moving it into the core, by waiving the hearing, or by lifting the cap, its development value jumps and it becomes far simpler to build or to sell. The public forfeits its say, and the owner banks the difference. In James Bay, the clearest beneficiary is whoever held the fourteen-storey lots that crossed the line and reached the market by March. On the waterfront, it is the harbour businesses the consultation was routed through. Downtown, the beneficiary is named in the staff report itself.

Item G.2 did not descend from the clouds. The report states, plainly, that its hotel measures were “highlighted in the recent Greater Victoria Hotel Development Report created by a working group convened by Destination Greater Victoria,” presented to council on June 11, and that the city’s own analysis was “informed by the working group.” The density figure, the site sizes, the target of 1,500 new hotel rooms, the tax holiday, every piece of it traces back to a tourism-industry working group. Staff sat on that group, then wrote its wish list into a recommendation council can pass in a single vote.

Destination Greater Victoria is no stranger to these pages. As we set out in Licensed to Kill: The Sequel, the executive running its public affairs is Jeremy Loveday, who sat on this council from 2014 to 2022 and led the drive to shut down short-term rentals, the hotels’ cheaper competitor. He closed one door from inside the chamber, walked around the building, and now lobbies the same council to fling the other one open. This morning that council takes up his lobby’s hotel-density shopping list, beneath a heading that hides Old Town inside it. The working group that produced the list included the BC Hotel Association, developers, and city staff. The people asking to be freed from the public’s hearing, in short, are the people who once sat in the chamber and the people whose money helps decide who sits there now.

The money runs in the other direction as well, and we have traced it before. In her 2022 campaign, Mayor Alto took close to forty percent of her funds from developers, builders, and real estate. Dell took five hundred dollars from developer Ed Geric in 2022, and in April 2026 council handed a stalled Geric condo a $677,500 public payout at full market price. Aryze Developments, whose network bankrolled the pool referendum run by Caradonna’s own campaign manager, has watched project after project sail through. One industry, seated at both ends of the same table, helps write the plan on one side and helps fund the council on the other, while the hearing that used to sit between them is carried out of the room.

The Record They Will Not Keep

There is a last reason all of this is so difficult to see, and it is not an accident. British Columbia maintains a lobbyist registry for the province, and it is the sole reason the provincial half of the short-term rental story could ever be told, because it was written down. That registry does not reach municipal councils. Who lobbies Victoria city council, on whose behalf, and for what end, is recorded nowhere at all. When the question reached the floor on September 11, 2025, council did not create a registry. It voted to study one. In the same meeting, a companion motion that would have required councillors to disclose their donors and step back from related decisions was opposed by Councillors Krista Loughton, Dave Thompson, and Matt Dell. So the capital presides over the province’s densest housing experiment, and the capital is the one city council you are not permitted to watch.

Sources and Notes

This is an opinion and analysis piece. The argument is the publication’s own, drawn from the public records, filings, meeting records, staff reports, and correspondence described below.

The public-hearing rule: the Local Government Act, section 464, as amended by the Housing Statutes (Residential Development) Amendment Act, 2023 (Bill 44), which removed the default requirement for a public hearing on a zoning bylaw amendment consistent with an official community plan and prohibits a hearing on certain consistent residential rezonings.

James Bay and the Official Community Plan: adopted October 2, 2025; the upzoning, density and renter figures, and the single workshop are drawn from the plan, council records, and residents’ submissions. The boundary changes moving parcels into the Downtown Core Area, including the fourteen-storey James Bay site on page 194 of Appendix C, and the parcels in Fernwood, Burnside-Gorge, North Park, Fairfield, and James Bay, are drawn from the adopted plan and its appendices; council’s recognition of the scale of the changes on October 16, 2025, is drawn from council records. Councillor Dell’s absence from the October 2 vote is recorded in the minutes.

The harbour rezoning: the June 25, 2026 industrial waterfront rezoning, the uses it permitted, and the waiver of the public hearing are drawn from the City of Victoria staff report and council records, and were reported in “No Public Hearing, No Public Notice,” BC Politics Watch, June 27, 2026. Councillor Dell’s motion to limit question time, his praise of staff, and Councillor Chris Coleman’s contrary assessment are drawn from the meeting record. Councillor Dell’s quoted statements are drawn from his emails to the James Bay Neighbourhood Association dated June 23 and July 11, 2026, and his non-disclosure of the harbour-authority representative role from that correspondence and his council webpage.

Item G.2: the July 10, 2026 Committee of the Whole report “Economic and Employment Land Solutions,” authored by Senior Planner Malcolm Maclean and Acting Director of Planning and Development Alec Johnston, and marked “Report accepted and recommended by the City Manager,” Jocelyn Jenkyns, City Manager of the City of Victoria. Recommendation 2 (waiver of the public hearing), the 5.5:1 FSR increase in the CBD-1 and CBD-2 zones, the added light-industrial, laboratory, and veterinary uses in the CBD and Old Town District zones, Recommendation 4 (direction to “revise and publish” the Downtown Core Area Plan and the policy changes in Attachment A), the report’s statement that the Old Town changes “do not introduce new as-of-right permissions,” and the up-to-ten-year Revitalization Tax Exemption together with the report’s acknowledgment that it “does shift the tax burden to non-exempt properties,” are all drawn from that report and its Attachment A. The attribution of the hotel measures to the Greater Victoria Hotel Development Report of a working group convened by Destination Greater Victoria, presented June 11, 2026, is drawn from the report’s Background section.

Old Town’s heritage status: Victoria’s Old Town Historic Commercial District is recognized as British Columbia’s first Heritage Conservation Area; the district’s nineteenth-century commercial streetscapes, the demolition and facade reconstruction of blocks including the 1892 Driard Hotel in the late 1980s, and the subsequent record of no demolitions within Victoria’s heritage conservation areas, are drawn from the City of Victoria’s heritage records and the public heritage history of the district. Primary documentation of the Driard episode is held in the city’s heritage-planning records.

The province-blame framing: Councillor Jeremy Caradonna’s written statement to a constituent that provincial changes “prevent us from holding public hearings on development projects that align with the Official Community Plan.”

The capital as laboratory, the beneficiaries, and the lobby: former mayor Lisa Helps’s appointment as a provincial housing adviser; the provincial ties of Councillors Dell, Caradonna, Thompson, and Mayor Alto; Jeremy Loveday’s council tenure (2014–2022), his role leading the short-term rental file, and his current public-affairs role at Destination Greater Victoria; the membership and recommendations of the Greater Victoria Hotel Development working group; Mayor Alto’s 2022 campaign financing; the $500 Geric contribution and the April 2026 $677,500 Housing Reserve Fund grant to a stalled Geric property; and Aryze’s approvals and campaign links, are as documented and sourced in “Licensed to Kill” and “Licensed to Kill: The Sequel,” BC Politics Watch, June 2026, and the Elections BC and council records cited therein.

The lobbyist registry: the Lobbyists Transparency Act’s exemption of municipal councils, and the September 11, 2025 council decision to study rather than create a municipal registry, along with the opposition of Councillors Loughton, Thompson, and Dell to a related donor-disclosure motion, are drawn from the Act and council records and were reported in “Licensed to Kill: The Sequel.”

We do not allege that any councillor, staff member, or lobbyist acted on secret instruction, and we do not assert a document establishing that. We do not claim the boundary changes were drawn at any developer’s direction, and we make no claim that any rezoning described here is illegal; the public-hearing waivers described are permitted under the Local Government Act. Where we characterize the removal of public hearings and judge the conduct of named officials, those are the considered opinions of BC Politics Watch, offered as fair comment on matters of significant public interest ahead of the October 17, 2026 municipal election. Demonstrable factual errors may be sent to contact.bcpoliticswatch@proton.me for correction.

At 8:20 on the morning of February 7, 2024, Councillor Matt Dell emailed two senior City of Victoria planners about a contested development at 1734 Hollywood Crescent, in the Gonzales neighbourhood. The address is not a vacant lot. It is one of the neighbourhood’s landmarks, a beautiful historic heritage house with a rare and distinctive stone garage, and the owners want to demolish it. That is what residents had been writing to Dell about for weeks: they were asking the councillor who campaigns on listening to help save a landmark from the wrecking ball. Here is what he asked the city’s planners for, word for word:

“I’d like to send a large message to everyone today, just to let them know that I’m responsive to their concerns. Do you have any brief suggested messaging for this particular project?”

Read it again. He did not ask staff how to address the residents’ concerns. He asked staff to help him write a message whose stated purpose was to let residents know he is responsive. Not to be responsive. To be seen to be. He signed off asking for “a few project specifics that are public,” because, in his words, “I think the residents do want some details to chew on.”

That email sits inside an 863-page freedom-of-information release. Nowhere in those 863 pages does the promised mass message to residents actually appear. What appears instead is a portrait, in Dell’s own hand, of how Victoria’s hardest-working public image really works.

The watchdog who watches you

Nine days before that email, Dell had reassured a Gonzales resident worried about the same project. “I’ll be monitoring it closely to ensure it’s something that fits the guidelines, as you have outlined,” he wrote. The resident had every reason to think the neighbourhood had a set of eyes at City Hall.

They did. The eyes were pointed the other way. On April 8, 2024, Dell wrote to the City Manager’s office asking for an update on the file and volunteered this: “I won’t share anything with the neighbours, or the folks petitioning against it.” The close monitoring he had promised residents was, in his own words to staff, a one-way valve.

By May 27 he was introducing residents to the developer’s consultant directly, vouching for the man, “I’ve known Joe for a number of years… a key local advocate for supporting seniors housing, affordable housing, and things like that,” and stating his goal plainly: “My hope is we can find some resolution on this project before it arrives at council.” The residents’ petition asked for one thing, that council enforce the rules council itself had passed weeks earlier. Dell’s documented hope was that council never see the file at all.

A fellow councillor said the quiet part in writing the same week. To staff, Jeremy Caradonna described the residents’ letters as “a fairly intense campaign… replete with a petition and many angry emails,” and stated a structural preference: “we should be keeping non-expert elected officials out of these decisions as much as possible.” To the residents themselves, months earlier, he had played a different character, calling the delegation rules a mystery, “a line that I am still trying to understand.” In public he claimed to be baffled by the process; in private he knew exactly what he wanted from it.

The two faces, for two years

If Hollywood Crescent were a single file, it would be a single file. It is not. Every time Dell’s audience changes, his position changes with it.

To voters in 2022, through his Times Colonist candidate profile: “The most important thing the council can do is listen to residents and work to address their concerns.” By his third year in office he was telling the council chamber the opposite, that too much public input was a hazard rather than a duty. The councillor elected on listening had come to treat listening as the problem.

The Official Community Plan shows both faces too. In public, Dell sold it as consultation-driven city building. Writing to Homes for Living, the development lobby whose endorsement he is chasing for 2026, he described the real payoff: council picked the “boldest” option so that “developers will no longer need to worry about the rezoning process.” In the same reply he waved off residents’ worries about trees and affordability as “misleading arguments” from the “comfortably housed.” That is what your emails become when he is writing to the people he credits with winning him the last election.

The votes against you

Dell’s dismissiveness is not confined to private email. It runs through his voting record, on the very machinery that lets ordinary people reach their own council. In August 2023 Dell backed a change that stripped residents out of the city’s Code of Conduct complaint process, leaving only councillors, staff, and committee members able to file a complaint about a councillor’s conduct. The mayor herself called it narrowing “far too dramatically.” Two years later he voted against standing up a public engagement program on the draft city budget, arguing that open input just lets people “stack the deck,” and calling skewed consultation “one of the reasons we have a housing crisis.” Both votes run the same direction, away from the public and toward a council that hears less.

Then there is how the public’s money moves. In April 2026, asked to turn a $175,000 grant to the privately owned and operated Victoria Curling Club, drawn from an emergency contingency fund and handed out outside every published grant program the city runs, into a repayable loan, Dell refused. “I find it just frankly morally wrong that we’re treating this as some sort of like business loan proposition,” he said. “This is a gift.” For a resident petitioning about the development next door, the rules are ironclad. For the right recipient, they are a gift.

Who does Matt Dell work for?

There is a reason the private Dell keeps siding with the province’s building agenda over his own neighbourhood, and it is not a secret. He tells you himself, on his re-election brochure, under the heading “Matt has deep roots in Victoria”: he “works in policy and legislation with the BC Government.” The BC Government Directory lists him, this month, as Director, Legislation in the Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills. He is a serving provincial employee. He is also a Victoria city councillor, and has been since 2022, voting on the housing, zoning, and density files where the province has spent four years overriding cities like his own.

Two oaths, two employers, two cheques. One of the cheques is public, and anyone can look it up: a Victoria councillor made $47,496 when Dell took office, a number the city’s bylaw lifts with inflation to somewhere near $58,000 today. What the provincial job pays, these figures can not be found. At least not from a recent search. A Director of Legislation earns well into six figures, and the province names every public servant paid $75,000 or more in its annual Public Accounts, so a full director’s salary sits on the public record. What Dell has never reconciled is how much of that director’s job he still does, and how it fits inside the thirty-hour council weeks he has described. Between the two cheques, his public income plausibly clears two hundred thousand dollars a year, drawn at once from the two governments he is supposed to hold apart.

He has been vocal about the smaller cheque. In his first term he and Caradonna moved to have council work declared full-time and councillor pay lifted to half the mayor’s salary, and it carried five to three. “It cannot simultaneously be a full-time job with part-time pay and benefits, which is what it currently is,” he told the chamber. Set that beside the man who said it: at that moment he was drawing a second salary from the province to direct its legislation. Take him at his word that council is full-time work, and the province was paying him for a director’s job in hours a full-time councillor could not have had to spare. Take the provincial cheque as honest work, and council was never the full-time job his motion claimed. He cannot have it both ways, though both cheques cleared.

The duty he is under

British Columbia does not leave this to good intentions. Its Standards of Conduct require a public servant to put the government’s interests ahead of his own, to protect confidential information, and, in the document’s own words, to prevent conflicts of interest “or the perception of conflicts of interest” from arising, disclosing any conflict that is real, perceived, or even possible to a manager or an ethics advisor.

Everything turns on that one word, perception. Nobody has to prove a public servant did something wrong; it is enough that an ordinary person, looking at the setup, could reasonably wonder whose side he was on.

Dell’s four years do not survive that test. In late 2023 his employer, the provincial government, passed Bill 44, the housing law that forces cities to allow more density on residential land, orders them to rewrite their community plans to match, and, once a plan is updated, bars them from holding a public hearing on any rezoning that fits it. It handed Victoria its housing targets and made clear that any council dragging its feet would be overruled. Then the same man, sitting as a councillor, voted the Missing Middle rules, the Official Community Plan, and the rezonings through, giving the province exactly what it asked for. Every time he votes yes on more density, you cannot tell whether that is Matt Dell the councillor making up his own mind or Matt Dell the provincial employee following his employer’s rulebook. Either way, residents concerns never seem to be heard. A conflict of interest is not the same thing as a bribe. It just means the public can no longer be sure a vote was cast for them and not for someone else, and Dell has carried that doubt into every housing vote he has made.

The province’s own rules say public servants who run for office must keep their political activity clearly separate from the job. Down the harbour, in the federal public service, the rules bite far harder: an employee cannot even become a candidate without written permission from the Public Service Commission, which can order leave without pay for the entire length of a municipal term. A federal counterpart in Dell’s position could be made to give up the government salary for as long as he sat on council. British Columbia asks only that its people keep the two roles “clearly separated,” takes their word for it, and lets the second cheque keep arriving.

Bayview is where that conflict stops being theoretical. A twenty-acre project in Vic West, nine new towers of ten to thirty-two storeys, it drew hundreds of residents to the public hearing, most of them opposed. Council approved it 7 to 2, with Dell in the majority, speaking of how solemn the decision was. To vote against a project that size was to vote against his employer’s signature agenda; to vote for it was to advance that agenda.

None of which means Dell fails to grasp what a conflict of interest is. He invokes it, precisely, when it serves him. On December 7, 2023, he recused himself from a vote on the city’s taxed boulevard program because it touched his own property, stepping out and slipping back in the sixty seconds it took the item to pass. The system worked exactly as designed, and Dell worked it.

The more revealing recusal came two years later. On December 11, 2025, when council moved to write to a provincial legislative committee about a bill, Dell stepped aside again, and the reason recorded in the minutes was “a perceived perception of bias.” Bias from what? From the plain fact that he works for the provincial government, and here was council presuming to lobby that government. On that file, Dell decided his provincial employment created enough of a perception problem that the right thing to do was leave the room. He was right.

His housing record is where that same principle quietly disappears. The provincial employment has not changed, and the perception of bias hangs just as heavily over every vote he has cast to enact his employer’s housing law: Bill 44, the Official Community Plan, the rezonings, the Missing Middle rules. If a letter to a provincial committee was too close for comfort, voting his provincial employer’s entire building agenda through a city council is closer still. Yet on those votes, the ones that remake whole neighbourhoods, he has never stepped aside, never disclosed, never so much as paused. He recuses himself for a boulevard outside his house and for a piece of correspondence. He stays firmly in his seat for the agenda that pays him.

Complaints, and no answers

Freedom-of-information records indicate that complaints about Dell’s dual role have been made to the BC Ombudsperson. Whatever has come of them is not public. The questions at their centre, whether the conflicts were disclosed, whether the arrangement squares with the Standards of Conduct, whether his votes on his employer’s housing files were shaped by his provincial job, remain unanswered, and Dell has gone on voting, writing, and now campaigning as though they were never raised.

James Bay pays the bill

The two faces are not a Hollywood Crescent problem. They are a James Bay problem also, and the neighbourhood has now paid for them twice.

Dell wears a second pair of hats there too. He is council’s liaison to James Bay, the man meant to carry its concerns into City Hall, and at the same time the city’s appointed representative on the board of the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority, which runs the working waterfront at the neighbourhood’s edge. On June 25, 2026, that arrangement came due. In a single afternoon, with no public hearing and no direct notice to residents, council rewrote the zoning across the industrial waterfront, permitting heavy uses including ship breaking as of right, lifting height limits, striking parking requirements, and cancelling the Harbour Road design guidelines. The consultation beforehand ran almost entirely through the harbour businesses that stood to gain. A James Bay resident who had presented for the neighbourhood during the residential phase of the same planning process says the industrial rezoning never came up in those talks, and that he learned of it only when the June 25 agenda went online, the way any stranger would. The liaison who should have warned him held both relevant seats and used neither. When Councillor Marg Gardiner asked for seventeen minutes of questions instead of ten, Dell voted her down. His one contribution to the afternoon was to praise staff for their “comprehensive work” on a complex file, a curious thing to say about a mere five-page report that Councillor Chris Coleman, in the same meeting, said had missed the mark for barely weighing the neighbourhoods it would reshape. City staff were at it again, and Dell, the councillor did not hold them accountable in any way. The opposite.

The waterfront was the second turn of the handle. The first came the previous October. When council adopted the new Official Community Plan on October 2, 2025, it upzoned most of James Bay to six storeys, over a neighbourhood already, by residents’ own count, forty percent denser than any other in the city, seventy percent renters, and given a single two-hour workshop where earlier plans gave neighbourhoods years. The councillor whose one job was to carry that objection into the chamber was not in the chamber. The nine-member council was down to eight that night, and the empty chair was Dell’s. James Bay’s own liaison missed the most consequential land-use vote of the term, the one that rezoned his neighbourhood over its objections and, as it turned out, moved the boundaries beneath it.

Because buried in the plan was a detail almost no one caught. On a greyscale map on page 194 of Appendix C, inside a document of roughly eleven hundred pages, the lots for a fourteen-storey James Bay tower had been nudged across a line into the Downtown Core Area. Everything turns on that line. Once a parcel sits inside the Downtown Core boundary, a tower on it counts as consistent with the Official Community Plan, and under Bill 44 a rezoning consistent with the plan cannot go to a public hearing. The height never had to be argued in the open, because moving the map closed the hearing before the argument could start. By March 2026 the lots were on the market. And James Bay’s were not the only ones to move: more than a dozen residential blocks in Fernwood, plus parcels in Burnside-Gorge, North Park, Fairfield, and James Bay, were lifted from their residential zones into the expanded downtown zone in the seven weeks before the vote, each now sealed off from a hearing. Council did not grasp the scale of it until October 16, fourteen days after voting the plan into law. They had adopted a document they never finished reading.

Pressed by residents, the bloc has an answer ready: the province tied their hands. Caradonna put it in writing to a constituent. The province, he replied, “has made changes to the Local Government Act that prevent us from holding public hearings on development projects that align with the Official Community Plan, so there are fewer public hearings than before.” Gaslighting par excellence. True as far as it goes, and it flips cause and effect. That rule strips the hearing only after a proposal is found to align with the plan, and nothing made a fourteen-storey tower on those lots align with anything until council moved them into the downtown zone. The province did not draw the boundary on page 194. Council drew it, and only then reached for the province to explain the silence. In Dell’s case the excuse fails twice, because he cannot even claim he stood in the chamber and lost the argument for James Bay. On the night the map moved, he was not there.

The rescue that was choreography

Then came the sequel, and it is the most telling part. The density did not land quietly. Residents packed the hearings, buried council in email, and organized against being asked, in the mayor’s own words, to carry too much. Faced with that anger, the people who delivered the plan produced a gesture. In November 2025, weeks after the plan passed, Mayor Alto moved to explore designating James Bay a heritage conservation area, and Dell seconded her. The timing is the whole story. The plan that upzoned the neighbourhood and, by residents’ account, protected none of its heritage had passed in October; the motion to go looking for heritage protection appeared in November, after the backlash, from two of the people who delivered the loss. It designated nothing. It asked staff to study the question and report back, the same instrument Dell reached for on his “cooling bylaw,” which was itself only a request for a staff report sold as a concrete step. He was careful, too, to reassure the development side that a heritage designation need not slow a single tower. A neighbourhood loses its protection in one motion and is offered a study of maybe getting some back in the next, on the promise that the study will change nothing. What the residents had asked for was a shield; what the motion handed them was choreography.

The record he runs on

The rest of his advertised achievements open the same gap the moment you check them. He says FernFest is back; the minutes show council redirected $20,000 from an existing grant pool after the organizers missed the proper deadline, approved only after an amendment to trim it died on a tie, with a developer, Aryze, quietly adding $10,000 that appears nowhere in his telling. He takes credit for the Christ Church Cathedral rezoning “so the church can build affordable housing”; what council actually passed, 6 to 2, was a rezoning with no development permit, no construction, and no enforceable affordability requirement on the up-to-eighteen-storey, three-hundred-unit density it enables.

Nowhere is the gap wider than at Hermann’s Jazz Club, and nowhere is Dell more exposed by his own words. His election brochure lists “Hermann’s Jazz” among the things he has delivered. What he delivered was a land purchase the public overpaid for. In March 2024 the city bought the building for $3.95 million, roughly $691,000 over its assessed value, paid not from any arts budget but from the Land Sale Reserve, a fund restricted to acquiring land; by 2026 the property was assessed at $1.58 million, less than half what the public was charged. While the mayor spoke of saving live music, Dell described the deal as a developer would, calling its “potential for arts, city revenue and eventual land assembly” “huge.” Land assembly is not a jazz term. Two years later the operator collapsed, and it was the public, 2,903 donors giving $455,820, who cleared the debts and reopened the doors, getting no ownership and not even a tax receipt. The city kept the land, the residents kept the bill, and Dell now runs for re-election on having saved the place.

The donor, and the vote

On October 1, 2022, in the final days of the campaign that first elected him, Dell took five hundred dollars from Ed Geric, president of Mike Geric Construction, one of the larger multifamily developers in Victoria. Geric wrote the identical cheque to Alto, Caradonna, Thompson, and Loughton. For a developer, five hundred dollars is small money that buys something larger: proximity. And proximity to this council has paid Geric’s firm back more than once. On April 16, 2026, council granted $677,500 from the Housing Reserve Fund to help a non-profit buy 611 Speed Avenue, a stalled Geric condominium, at full market price with no discount for the taxpayer, after Geric lost nearly a third of his presale buyers in the same downturn now driving the province-wide condo bailout. Victoria paid market price to finish a sale the market would not, and filed it under affordable housing.

The public can see the donation. Whatever passed between developer and councillor afterward stays hidden, because Victoria, like every municipality in the province, keeps no lobbyist registry, and a councillor who wanted a conversation kept off the record would only have to move it off his victoria.ca inbox. When Gardiner and Hammond moved this March to stop the city paying dues to the developers’ own lobby, the Urban Development Institute, the motion carried eight to one. The lone vote to keep writing that cheque was Dell’s. He has said his council is “in the pocket of trying to build more housing.” In the pocket. His phrase.

Ask me anything

Dell’s re-election signs carry two slogans: “Ask Me Anything” and “Leadership That Listens.” Hold them against the record. James Bay asked to be told before its waterfront was rezoned, and was not. Residents packed the hearings to ask not to be planned around, and were. The public asked to keep the right to file a conduct complaint against a councillor, and Dell voted to take it away. A councillor asked for a few more minutes to question the harbour bylaw, and Dell voted her down. For four years the asking was never the problem. The answering was. And now we know, from his own inbox, what the answering is for: to send “a large message to everyone today, just to let them know that I’m responsive to their concerns.” Not to be responsive. To be seen to be.

The birthday ask

Today is Matt Dell’s birthday, and yesterday he marked it by posting to all of British Columbia on Twitter (X), asking people to help pay for his re-election. Think about what that request really is. A director inside the BC NDP government, drawing a provincial salary funded by the whole province, is now asking that same province to buy him four more years on Victoria council. The outside job and the outside money were the problem all along, and his answer is to go looking for more of both. A seat on this council is not a provincial appointment. It answers to the people who live here and to nobody else, not a party, not a premier’s office, not a donor a province away who will never have to live under the vote he helped pay for. For four years Dell’s loyalty has pointed everywhere except at the residents who elected him. Matt Dell keeps one face for the public and one for the record. The record is the honest one.

Note: The Hollywood Crescent emails quoted here are drawn from City of Victoria freedom-of-information release VIC-2024-094; other quotes are drawn from council meeting records and video, an authorized campaign questionnaire reply, and published reporting. Freedom-of-information records indicate that complaints about Councillor Matt Dell’s conduct have been made to the office of the BC Ombudsperson; those complaints have not been adjudicated. Where we characterize the distance between what Dell says in public and what he writes in private, and where we judge his performance in office, those are the considered opinions of BC Politics Watch, offered as fair comment on a matter of significant public interest, the October 17, 2026 municipal election, in which he is a candidate. No allegation of criminal conduct is made or implied. Demonstrable factual errors may be sent to contact.bcpoliticswatch@proton.me for correction.

None of the items below amounts to a scandal on its own, and each arrived with a plausible explanation attached. Read them in sequence and see what you think.

Close the public square

The obvious place to start is August 2024, when the city turned off public comments across its entire social media presence: Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube and LinkedIn. The stated reason was “disrespectful content and misinformation,” and online abuse is real; nobody envies the staff who spent six hours moderating one ugly Facebook thread. But look at the remedy the city picked. It didn’t hire more moderators or restrict comments on the ugliest posts; it eliminated the public’s ability to respond to its government at all, everywhere, permanently. You can still send a private message. Nobody will see it but them.

The Soviets understood this trick long before Facebook existed. Pravda ran a letters page; editors decided which letters ran. Putin’s Russia does the modern version, broadcasting around the clock while critics get labelled extremists or “foreign agents” and pushed off the platforms. A government account with the comments turned off is not engagement. It’s a loudspeaker.

Abolish the complaint box

Less noticed, and worse: under Victoria’s code of conduct bylaw, complaints against council members may be submitted only by other council members, committee members and city employees. Read that twice. An ordinary resident cannot file a conduct complaint against the people they elected. Not unless a councillor agrees to carry it in for them.

The Soviet Union ran official misconduct through the Party Control Committee, an organ of the party, answerable to the party, staffed by the party. Complaints from citizens existed if the apparatus decided they existed, and mostly the apparatus existed to absorb them. Same blueprint here, smaller scale: accountability administered by colleagues, out of reach of the people paying for it.

Punish the dissidents

Any system that closes its complaint channels still has to deal with the people who complain anyway, and Victoria’s handling of one of them is instructive. In August 2024, two weeks after the comments went dark, firefighter Josh Montgomery was suspended without pay for “unauthorized public criticism of city policy.” Not for leaking. Not for insubordination on the job. For publicly disagreeing. Coincidence? Maybe. What’s certain is that in a single month, Victoria closed the public’s channel for criticism and disciplined an employee for using his own. A residents’ petition called it retaliation that “suppresses the voices of those who work to protect the community.”

Authoritarian systems run on exactly this economy. Russia jails its Navalnys, but most of the daily work is cheaper than a prison cell: a fine here, a firing there, a note in a personnel file. East Germany rarely had to jail a worker for criticizing policy, because a blocked promotion did the job and every colleague who watched it happen learned the lesson for free. Havel wrote about the greengrocer who puts the approved slogan in his shop window, not from belief but because the price of refusing had been demonstrated on someone else. Suspend one firefighter and you buy the silence of hundreds of employees. That is the actual transaction.

Manage what participation remains

If you want to speak to Victoria council, you apply in writing, in advance, and you get five minutes. How much those five minutes matter is another question. The Official Community Plan process went badly enough that a Times Colonist comment piece described a “crisis of confidence in Victoria City Hall”: consultation timelines shortened, community groups left out, engagement sessions presenting “a fixed vision rather than inviting genuine input.” Then in October 2025, council adopted the new OCP with a package of zoning changes bundled into it and passed the lot without a public hearing. Taller buildings, longer lists of permitted uses, deleted parking rules. The public never saw the details it was supposedly consulted on.

What’s on display here has a name, managed participation, and it means the forms of consultation survive while the decisions happen elsewhere, earlier. Stalin’s government staged a months-long “nationwide discussion” of the 1936 constitution, collecting millions of comments on a text that was never going to change. Cuba still does it. Its Poder Popular assemblies give citizens vigorous debate about schedules and logistics while the direction of policy stays off the table, and Havana cites the whole exercise as proof of a democracy more authentic than elections. People get to talk. They don’t get to change anything. A consultation that cannot affect the outcome isn’t consultation, it’s a receipt the government writes to itself.

Lock in the majority, concentrate the power

All of this works because council votes are rarely in play. Jeremy Caradonna, Dave Thompson, Matt Dell, Krista Loughton and Susan Kim, known even in the Times Colonist as the “gang of five”, control most of the votes. Six of the nine members elected in 2022 were endorsed by the departing mayor, Lisa Helps, and her project carries on under this one. The Soviets had a term for the arrangement, democratic centralism: settle the position inside the group, ratify it unanimously in public, let the chamber debate serve as a performance for the record. Once you know the outcome before the deliberation starts, the deliberation is decoration.

Campaign finance records suggest the alignment runs to the development industry as well, and the same names that appear on the city's development files turn up in the mayor's campaign filings. Alto's 2022 disclosure filed with Elections BC reports $68,340 in contributions, and parts of the donor list read like a directory of the local industry: Robert Jawl and Karen Jawl of Jawl Properties, Edward Geric of Mike Geric Construction, a maximum-limit donation from Mike Miller of Abstract Developments, Patricia Ridgeway-Mariash of the family behind Focus Equities, and development consultant Gary Pooni. To be fair about what the law allows, corporate donations are banned in BC and individuals are capped at roughly $1,250, so nobody is buying a council with a cheque. But the pattern tells residents who has a standing relationship with the administration. A developer reaches city hall through the application, the pre-application meeting, the donation record. Since Bill 44, a neighbour who used to reach it at a public hearing often can't reach it at all.

Above the bloc sits the mayor, who in April 2026 gained new power to reject council motions outright. In plain terms, she now controls what elected councillors may even bring forward. In practice she also sets the agenda and meets with senior staff without other councillors in the room, and Committee of the Whole agendas tend to land days before the meeting, too late for anyone, councillor or citizen, to mount informed opposition. None of it breaks a rule. That’s the trick.

And around all of it, the machine: a well-paid senior administrative cohort that has carried straight through from the Helps years into the Alto ones, people whose careers depend on the confidence of the majority rather than the satisfaction of residents. The Soviets called that personnel system the nomenklatura. Nobody in it has to be corrupt. It selects for agreement, promotes for agreement, pays for agreement, and eventually the leader is standing in a hall of mirrors. You can watch the discretion at work in small things. The city handed SOLID Outreach $300,000 plus a pledge of up to $1.8 million over its neighbours’ objections, and when a structure went up on the property that critics say no provision of the zoning bylaw allows, it stayed up. Try that with your back fence. Enforce the rules strictly on critics and loosely on partners and you no longer have the rule of law; you have rule by discretion, the thing authoritarian government actually runs on.

Close the doors, price the truth

Whatever can’t be settled in advance tends to move behind closed doors, and council has used the in-camera meeting on high-profile decisions often enough to draw real public anger, enough that veteran councillor Chris Coleman, while defending the practice, still conceded the system “hasn’t worked at trying to be seen to be trustworthy.” Meanwhile, as of March 2026, it costs $10 to file a freedom of information request with the city. Ten dollars sounds like nothing. Except we know what fees do, because BC already ran the experiment: after the province introduced its own FOI fee, requests measurably declined, and the burden lands hardest on the journalists and citizen watchdogs who file in volume. And even a paid, accepted request can come back gutted, because BC’s access law lets a public body withhold records whose release could harm the financial or economic interests of the body itself. Sit with that logic for a second. The government may keep information from you on the grounds that your knowing it would hurt the government. But if a record is so damaging that the city refuses to release it, that is usually a fair description of exactly the record residents most need to see. Whatever harms the city’s interests when disclosed was, presumably, already harming somebody when it was done.

Russia supplies the finished version. When Navalny’s investigators kept mining the state’s public property registries to expose corruption, the Kremlin didn’t abolish the registries. It closed access to the ownership records. The documents survive; your reach to them is what gets cut. A ten-dollar toll on asking your own government what it did in your name is a small thing. Bricks are small things too.

The NDP overlord above: Victoria as the local node

None of this is happening in a vacuum, because above the council sits a provincial government running its own version of the same project. Putin’s Russia operates on what the Kremlin itself calls the power vertical: the centre sets the line, the regions and cities implement it, and local objection becomes procedural noise. The BC NDP has built a serviceable provincial equivalent. Bill 44 stripped municipalities of the power to hold public hearings on rezonings consistent with an official community plan. Think about what that removed. The one forum where an ordinary resident could stand up and say no to a specific decision on their own street, gone province-wide in a single bill. The same government brought in the FOI application fee, met its own 30-day disclosure deadlines only about half the time, and, already accused of a “stealth attack” on freedom of information, tabled Bill 9, sponsored by Citizens’ Services Minister Diana Gibson, whose husband is Victoria city councillor Dave Thompson, a member of the council’s dominant bloc. The minister narrowing the province’s access-to-records law and a councillor of the voting majority that runs Victoria are, in this case, married. Draw the org chart of the power vertical here and one of its lines runs through a household. Bill 9 widens the grounds for rejecting or delaying a request, lets public bodies disregard requests they deem “abusive,” and swaps the legal duty to respond “without delay” for “without reasonable delay.” One adjective, a great deal of quiet work. The B.C. Freedom of Information and Privacy Association says the bill “will tip the balance of power away from requesters.” The opposition filibustered through the night. It passed anyway.

The Kremlin’s ideologists had a phrase for this model: managed democracy. Elections continue. Opposition exists. Nobody is formally forbidden from dissenting; dissent is just rendered inconsequential, because the hearing where you’d voice it has been abolished and the record you’d build your case on costs money and arrives late. Victoria didn’t invent the architecture. It just operates, enthusiastically, as the municipal node of it, and when residents ask who took their voice, the city points at the province and the province points at the city.

The comparison Victoria invites

So, is Victoria a dictatorship? No. There are elections in 2026. No one is in jail. Not yet. There is a press, free on paper, though so thinned by consolidation and so dependent on government goodwill that sustained adversarial coverage of city hall barely exists; most of what appears in this article surfaced in op-eds and one-off reports, not investigations. But “not a dictatorship” is a floor, not a standard. The useful comparison is with the method, the one that runs from Brezhnev’s Moscow through Honecker’s East Germany to Putin’s managed democracy: government talks at citizens rather than with them, complaints route through the institution being complained about, employees learn that criticism costs, consultation ratifies what’s already decided, information carries a price tag, and power drifts quietly upward. Every item on that list now has a Victoria analogue. Several carry a BC NDP signature. And each arrived wrapped in civility, efficiency, housing or safety. The originals arrived the same way; no regime in history has restricted participation and said so out loud.

Residents have noticed, and they have said so in numbers that should have ended the argument. As Global News reported, in a survey the city itself commissioned, more than 80 per cent of respondents said they were dissatisfied with Victoria’s governance. Four out of five. A government that wanted to listen would have changed course. This one made itself harder to complain to.

Council has answers ready: online abuse is toxic, the housing emergency demands speed, the province forced our hand. Fine. Then prove the pattern is a coincidence. Restore public complaints to the code of conduct. Reopen the comments with real moderation. Publish agendas with real notice. Drop the FOI fee. Default to open meetings. None of that needs provincial permission. It only needs a council willing to be answered back.

Until then, judge the pattern, not the press releases. A government that closes every channel through which it might hear “no” has told you what it thinks of you. That’s not how dictatorships begin. It’s how accountable government ends.

Sources

• City of Victoria shuts down public comments on social media, Times Colonist

• Code of conduct changes don’t go far enough, Victoria councillor says, Times Colonist

• Comment: A crisis of confidence in Victoria City Hall, Times Colonist

• New power for B.C. city’s mayor to reject council motions draws criticism, Victoria News

• No Public Hearing, No Public Notice, BC Politics Watch

• Closed council meetings are routine. They can also be lightning rods for public ire, Capital Daily

• Petition: Resign Marianne Alto, Change.org

• Comment: Victoria residents trapped by crime deserve compensation (”gang of five”), Times Colonist

• For Victoria, a mostly new council, but six of nine endorsed by departing mayor, Times Colonist

• City of Victoria provides $1.8M to help vulnerable at access hub, Times Colonist

• Criticism of outreach supportive spaces pivots to city bylaws, Capital Daily

• Marianne Alto 2022 campaign disclosure statement, Elections BC

• Freedom of Information ($10 application fee), City of Victoria

• B.C. freedom of information requests declined after fee imposed, Coast Reporter

• The Truth Shall Set You Back a Fee, Canadian Bar Association

• BC Government Accused of a Stealth Attack on Freedom of Information, The Tyee

• Bill 9: B.C. plans big changes to freedom of information rules, The Narwhal

• Election 2024 Riding Brief: Oak Bay-Gordon Head, Business in Vancouver

• Politicians were up all night debating BC’s Bill 9, CBC News

• New BC Housing Legislation Brings Changes to the Public Hearings Process, BC Law Institute

• More than 80% of survey respondents dissatisfied with City of Victoria’s governance, Global News

We have received an email from Councillor Jeremy Caradonna attributing this publication to a local resident. The attribution is false. The individual named is neither the author of this publication nor behind any of its accounts, and if Councillor Caradonna has repeated the claim to others, he has misinformed them about a private person.

Separately, a staff member in Mayor Alto’s office, posting under her own name, recommended that residents be “wary of this publication,” described its posts as “racist and homophobic,” and told readers to “wonder about their motives.” This was not a passing remark in a small room. It was posted to James Bay Local, a community Facebook group of roughly 18,000 members, and we have preserved it.

Consider the standard at work here. In 2024, a Victoria firefighter wrote to the Premier under his own name, raising public safety concerns about a facility being opened in his neighbourhood, and was suspended without pay for it. The Premier himself said that “no one should face consequences for writing to me.” Mayor Alto did not defend a city worker’s right to speak. She said she had nothing to do with the decision and criticized the Premier for commenting on what she called “an operational personnel matter.”

Today a member of the mayor’s own office uses a public forum to warn residents away from a publication that questions City Hall, and the question asks itself: is this, too, an operational personnel matter? Will the standard applied to a firefighter who raised safety concerns be applied to a member of the Mayor’s staff who discourages residents from reading City Hall’s political critics? Or does the standard only run one way, against the people who question it?

City Hall cannot claim that personal social media activity is beyond its concern, because it was Mayor Alto herself who advanced a code of conduct investigation into Councillor Susan Kim after Kim signed, in her own name, an open letter describing accounts of sexual violence against women in the October 7 Hamas attack as unverified. The investigator found a breach, concluding that Kim had not made sufficiently clear when she was speaking as a councillor and when she was speaking as a private citizen. The precedent is the mayor’s own. We ask only that it be applied as readily to her office as it was to a council colleague.

Freedom of expression and freedom of the press are protected under section 2(b) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and that protection exists precisely for this: citizens scrutinizing the governments they pay for. It covers reporting, commentary, and satire alike. Satire is centuries older than this country, and it has survived because it does a job nothing else does. It lets the governed laugh at the governing, and power has never answered it with anything but force or better behaviour. It covers anonymous writing too, a tradition as old as political journalism itself. A free press does not require City Hall’s approval of its tone, its anonymity, or its conclusions. Officials are entitled to respond to what we publish. They are not entitled to use public office to mislabel criticism as hate, or to pin our work on residents it does not belong to.

We write this in a world where journalists are jailed and killed for criticizing the political class. In Canada that criticism is a protected right, and those who seek public office accept scrutiny of their votes, their spending, their salaries, and their conduct as part of the job. That is the bargain of holding public power in a democracy, which is why the direction at City Hall alarms us: more business conducted in closed meetings, information that grows harder and slower to obtain, a councillor speculating about the identity of his critics, and a staffer in the mayor’s office discouraging residents from reading them. Democracies do not need their critics to be quiet. They need their governments to answer them.

Parliament has an official Opposition whose entire job is to challenge the government every day it sits. Victoria council has no such institution, and the local press has shown little appetite for the job; too much of what passes for coverage of City Hall is a light rewrite of the City’s own press releases, when the public deserves someone reading the filings and asking the follow-up questions. The scrutiny that remains increasingly falls to residents. We are part of that. Meanwhile, the councillor who sent us a false attribution about this publication spent this spring calling for “reasonable, rational, and enforceable regulations” on AI-generated content at every level of government, warning that false information online threatens democracy itself. Whatever the merits of that proposal, a councillor worried about false information online could start with the false claim he put in writing himself.

For readers new to this publication, our record is consistent. We questioned the rezoning of the harbour, passed in a single afternoon; the redrawing of James Bay’s boundaries in the new Official Community Plan, adopted over what many residents call no meaningful consultation; and the siting of the Dowler Place facility, which neighbours, including the firefighter later suspended, say happened without them. We questioned the Crystal Pool referendum, where Councillors Jeremy Caradonna and Matt Dell campaigned for the Yes side and voters approved $169 million in borrowing toward a $209 million project without knowing that roughly 85 percent of the Yes campaign’s significant contributions came from the leadership network of Aryze Developments, whose project pipeline sits in the pool’s neighbourhood, or that the campaign’s authorized principal official is now Councillor Caradonna’s 2026 financial agent. All of it was legal, and none of it was visible in any single filing. Victorians deserve to know how decisions about their money are made.

The same principle applies to the harbour. When the City declared it would not “stand in the way” of major harbour-front land transfers, and when we called for transparency around the publicly owned lands adjacent to the Legislature, we argued that decisions of that magnitude deserve greater public involvement: published terms, published timelines, and a genuine chance for residents to be heard. The harbour is the entryway to this city, and it does not belong to the City alone or even to the province alone; it is public land and water, held for all Canadians, and decisions about its future should be made in the open, not announced after the fact. For making that argument, an MLA publicly called this publication racist. We would make the identical argument if those lands were going to a property developer, a university, or any other party, and our record shows we have. The question has never been who receives public land. It is whether the public is consulted before decisions of that scale are made in their name. We support reconciliation, and we do not accept that transparency and reconciliation are opposites. No one gets a pass from public process, and asking that the process be followed is not an act of hostility toward anyone.

Our scrutiny has not stopped at elected officials, because senior unelected staff spend public money and exercise public power too; it follows the power, not the title. We have argued for the closure of a supervised drug consumption site, a policy position that many residents share and many others dispute, and the disagreement is legitimate in both directions. Calling a policy argument hateful does not answer it. As for our motives, nobody has to wonder about those. They are printed in every piece we publish.

We put three questions to the City directly. Was the social media activity described above conducted on City equipment or on City time? Are any City resources or staff hours being used to disparage residents of Victoria or this publication? What is the City’s policy on personal political activity conducted through City resources?

Through all of this, notice what has been missing: any dispute of the facts we have published. Not one figure, date, or document has been challenged. The response instead has been to guess at who writes this publication, and to guess wrongly. Going after presumed authors rather than published facts is not a rebuttal. It concedes that the facts stand. Criticizing land use decisions, public spending, and the treatment of city workers is not racism or homophobia. It is civic accountability.

If anyone at City Hall believes something we have published is false, say what, and show why. Our correction policy is simple and has always been open to everyone: write to us and show us the error. Until then, we ask Councillor Caradonna to retract his attribution and correct the record with anyone he may have told, we ask the member of the mayor’s staff to take her post down, and we ask anyone else who has pinned this publication on a private resident to do the same. Documentation of every instance is on file.

We finish where we began. Victoria is the capital of British Columbia, and its council should be the gold standard for open local government in this province. Right now it is behaving like something democracy is not. We write this on a day when yet another council matter sits behind closed doors, off camera. Turn the cameras on. Closed meetings are meant to be the law’s narrow exception, not a habit, and a government paid with public money that grows comfortable deciding public business out of public view is shielding itself from the very scrutiny it signed up for. Everyone knows what closed doors and silenced critics are the marks of. No Canadian wants their capital city to resemble that. Do better. Victoria deserves it.

We will keep publishing.

BC Politics Watch

This concludes “A Company Town for One Party.” Part 1, “Two Seats, One Party,” examined a city in declared crisis and the two MLAs it elected: Grace Lore’s nineteen-month absence, and Nina Krieger’s road from film tax credits to the hardest file in government. This part follows the money, the housing the rest of the region would not take, the land, and the word this publication will not accept.

The Ledger

Between them, Victoria’s two MLAs have held six offices, and Part 1 traced the careers behind them. Line them up: Parliamentary Secretary for Gender Equity. Minister of State for Child Care. Minister of Children and Family Development. Minister without Portfolio. Parliamentary Secretary for Arts and Film. And Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General, the sole hard-services file, arriving in July 2025, eight months after the window this article covers opened. The announcements the two have fronted for Victoria all point the same way: gender-based-violence and community-safety grants funded by civil forfeiture, anti-hate grants, anti-racism and multiculturalism grants, film-subsidy increases, World Cup fan zones. Civil forfeiture is where the pattern shows first, and this section starts there; the shelters, the land and the silences fill out the rest of the ledger.

Civil forfeiture is the connective tissue between the two members. Krieger legislates its expansion and doubles its office; Lore fronts the grants it pays for and promotes them cheerfully on her social media. Set aside the merits of any individual grant. A government that celebrates property seized without criminal conviction as a funding stream for its favoured programs, while its own Bill 8 lowers the bar for seizure, has built exactly the incentive structure civil-liberties critics across North America warn about. A government that funds itself by seizing comes to depend on seizing.

In May 2026, Victorians saw where that dependence leads. Alongside its marquee claims against Hells Angels clubhouses, the forfeiture machinery Krieger oversees filed to seize the Quadra Street shopfront of the Victoria Cannabis Buyers Club, a thirty-year-old compassion club in the heart of Lore’s riding that has supplied medical cannabis to more than 9,000 people who cannot afford or access the licensed market. The province is pursuing $3.24 million in accumulated fines from enforcement raids and has filed a certificate of judgment against the home of a volunteer board member. The club rallied in the street, pleaded with City Hall, and filed for judicial review. Its founder, who once argued medical cannabis access at the Supreme Court of Canada, said the forfeiture fight “makes that seem like a birthday party.” A few blocks away, open fentanyl dealing on Pandora carries on. The forfeiture office went after a compassion club and a volunteer’s house instead. Lore’s constituents run the club, use it, and asked their MLA for help.

Help arrived as an email. In a letter to the club’s founder, shared with this publication by its recipients, Lore writes that she hears the concerns. She attributes the problem to “the failure of the federal Cannabis Act and Cannabis Regulations,” says the province “is unable to grant an exemption,” commits to raising the matter with “Minister Krieger and her team” and the local MP, and notes that conflict-of-interest rules prevent her from commenting on the April enforcement action while it is before the courts. She apologizes for her civil-forfeiture video, which “felt extremely hurtful to some people – and for that I apologize,” adding that she “was not referring to the VCBC.” As a cancer survivor, she writes, she is “so sorry to those who feel disconnected from relief.”

That letter is all the club ever got. Its founder tried four Thursdays running to meet his MLA and found the constituency office closed each time, for staff shortages; the email arrived in place of a meeting that never happened. And the email itself is a concession dressed up as a jurisdiction lesson. Health Canada did not raid the Quadra Street shopfront; the province’s Community Safety Unit did, under provincial statute. Health Canada did not levy $3.24 million in fines or move to seize the building and a volunteer’s home; the Civil Forfeiture Office her own government expanded did. The federal Act explains why the club is unlicensed. It does not explain why her province, alone among the choices available to it, chose to seize. The one remedy she offers her constituents is to raise their concerns with the very minister whose office is pursuing them. And her apology concedes that the video landed exactly as her constituents said it did.

The club’s reply, also on file in full, is long, angry and precise, and three of its facts stand on their own.

First, Mayor Marianne Alto wrote to Public Safety Minister Krieger and Attorney General Niki Sharma on June 17, 2026 in support of the club, asking, in her words, for “a fair hearing, before sentence is declared and executed”: a pause on enforcement until the judicial review is complete. Lore’s letter nowhere acknowledges the mayor’s, and the club concluded she was unaware of it. On the one file where City Hall finally broke step with the province, the local MLA appears not to have noticed.

Second, the club answers the jurisdiction lesson with a statute. A Farnworth amendment to the Cannabis Control and Licensing Act stripped the enforcement director of jurisdiction over constitutional questions, the very Charter arguments the club had raised against its fines, and, the club says, was applied retroactively to its own case. Whatever Health Canada governs, that choice was made in British Columbia’s legislature, by the government whose caucus Lore sits in.

Third, the texture of day-to-day representation. The four shuttered Thursdays were not the whole of it: the club writes that her staff once declined a meeting because the club was, at that moment, being raided and fined by the Solicitor General. Two blocks from the shopfront the province is seizing, a cannabis distribution program run by a government-funded outreach society operates without a retail licence. The club calls the contrast infuriating. The Community Safety Unit has never explained the principle that seizes one and tolerates the other.

Victoria asked for other things and did not get them. No involuntary-care facility: when the Premier’s signature secure-care expansion opened beds, they went to Maple Ridge, Surrey and Prince George, with Island sites merely “being identified.” This, for the city whose point-in-time count found four in five homeless residents struggling with substance use. No confirmed provincial capital dollar for Crystal Pool. Nothing for the schools ordinary families depend on: Budget 2026 explicitly slowed the capital budget that builds and upgrades them, in a district whose elected board the province had fired and whose land was being leased and sold for development. The $3.3-billion Community Housing Fund was quietly suspended in February 2026, leaving non-profit housing proponents “holding the bag.” Transit capital slowed too, with the McKenzie RapidBus line stuck at the engagement stage since 2024 and the Belleville Terminal rebuild ballooning from $331 million to $416 million. And the drug-decriminalization pilot, the government’s boldest ideological experiment, imposed most visibly on downtown Victoria’s streets, was allowed to expire in January 2026 after peer-reviewed research found no attributable reduction in deaths or hospitalizations. A quiet admission, never accompanied by an apology to the neighbourhoods that absorbed the trial run.

The Island’s oldest infrastructure grievance fared no better. No train has run on the E&N corridor since 2011. The province extended an $18-million corridor planning grant by a year in January 2025, signed a Reconciliation Corridor Agreement with First Nations in late 2025 to explore passenger service between Langford and Victoria, and commissioned a feasibility study expected in 2026. Fifteen years after the last train, the corridor is still a study. An island economy lives on its connections: the ferries, the roads, the harbour, the rail bed rusting through the middle of it. Island trade and Island businesses feel every gap. Neither of the people the capital sends to the legislature has a background in infrastructure, trade or transportation, and the record reads like it.

None of this makes gender equity, child care, arts funding or anti-racism work illegitimate purposes of government. Reasonable people differ on their weight, and New Democrats would call several of them core services with economic payoffs. The critique is narrower and harder. In the city Part 1 described, in crisis by its own mayor’s account and financing provincial responsibilities out of pocket, the revealed priorities of its only two provincial representatives, measured by the offices they held and the announcements they chose, tilted conspicuously toward the party’s social program and away from the unglamorous work of delivery.

Part 1 promised the figures from Nina Krieger’s candidate financing report, and they are starker than expected. Total political contributions, from all sources: zero dollars. Not one donation, from one donor, in Victoria-Swan Lake or anywhere else. The campaign ran on $87,659.09 in transfers from the BC NDP, a $250 nomination-deposit refund, and a $26,425 election-expense reimbursement paid from public funds under the Election Act. It spent $67,769, transferred $46,063.36 back to the BC NDP in July 2025, and closed its account at zero. No resident of the riding gave this campaign a dollar. The party funded it, the taxpayer subsidized it, and the surplus went home to the party.

The Overlap

The province and the city dealt with each other on several tracks at once.

Track one: lockstep on shelter and housing. On paper it reads as partnership. In practice the province needed a council that would never say no, and in Victoria it had one. The HEART/HEARTH framework the city and province signed in early 2024 did produce. By January 2026 the Bridge Street Pathways shelter, 34 referral-only spaces prioritizing people from Pandora and Ellice, provincially operated for three years with the city contributing up to $700,000, was announced as the eighth project, formally “completing the Province’s HEARTH commitment for Victoria.” Provincial money flowed to roughly 300 supportive units on Pandora and Discovery, housing the system’s highest-acuity residents on the two most burdened streets in the city. It flowed separately to 505 rentals on the old Capital City Centre Hotel site and 319 middle-income homes in December 2025, conventional housing that belongs in a different column from the supportive stock. And it flowed to the 20 units of Johnson Manor with Cool Aid, announced as “dry” recovery housing.

The operator’s own program page is precise about what those units are: men only, completed detox and treatment, a minimum of 60 days continuous abstinence at entry, work or volunteering within six months, stays of six to 24 months, under a model it calls “harm-reduction informed but abstinence-based.” Sixty days is early recovery by any clinical measure, and the operator says as much, describing its residents as men who have “completed early-stage recovery.” Sobriety measured in weeks is precisely what a recovery environment exists to protect. The environment on offer is the 1100-block of Johnson Street, where, as this publication has seen from the ground, open drug use and street disorder are a constant presence a few blocks off the Pandora corridor. Siting the partnership’s first abstinence-based housing inside the landscape its residents are trying to leave is a choice nobody was asked about. Residents were expected by early spring 2026. As this article went to press in July, Cool Aid’s page still described the building as opening, applications on hold pending a wait-list review, and no announcement from the province, the city or the operator recorded anyone having moved in.

Then there are the targets. Victoria exceeded its Housing Supply Act quota two years running, 1,477 net units against a year-one target of 659, the best compliance record among the first ten municipalities. That phrase deserves a second read. The targets measure how completely a council delivers what the province demands, and this council delivered more than double the demand, over its own residents’ objections. That is not a city grudgingly meeting a quota. It is a city going above and beyond one. The province set the quota and issued the releases; the city delivered without a murmur. Every one of the eight HEARTH sites sits inside the City of Victoria, which already holds roughly 87 per cent of the region’s supportive housing. The new supportive units and shelter spaces kept arriving in the same two ridings, with the Pandora corridor, in Lore’s riding, absorbing the most, while Oak Bay, the Peninsula and the western suburbs hosted next to none. That distribution did not happen by accident. The region’s other councils have watched what each new site does to the blocks around it and kept their distance, and the province has not forced them, because it has never needed force in Victoria. Residents here did not want the concentration and said so, in delegations, in letters, in the neighbourhood fights this article keeps returning to. They asked their council to stop siting facility after facility on the same streets, and a council ideologically at home with the government kept saying yes. That is the cycle a company town runs on. With a mayor and council this entrenched in the NDP’s project, no siting decision is ever genuinely open: residents can delegate, write and plead, and the answer is settled before they speak. And the two people positioned to break the cycle, the city’s MLAs, have every reason not to: each site their council absorbs is a delivery statistic for their government, a ribbon for their podium. The concentration that residents call a burden, their party calls a success. Meanwhile the one program aimed squarely at ordinary family-scale affordable housing, the Community Housing Fund, is the one the province suspended.

Track two: the unpaid bill. Under every joint podium ran the city’s insistence that it is subsidizing the province. Council formally told the province to “pay up” for homelessness costs. Alto’s response to Budget 2025 welcomed the money but stated flatly, “I am not confident that the allocated funding is enough or adequate.” The Community Safety and Wellbeing Plan is, structurally, a list of costed demands on the province. The $10.35 million was the city paying those costs itself, and paying was a mistake. A government that pays bills it does not owe invites more of them, and the province obliged. The January 2026 “we have done more than enough” declaration was the city announcing, years and tens of millions of dollars too late, that it would not pay again. Through all of it, the two MLAs’ public role was to appear at announcements of provincial spending. Never, on any located record, did either publicly side with their city’s demand for structural funding, a fair-share regional distribution of supportive housing, or compensation for downloaded costs. At the flagship January 2026 joint shelter announcement, the local political quote in the province’s own release went to Green MLA Rob Botterell of Saanich North and the Islands, crediting his party’s accord. The two MLAs who actually represent the city appear nowhere in it.

Track three: open conflict. The starkest episode was not about homelessness at all. In January 2025 the provincial education minister fired Victoria’s entire elected school board over the police-liaison dispute. In May 2026 the province reinstated every trustee and conceded the judicial review, after late-disclosed ministry text messages revealed what the government itself called a “significant administrative error.” The debacle cost taxpayers upwards of $419,000 and stands as the most heavy-handed provincial intervention in Victoria’s local democracy in years. Neither Victoria MLA is on record defending the city’s elected trustees. Add the VicPD budget overrides and the E-Comm download, and the pattern completes itself: when province and city collided, the city’s two voices in government sided with the province every time.

Track four: the silences. The sharpest test of a local MLA is not the joint announcement but the moment constituents dissent from the governing consensus. Here the record is unbroken silence. On June 25, 2026, council’s Zoning Bylaw Modernization, Phase Two rewrote the rules for much of Victoria’s working harbour: ship-breaking permitted in the marine-industrial zone, height limits raised to twenty-five metres, parking requirements removed, the Harbour Road design guidelines cancelled. The package was introduced, passed and given final approval in a single afternoon, with no public hearing and no direct notice to James Bay or Vic West, the neighbourhoods that face the water, as this publication documented at the time. The vehicle for that speed was provincial. Bill 44, the NDP’s 2023 housing statute, forbids a public hearing for rezonings consistent with the Official Community Plan. Whatever one’s view of density, and the OCP fights in James Bay, already among the densest neighbourhoods in Canada, are genuinely two-sided, the procedural fact is not in dispute: the legislature these two MLAs sit in wrote the law that removed their constituents’ right to be heard at City Hall, and neither has said a public word about how their own city used it.

The silence coincides with the largest defence buildout this region has seen in a generation. Canada reached NATO’s two per cent spending target in 2025-26. Ottawa is spending $1.1 billion recapitalizing the jetties at CFB Esquimalt, a project expected to support some 1,280 construction jobs, and the federal defence industrial strategy toured British Columbia in February 2026 looking for places to put shipbuilding work. A working harbour rezoned for industry at exactly this moment could have been the region’s biggest economic opening in decades. A switched-on council and engaged provincial members would have tied the new industrial permissions to two conditions: environmental protection, because ship-breaking is among the dirtiest work a waterfront can host, and guarantees of local jobs. Nothing on the public record ties the rezoning to either. The permissions went through unpriced and unconditioned, and the city’s two MLAs said nothing.

The ecological stakes deserve to be stated plainly, because nobody at City Hall stated them. Ship-breaking is not dirty in the abstract: dismantling hulls releases asbestos, heavy metals and fuel residues, which is why the industry’s record elsewhere is written on contaminated foreshores. The zone that now permits it sits on a working harbour that is also a living one, water that residents and volunteers have spent decades nursing back to health. What discharge standards will apply, what monitoring, what remediation bond, whether any environmental assessment will precede the first hull: as of this writing the public record contains no answers, because the venue where those questions would have been asked is the public hearing the statute forbids. A council that found a single afternoon sufficient for the rezoning has yet to find one for the water.

A week later, on July 2, 2026, Councillor Marg Gardiner moved that the mayor seek closure of The Harbour, the supervised-consumption site at 941 Pandora Avenue in Lore’s riding. The motion was defeated 7–1. Council’s inbox ran 458 to 20 against closure, with letters from doctors, nurses, addictions researchers and area residents. The site’s defenders won that week’s democratic argument decisively; the neighbours who call the site a “magnet” for dealing and disorder lost it. Nor is The Harbour the only such address in the city’s residential fabric. At 1802 Cook Street, the UVic-run Substance drug-checking storefront tests street drugs six days a week in a neighbourhood of family homes, within sight of a children’s daycare, an adjacency this publication has verified on the ground. Families were never asked whether it suited them; the service simply arrived, announced after the fact. Whichever side a reader takes, the observation is the same as on the harbour. On the most contested address in the capital, operating under the health authority and harm-reduction framework of the MLAs’ own government, neither member weighed in at all. Residents on every side of these fights, pro-density and anti, pro-site and anti, were left to fight City Hall alone, because the provincial members’ party wrote the rules, funds the operator, and set the targets the plan serves. None of it requires coordination. It requires only that no elected official in the city disagree with any of it.

The buildout itself raises two further questions. The first is design. The housing the province celebrates arrives overwhelmingly as standardized mid-rise blocks, and the tools a city once used to demand better from builders are the ones this government removed: the public hearing abolished by Bill 44, the design guidelines cancelled in the harbour rewrite. Victoria’s residents lost the venues where they could have demanded better buildings, and their MLAs let the loss pass unremarked.

The second is harder, and the numbers are the region’s own. Thirty per cent of Greater Victoria’s homeless population identifies as Indigenous, against roughly five per cent of the general population, a six-fold overrepresentation the Indigenous press tracks as a continuing crisis. The province’s flagship answer concentrates the most vulnerable, disproportionately Indigenous, into designated supportive-housing blocks along a single corridor anchored by a consumption site, where their suffering is public and, as the eleven days after the Pandora clearing showed, sometimes fatal. Some of the government’s harshest critics reach for an ugly historical comparison: designated blocks, managed substances, segregation from the city’s prosperity. The comparison is inflammatory, but the numbers underneath it are the CRD’s own. And the juxtaposition is hard to look away from. The MLA whose proudest ministerial achievement recognized First Nations jurisdiction over their own children represents the corridor where Indigenous adults are six times overrepresented among the people sleeping outside, and the public record contains her comment on neither.

The Front Lawn

Beginning in October 2023, pro-Palestinian marches assembled every Saturday at the Parliament Buildings and moved through downtown. They ran 126 consecutive weeks before VicPD announced in March 2026 that it would no longer provide traffic control, citing “unsustainable strain”: more than 10,000 officer-hours and an estimated $1.2 million in policing costs over two years. The marchers responded with a formal complaint against VicPD alleging bias, vowed to continue, and disrupted this year’s Canada Day observances downtown before the weekly marches finally wound down, as this publication observed. On the cause itself, BC Politics Watch takes no position; the right to protest at a legislature is democratic bedrock. But the arithmetic belongs in any honest accounting of the city’s condition. A police department whose chief pleads chronic underfunding, in a downtown where businesses beg for patrols, spent two years of scarce officer-hours managing weekly traffic on the province’s doorstep. And it was attendees of one of those same rallies, told of the event from the rally stage, who went on to surround Nina Krieger’s family fundraiser through a fence. The costs fell on the city. The province appeared for the announcements and was absent when the bill came. No local politician would say plainly what was happening in front of their own building.

The city’s credibility on this file was damaged before the period this article covers began. In November 2023, Councillor Susan Kim signed the open letter “Stand with Palestine,” which criticized the federal NDP leader for “repeating the unverified accusation” that Hamas committed sexual violence on October 7, a characterization contradicted by subsequent UN reporting. More than 10,000 people petitioned for her resignation. The loudest official calls came from BC United leader Kevin Falcon, that is, from the opposition in the legislature, not from Victoria’s own governing-party MLAs. Kim apologized twice and asked to have her signature removed; a code-of-conduct investigation ended with no sanctions, and she sits on council still. Krieger was not yet in office. But Grace Lore was then a sitting minister whose entire political identity, parliamentary secretary for gender equity, career advocate against sexualized violence, was built on the principle that survivors are to be believed. No public comment from her on a councillor in her own city dismissing mass sexual violence as “unverified” could be located. When the offender is a political ally, even the party’s stated core values go unenforced.

Land Without Consultation

The Hatley Park Test

The land-title controversy sinking the government province-wide has a Greater Victoria address. Under the Te’mexw treaty, now in its final stages, Ottawa and the province propose to transfer Hatley Park, federal land and home of Royal Roads University, to the Songhees Nation. In April 2026 the neighbouring Esquimalt Nation sued to stop it, claiming the site as its own. The first party to call this process unjust was not a taxpayer or a heritage society. It was a Lekwungen successor nation, forced into court because the governments at the table divided the land without it. A process that cannot persuade the Lekwungen peoples’ own kin had no hope of persuading a public that was never asked. And Hatley Park is not the only land moving. The same treaty would transfer prime parcels inside Victoria: the harbourfront lot at 1112 Wharf Street, assessed at $23.4 million, and 430 Menzies Street, directly across from the legislature, assessed at $25.9 million.

The procedure repeats. The harbour was rezoned with no public hearing, the hearing itself abolished by provincial statute. The Official Community Plan densified neighbourhoods that had objected on the record. School lands were leased and sold. Crown land is committed at treaty tables that hold no public hearing. Any one of these outcomes can be defended, and many Victorians defend them. The pattern still stands: file by file, this government has cut the public out of decisions about land. The people asking questions include families who spent generations building this city’s businesses, homes and institutions, and who live and work beside the Lekwungen peoples on whose territory it stands. Having a stake is not a sin. Asking for a say is not racism.

The Epithet

When BC Politics Watch reported that the Te’mexw treaty would move land beside the legislature and a substantial piece of the harbourfront to the Songhees Nation, and called for transparency, Grace Lore answered. In the first days of July 2026, days before this article went to press, in a public social-media post that remains live as we publish, she called this outlet racist and anti-Indigenous. The answer was not information. It was an epithet. The same days passed without a word from her accounts about the machete attack on women in Beacon Hill Park, in her own riding. Nina Krieger, the minister whose actual portfolio is public safety, was no louder; no statement from her could be located either. Nor could one from the mayor or any member of council. Women were attacked with a machete in the capital’s most famous park, and the entire local political class had nothing to say. She never asked the ancestry of the people she was describing; she assumed it. Our writers and contributors are not all white; they include people with Indigenous backgrounds and descendants of the families who built this city. Nothing in asking how public land changes hands disrespects anyone. So here is the question she keeps declining to answer: how much respect will these transfers command when the decisions are made without the public consultation that could make them stick? An MLA who reaches for a slur instead of an answer has told her constituents exactly what she thinks she owes them.

Her response to this publication was not an isolated reflex. In March 2026, Conservative MLA Hon Chan was charged with assault, assault by choking and uttering threats, and expelled from his caucus. Lore issued the governing caucus’s statement demanding his immediate resignation from the legislature, over charges no court has tried. The charges are serious, and many will share her view. But put her two most visible statements of 2026 side by side. For an opposition MLA facing untried charges: give up your seat. For her own constituents asking about land: you are racists. The method is the same both times, the strongest available accusation, fired before any process has run. And her concern arrives on a schedule. Her silence on the Councillor Kim letter ran on that schedule; the offender was an ally. When a young woman was hurt in the Beacon Hill Park machete attack, she said nothing again; there was no opponent to blame. The pattern is not concern for victims. It is concern for victims whose cases embarrass the right people.

This publication regards violence against women, and against anyone, as abhorrent, and people who commit it belong before the courts. That is precisely why the courts must be allowed to do their work first. We made this argument to her directly, months earlier, in an exchange of messages: pronouncing guilt before trial in something as grave as sexual assault cuts two ways. It ruins people who may be innocent, and it corrodes the seriousness owed to women who come forward, whose cases deserve to be weighed on evidence, not politics. In the same exchange we asked whether she had looked into the contaminated soils of the Bayview roundhouse lands in Vic West, a former rail yard approved for towers while its hazards remained outstanding. Meanwhile her silences kept their own ledger: Pandora, Crystal Pool, the OCP, the forfeiture claim against a compassion club in her own riding, on which her office offered sympathy by private email while declining public comment. Her voice in 2026 is reserved for accusations that cost her nothing.

The Harbour’s Future

The harbour question is no longer hypothetical. The province is reportedly weeks from a memorandum of understanding on the “Future of History” project: a 15,000-square-foot floating Indigenous welcome centre and exhibit space in the Inner Harbour, at the foot of the historic Steamship Building, a $40-million partnership between the Maritime Museum of BC and the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations. The project may prove admirable. The cultures it would present are the oldest on this coast. But a structure that size, floating in the most photographed view in British Columbia, in front of the legislature and steps from the Royal BC Museum, would once have filled a public hearing with questions. What will it block? What else is planned for the harbourfront as the treaty parcels change hands? Who decided? No referendum is planned, and no hearing is required. The city, which backed the Songhees claims under Lisa Helps and backs them still under Marianne Alto, has said it will not stand in the province’s way.

Grace Lore’s only located Hansard appearance of the 43rd Parliament, a transcript in our possession, is her introduction of the Maritime Museum Society’s leading advocate and her convening of meetings that day with an Esquimalt Nation representative and ministerial colleagues. Her only visible work in the legislature is facilitation of the harbour project; her only public engagement with its questioners is the accusation. And meetings are not consent. Victoria has been offered briefings in plenty and votes never, from the treaty parcels to the OCP to the harbour itself.

The government will answer that modern treaties are nation-to-nation instruments, ratified by members and legislatures, not municipal plebiscites. That is a real answer, and a government confident in it would give it instead of calling the questioner racist. Its confidence is not shared by the Esquimalt Nation, which had to sue to be heard. Indigenous opinion is not a monolith; nations disagree with nations, and some Indigenous residents tell us they fear that contested windfalls, delivered without public buy-in, will be resented on their own streets. Sociology has a name for benevolence so sure of its virtue that it stops listening to everyone, including the people it claims to serve. A non-Indigenous minister who hurls accusations on other people’s behalf should consider whether it fits. This publication is not outraged by reconciliation. It is outraged by the slander.

The minister will also say there was consultation, and something called consultation did occur: surveys and open houses on the Official Community Plan, meetings with invited guests on the harbour. The record shows what each was worth. Where input was possible it was overridden; the OCP densified the very neighbourhoods that had objected. Where the decisions were largest the venue was abolished; the harbour package went from introduction to final approval in hours, under a statute her own government wrote to forbid the hearing, and no public process of any kind attends the treaty transfers. A desk in a meeting room is not a public process. Decisions of this size are owed a public announcement and a public reckoning before the fact, to the opposition, to every resident, and to the British Columbians in whose name the land is held, not a briefing.

As for the epithet, it fails on the simplest evidence. This publication demands public consultation with monotonous consistency, on drug-consumption sites, on rezonings, on private developments, on the harbour, and on these transfers alike. A demand that treats every file identically is about process, not ancestry. So we put our position in the one form the minister can actually meet, and it rests on her own government’s precedent. The province’s statute book would not let Victoria borrow $168.9 million for a swimming pool without a binding referendum; that vote was held in February 2025. Yet the permanent disposition of public land in the capital, land held in the name of every British Columbian, triggers no vote at all. A loan repayable over twenty years requires the people’s assent. A transfer that can never be repaid requires none. It is public land, and its disposition should go to a public vote of the British Columbians who own it. The precedent is her government’s; we are only asking it to apply its own principle. Until she will say the same, we invite her to name the date and the venue where a Victoria resident’s objection could lawfully have altered the harbour rezoning, the school-land disposals, or the transfer of a single parcel. There is none to name.

The government will point to the numbers that moved its way: toxic-drug deaths in Victoria fell from 174 in 2023 to 94 in 2025, and provincial crime statistics ticked down. Those deaths are measured in human lives, and every one matters more than any statistic in this article. But the decline is mirrored across the Island and the province, in cities these two MLAs have never represented, which is precisely why crediting them for it does not survive contact with the map. Causation is the very thing Save Our Streets contests of every favourable statistic, and readers can weigh the numbers against the streets they walk. What no number answers is the question this article keeps asking: who, in nineteen months, spoke for Victoria when Victoria and the party disagreed?

A Government in Decline

None of this happened in a vacuum. Budget 2026 carried a record $13.3-billion deficit, tax increases, roughly 15,000 public-sector positions cut over three years, and delayed capital across schools, hospitals and transit. Downtown businesses, bleeding customers to disorder and profit to vacancy, asked for safety and relief; the budget answered with higher taxes and a slower buildout, while the grant announcements kept flowing to the causes the government prefers. In February 2026 the BC Greens tore up their cooperation accord, saying the NDP had failed on two-thirds of its commitments, the same accord that underpinned Victoria’s HEARTH shelter program, whose future funding is now an open question. Premier Eby’s approval slid from 53 per cent in March 2025 to 33 per cent by May 2026, with the Conservatives leading by double digits in some polls and pollsters naming the government’s handling of Indigenous land-title questions, the controversy examined above at its Greater Victoria address, as a leading driver of the slide. For a city governed by a one-seat NDP majority, whose every local ask must now compete with a fiscal crisis and a re-election panic, the period of easy announcements is over. The city’s two MLAs will spend the rest of the term defending a record, and the record is weaker than the announcements made it look.

What the Record Says

Part 1 judged two politicians. What remains is the system that produced them. Every file above ran through a single political family that no one inside had reason to question and no one outside had power to. Nobody had to plan it; a one-party town produces it on autopilot. The correction does not require agreeing with this publication about anything else. Victoria votes for its council in October 2026 and for its MLAs in 2028. Between now and then, every candidate who asks for either job should be asked one question first: when your party and your city disagree, whose side are you on? The two members this article has examined never had to answer it. The council that rezoned the harbour and absorbed every site the province sent never had to answer it either. The next ones should not get the choice.

A Note on Method

Documentary sources for every claim in this article are on file with BC Politics Watch. Primary records include Elections BC candidate financing filings, Victoria council escribe minutes and staff reports, provincial news releases and budget documents, Hansard transcripts, BC Coroners Service data, and reporting by the Times Colonist, Capital Daily, CHEK News, Victoria News and Victoria Buzz from October 2024 to July 2026, linked under Sources. The end of the weekly pro-Palestinian marches and the Canada Day disruption are reported from this publication’s direct observation, as is the proximity of a daycare to the drug-checking site at 1802 Cook Street [photograph on file before publication], and as are the street conditions described on the 1100-block of Johnson Street. Grace Lore’s public post characterizing this publication as racist and anti-Indigenous is preserved in an archived capture held by the publication.. Lore’s email to the Victoria Cannabis Buyers Club, quoted in The Ledger, was provided to this publication by its recipients and is on file in full, as is the club’s reply; the mayor’s June 17, 2026 letter is quoted as it appears in that reply. Riding-boundary attributions for individual housing projects are approximate. A claim that drugs move from the Pandora corridor into Victoria schools is unsupported by located reporting and is not asserted here. No individual writer or contributor of this publication is identified, by design.

Sources

• CHEK: Victoria tells province to pay up for homelessness costs

• City of Victoria: Mayor Alto statement on BC Budget 2025 (Mar 2025)

• BC Government: Bridge Street Pathways shelter, HEARTH commitment complete (Jan 2026)

• CBC: Housing Supply Act year-one results (Dec 2024)

• Victoria Buzz: Victoria exceeds housing targets second year (Nov 2025)

• Victoria News: BC quietly suspends Community Housing Fund (Feb 2026)

• Victoria News: dry recovery housing coming to Victoria (Nov 2025)

• CBC: involuntary care beds for Surrey and Prince George (Sept 2025)

• CBC: BC ends drug decriminalization pilot (Jan 2026)

• Capital Daily: 343 Islanders killed by toxic drugs in 2025, lowest in years

• CHEK: SD61 trustees reinstated, province concedes court case (May 2026)

• Victoria News: school board debacle costs province $419K+ (May 2026)

• BC Government: Belleville Terminal redevelopment project page

• CBC: BC Budget 2026: record deficit, job cuts, capital delays (Feb 2026)

• The Tyee: Greens end deal to back NDP (Feb 2026)

• Angus Reid Institute: premiers’ approval tracking (2025–2026)

• Victoria News: businesses and police “reshaping the wild west image” (Dec 2025)

• BC Government: community safety grants with Lore, Krieger, Gibson (May 2026)

• BC Government: anti-hate protection grants (June 2026)

• Times Colonist: Esquimalt Nation lawsuit opposes Hatley Park transfer to Songhees (Apr 2026)

• BC Politics Watch: No Public Hearing, No Public Notice (harbour rezoning, June 2026)

• CHEK: motion to close safe consumption site defeated 7–1 (July 2026)

• Victoria News: motion to close safe consumption site fails; 458–20 correspondence (July 2026)

• Times Colonist: call to shut down Pandora drug-consumption site quashed

• The CJN: VicPD withdraws traffic support for pro-Palestine protests after 126 weeks (2026)

• CBC: Victoria police to stop providing traffic control for weekly rallies (Mar 2026)

• Victoria News: Palestine marchers file complaint against VicPD (Apr 2026)

• The CJN: calls continue for Councillor Susan Kim to resign (2023)

• CBC: opposition leader calls on Susan Kim to resign (Nov 2023)

• Victoria Buzz: Susan Kim issues second apology (Nov 2023)

• Victoria Buzz: 2025 PiT count details, 30% Indigenous (Sept 2025)

• Ha-Shilth-Sa: homeless counts continue to show high Indigenous representation (Oct 2025)

• Victoria News: Songhees confident in Colwood land transfer despite Nation’s injunction (Apr 2026)

• CHEK: Victoria Cannabis Buyers Club faces $3.24M civil forfeiture action (May 2026)

• Victoria News: cannabis club asks city for help as province files for forfeiture (May 2026)

• Victoria News: VCBC rallies against seizure of downtown shopfront (May 2026)

• Times Colonist: city backs Songhees land claims; Wharf and Menzies parcels

• CBC: MLA Hon Chan charged, removed from Conservative caucus (Mar 2026)

• CHEK: Richmond Centre MLA removed from caucus; Lore statement (Mar 2026)

• Victoria Buzz: proposed floating heritage centre nears key milestone (Jan 2026)

• Times Colonist: floating museum and waterfront maritime museum edge closer to reality

• Times Colonist: another year to use $18M for Island rail corridor planning (Jan 2025)

• CHEK: 15 years after last Vancouver Island train, debate over E&N corridor continues

• DND: Canada achieves NATO 2% defence spending benchmark (Mar 2026)

• Saanich News: $1.1B CFB Esquimalt jetty infrastructure

• DND: McGuinty concludes BC visit on Defence Industrial Strategy (Feb 2026)

Victoria is a single-party town, the most politically uniform capital in Canada. Every seat in Greater Victoria is held by the BC NDP, and so is very nearly every seat on Vancouver Island. The two ridings that cover the city itself, Victoria-Beacon Hill and Victoria-Swan Lake, have not elected anyone else in a generation. In October 2024, Grace Lore held Beacon Hill against Sonia Furstenau, the BC Green leader who had given up her Cowichan Valley seat to challenge her; Lore took 47.3 per cent to Furstenau’s 33.5, and the loss ended Furstenau’s political career. Next door, Nina Krieger, who ran unopposed for the NDP nomination after four-term MLA Rob Fleming retired, won Victoria-Swan Lake with 56 per cent. The Conservatives ran a distant third in both ridings. The raw numbers are smaller than the percentages make them sound. Lore received only 13,350 votes and Krieger 14,273, in a city of roughly 94,000 people and a capital region of 405,000 that lives with their decisions. Each was elected by about one city resident in seven.

The uniformity has removed the ordinary machinery of accountability, and not because Island voters are incapable of choosing differently. In the 2025 federal election they flipped Cowichan-Malahat-Langford to Conservative Jeff Kibble and sent Tamara Kronis to Ottawa for Nanaimo-Ladysmith. Those seats sit in Parliament, a continent away from the legislature that runs housing, policing, health and land in this city, and provincially there is no opposition MLA anywhere in the capital to ask awkward questions on its behalf. City Hall is dominated by a progressive council under Mayor Marianne Alto, so from the legislature on Belleville Street to the council chamber on Douglas, one political group manages every file that touches a Victorian’s life. Some of the connections are literal. Diana Gibson, the NDP cabinet minister whose Oak Bay-Gordon Head riding borders the city, is married to Victoria Councillor Dave Thompson; a second marriage, between the mayor and a Crown corporation chief executive, appears later in this story. Councillor Matt Dell has spent fifteen years drafting policy and legislation for the provincial government, and Councillor Jeremy Caradonna worked in the province’s Climate Change Secretariat; albeit briefly. A council asked to push back against the province would, in several chairs, be pushing back on its own résumés. Between 2024 and 2026, as conditions on downtown streets deteriorated, there was no one else to blame.

This article, published in two parts, examines the two people Victorians sent to the legislature: every ministry and title they have held, what they did with those offices, and what the city received in return. The business community, conservative critics and, increasingly, the city’s own NDP-aligned mayor have made versions of the same complaint, that the government these MLAs serve speaks fluently about social ambition and falls short on delivery: safe streets, functioning institutions, money that arrives when promised. The record that follows is drawn from government releases, watchdog reports, Hansard and local journalism, listed under Sources, together with documents in this publication’s possession.

The City They Represent

Homelessness rose. The 2025 Greater Victoria Point-in-Time count, conducted in March 2025 and released that September, found 1,749 people experiencing homelessness, up five per cent from 1,665 in 2023. Of those counted, 308 were living fully unsheltered, and roughly 80 per cent reported substance-use issues, a share that had jumped about twenty points in two years.

In June 2025 the Downtown Victoria Business Association reported that 69 per cent of downtown businesses said crime had increased, that 39 per cent had declining profits, and that roughly half would consider closing or leaving when their leases ended. Commercial vacancy downtown had reached a record 10.7 per cent that February, up from 6.1 per cent in 2023, and The Globe and Mail was describing how fentanyl had turned Pandora Avenue “from downtown hub to open-air drug market” where dealers work openly among the encamped. VicPD’s chief said transforming Pandora would mean confronting the drug trade on it, though the unit her force aimed at street-level trafficking had to wait for the city’s emergency money to fund nine officers. By the business association’s annual general meeting in November 2025, the message to governments had shrunk to a single line: “We don’t need another plan.”

What council produced that June was, in fact, another plan: a Community Safety and Wellbeing Plan built on the sentence “our city is in crisis”, running to roughly 95 recommendations, a striking number of them addressed to the province: fund the municipalities carrying homelessness costs, expand mental-health and addictions treatment, fix the courts. Days later, after a Canada Day long weekend with multiple violent incidents in a twelve-hour span, council approved $10.35 million of the city’s own money for police, bylaw officers, temporary housing and cleanup. Under British Columbia’s division of responsibilities, housing, health care, mental illness and addiction are provincial files; municipal property taxes exist to fund roads, parks, pipes, policing and permits. Victoria’s were now paying for both, and nothing about the arrangement obliged the province to match the commitment. It did not. The spending changed little that a resident could notice: the homeless count was higher after it than before, the businesses had stopped believing in plans, and a year later council was still issuing updates to the same document.

On July 3, 2026, days before this article went to press, a group of friends at a bonfire near Beacon Hill Park and Dallas Road was confronted by roughly fifteen males, one of whom produced a knife and then a machete. Three people were hurt; one young woman suffered a head injury and another victim needed surgery. Two suspects were arrested, and charges including aggravated assault were laid. The park gives Grace Lore’s riding its name, and as of publication, five days later, Lore has said nothing about the attack publicly. It came a year, almost to the week, after the Canada Day violence that pushed council to raid its own budget, and it sits atop a steady accumulation of smaller incidents: VicPD opened 2026 warning that a pedestrian or cyclist had been struck every single day of the year to that point, and on July 1 another pedestrian was seriously hurt in a suspected hit-and-run.

By January 2026 the mayor had had enough. Announcing another update to the safety plan, Marianne Alto declared “we have done more than enough… We do not have room for anyone else,” noting that Victoria hosts roughly 87 per cent of the region’s supportive housing and calling the city’s ten-million-dollar intervention “not sustainable.” Alto is no conservative. This is the city its two MLAs represent.

Grace Lore: A Career in Social Portfolios, and an Empty Chair

The Ministries She Has Held

Grace Lore came to politics from the University of Victoria, where she lectured in political science and specialized in gender and politics, and from years of front-line work at the Victoria Sexual Assault Centre. Her appointments since read in a straight line from that résumé. She became BC’s first Parliamentary Secretary for Gender Equity in November 2020, with a mandate covering gender-based-violence planning, pay-transparency legislation and gender-based analysis across government. In December 2022 David Eby made her Minister of State for Child Care, fronting the $10-a-day expansion, and in January 2024 she received her first full ministry, Children and Family Development. Since December 2024 she has been, and on the government’s own cabinet list remains, Minister without Portfolio. Not one of the four jobs has been economic, fiscal or infrastructural, and critics who say Victoria’s NDP benches were staffed for social causes rather than delivery do not have to look far for their evidence.

The MCFD Record

She did not inherit Children and Family Development in the ordinary way. Her predecessor, Mitzi Dean, was removed after revelations that an 11-year-old Indigenous boy, known publicly as Colby, had been tortured and killed in 2021 by extended-family caregivers while social workers went seven months without checking on him. Eby promised a “significant reset,” and it swept out the ministry’s top bureaucrat along with its minister. Deputy Minister Allison Bond, who had run MCFD since 2017, was moved sideways to Social Development; in March 2026 she was appointed chief executive of the Royal BC Museum, its fifth in five years. Bond is also, as the local outlet Vibrant Victoria noted when the legacy press did not, the spouse of Mayor Marianne Alto. The museum is a provincial Crown corporation; its board made the hire after what it described as a comprehensive global search, and the mayor’s office had no formal role. What remains is the sequence itself: the deputy who presided over a child-welfare system in documented crisis left for a Crown CEO post, she is married to the mayor whose city negotiates daily with the province, and no mainstream outlet covering the appointment mentioned the connection.

In September 2024, Lore signed the “Rising to the Challenge” Accord with the First Nations Leadership Council, recognizing First Nations jurisdiction over child and family services, and hired BC’s first Indigenous director of child welfare. It was the most visible achievement of her eleven months in the job, and the reviews were warm: Grand Chief Stewart Phillip called the accord “a serious commitment by Minister Grace Lore,” and Chief Don Tom, vice-president of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, called working with her “a breath of fresh air”. Sixty-eight per cent of the children in care in the system she ran are Indigenous.

Two months before the accord, the Representative for Children and Youth had released two reports in nine days: Don’t Look Away, on Colby’s death, and No Time to Wait, in which more than 80 per cent of child-welfare social workers said caseloads prevented them from doing their jobs properly. At the podium, Lore said “99 per cent of kids are being seen” and that frontline staffing was up 17 per cent. Capital Daily checked. The ministry’s own 2023/24 youth-justice practice audit showed service-plan follow-up at 11 per cent and compliance with required supervision contacts at 29 per cent, and budget documents showed a smaller staffing investment than she had cited. The BC Ombudsperson’s September 2024 report again ranked MCFD among the most-complained-about bodies in the province. “We can’t work incrementally anymore,” Threshold Housing’s Colin Tessier told The Tyee. “There’s death and harm basically every day.”

December 2024 to Now: The Vacancy

Weeks after her re-election, Lore was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. In December 2024 she stepped back from MCFD; Jodie Wickens of Coquitlam took the file, and Lore stayed in cabinet without a portfolio. Her updates since have been hard to read: chemotherapy so toxic it was “as hard on all my organs as it was on my cancer,” a pivot to surgery, and, as of October 2025, continuing fatigue and pain with another operation planned. The illness is a misfortune, not a failing, and her openness about it has been widely admired.

The arrangement built around the illness has drawn far less attention. For roughly nineteen months, December 2024 to this writing, Victoria-Beacon Hill has been represented by a legislator who holds a cabinet title without a portfolio, whose located Hansard record in the 43rd Parliament consists of routine proceedings, introductions of visiting guests and the like, and who has sponsored no bills and holds no committee assignments. Her MLA news feed over the period consists mainly of newsletters, community spotlights and a promotion of FIFA World Cup fan events. In October 2025 a Conservative MLA publicly wished her well and said he looked forward to “seeing her back in the Legislature”; she had not returned by then. The NDP holds the house by a single seat, yet neither the Premier nor the member has offered constituents a plan, a timeline or an interim arrangement beyond a constituency office that “remains available.” Other legislatures handle long ministerial absences with explicit deputization and public communication. Victoria-Beacon Hill, the riding that contains the 900-block of Pandora Avenue, got neither.

In late 2024, after the police-led clearing of the Pandora encampment, which the mayor championed, Ha-Shilth-Sa reported nine fatal overdoses in eleven days among the displaced. No public statement from the MLA for the block could be located, on the clearing or on the deaths, though during the campaign she had said Pandora “isn’t working for anyone.” In February 2025, Victorians voted 58.7 per cent to borrow up to $168.9 million to replace Crystal Pool, the city’s largest civic project, in her riding; no evidence could be found that she secured or publicly sought a provincial capital contribution, and the city was left applying for a $7-million grant against a $209-million bill. Her neighbourhoods changed around her too. James Bay, home to some 12,000 people and one of the densest neighbourhoods in Canada, along with Fairfield, North Park and the blocks around Beacon Hill, was upzoned in an Official Community Plan rewrite serving her government’s housing targets, and the public hearings where residents might have objected were abolished by Bill 44, passed while she sat in cabinet. Residents petitioned and lost. Nothing she said about the OCP, the density or the lost hearings could be located, and before her illness a constituent had complained to the local paper that her office would not grant a meeting. The silence has had exceptions. By March 2026 she was well enough to issue the governing caucus’s statement demanding a Richmond MLA’s resignation over criminal charges. There has been no comparable statement about Pandora, Crystal Pool, the OCP, the province’s forfeiture claim against her own constituents, or the machete attack days ago in Beacon Hill Park itself.

Nina Krieger: From Film Tax Credits to the Hardest File in Government

The Acclamation and the Apprenticeship

Nina Krieger reached the legislature without a contest at any stage. The seat was safe, the retiring incumbent stood beside her on election night, and the nomination was hers unopposed. She had spent eighteen years at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, most of them as executive director, commuting from Victoria toward the end; a distinguished career, spent entirely in the cultural and human-rights sector, with nothing in it that spoke to the disorder on her future constituents’ streets. Fifty-six per cent of Victoria-Swan Lake voted NDP anyway. The campaign ran on the central party’s platform and branding, and how much of its money came from party transfers rather than local donors is on file in her Elections BC candidate financing report; we will publish those figures in Part 2. A seat this safe is not won by a candidate. It is assigned to one.

Her first posting was Parliamentary Secretary for Arts and Film, awarded in November 2024 as downtown Victoria’s crisis built toward the city’s own declaration. Her signature involvements were the December 2024 increase in film tax credits, which lifted the production services credit from 28 to 36 per cent, and a Screen BC delegation to Los Angeles to court studios. The province was running multi-billion-dollar deficits at the time, and the capital’s businesses were asking for courts and police officers; its Victoria MLA was sweetening subsidies for one of the most heavily subsidized industries in North America. The position was abolished the day she left it. It had existed to hold her somewhere until she was needed.

On June 7, 2025, protesters from the weekly pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the legislature targeted Krieger’s first fundraiser, an afternoon of lawn bowling and a barbecue at a Victoria club, shouting at her through a fence. Krieger, one of a handful of Jewish MLAs in the province, called it intimidation “because of who she is,” and Attorney General Niki Sharma and Jewish organizations condemned the targeting as antisemitic. Whatever one thinks of the underlying politics, she was singled out at a family event over identity rather than policy, and no MLA on any bench deserves that. Six weeks later, Eby handed her a mandate naming the protection of targeted religious and cultural communities as one of its “twin challenges.”

July 2025: The Crime File Lands on a Victoria Desk

The July 17, 2025 cabinet shuffle made her Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General, one of the heaviest jobs in government and, for the first time in years, a portfolio aimed squarely at Victoria’s most visible failure, held by a Victoria MLA. She has called the first months “a wild ride.” The record since is substantial on paper: a 40-member provincial extortion task force, billed as Canada’s first and later credited with arrests and removals; the E-Comm 911 governance reviews, released after ten South Island municipalities protested dispatch costs downloaded onto them; a $16-million chronic-offender initiative targeting roughly 420 repeat offenders through twelve hubs; new firearm regulations aimed at extortion-related violence; a doubling of the Civil Forfeiture Office; the HealthIM mental-health crisis tool launched at VicPD headquarters; and a new police training site for Victoria announced in March 2026. She has also become the face of provincial housing openings in and around her riding, from the Pandora and Discovery Street projects, roughly 300 units and about $100 million provincial, to the 158-home Caledonia opening in Fernwood beside Mayor Alto in May 2026.

The Caledonia homes stand on former Victoria High School lands, assembled through a 2019 land swap that transferred school-district green space to the city and leased the site for sixty years. Housing advocates call that smart use of surplus public land. Critics see a pattern that includes a parcel beside Lansdowne Middle School sold on a 4–3 vote: school property converted to development in a district whose elected board the province fired for sixteen of the months under review, and whose capital projects Budget 2026 slowed. School land was easier for this government to give up than money for schools was to find.

Seven months into the job came the event that will define it. On February 10, 2026, a shooter in Tumbler Ridge killed her own mother and half-brother at home, then six people at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, wounding twenty-seven before killing herself, the deadliest mass shooting in Canada since Nova Scotia in 2020 and the deadliest school shooting since École Polytechnique. Krieger pledged to “deploy every resource” and has said a joint federal-provincial commission on the Nova Scotia model is “an option.” No minister can be judged for an atrocity that no policy made in Victoria could plausibly have prevented; she can be judged on what follows, the transparency of an investigation the Premier says is in its “final stages,” whether the floated commission becomes a commitment, whether policy follows the grief. Five months on, the commission remains an option.

In Victoria itself, the money has been small. The province’s flagship street-disorder program, C-STEP, delivered $220,000 to VicPD, against the $10.35 million the city put up itself and the $1.35 million a year it found for nine new officers; a provincial contribution of roughly two per cent of the city’s emergency spending is not a rescue; it is a photo opportunity. Under pressure, the minister has reached for the favourable statistic. Her January 2026 release said public-safety investments “deliver strong, measurable results,” and Jess Ketchum of Save Our Streets answered for much of the province: “Take a walk in almost any downtown in B.C. and it’s quickly apparent… street disorder and crime has not decreased.” Her own constituents’ business association was saying it did not need another plan.

Bill 8, her 2026 Civil Forfeiture Amendment Act, drew fire from civil-liberties critics for lowering the bar for the state to seize property. On E-Comm, she credited municipalities “for speaking up” about the dispatch download while noting they had known since 2019: sympathy, minus the cheque. And the director of police services, an official within her ministry, has repeatedly overridden Victoria council’s attempts to control the VicPD budget, most recently adding $598,128 to the 2025 budget. The province compels the spending. Victoria and Esquimalt property taxpayers write the cheque.

These are different failures. Grace Lore’s is a failure of priorities that her illness does not explain: her public accounts have had room for attacks on the BC Conservatives, for her party’s causes and for World Cup fan events, and none, on any located record, for Crystal Pool, for Pandora, or for the rezoning of her own neighbourhoods and the harbour they overlook. Nina Krieger’s is a failure of depth: handed the hardest job in government eighteen months after leaving a museum, she answered its pressures with statistics her constituents could refute by looking out the window. Victoria needed an advocate in one seat and an administrator in the other. In the years this article covers, it had neither.

A Note on Method

This two-part article covers October 2024 through July 7, 2026. It relies on provincial releases, municipal statements, watchdog reports and local journalism, listed under Sources, together with records in this publication’s possession. In the interest of transparency: Lore’s Hansard record described here reflects a transcript this publication holds, showing routine proceedings; the timing and fuller extent of her return to the chamber will be reported as confirmed. The status of any provincial grant toward Crystal Pool is unconfirmed; only the city’s applications were located. A circulating claim that Lore was reappointed to Children and Family Development in February 2026 is contradicted by the government’s own cabinet list and is treated here as false. Statements attributed to her social-media videos on civil forfeiture are not independently verified and are not asserted. Characterizations of the subjects of Lore’s social-media output reflect this publication’s review of her public accounts. Krieger’s committee assignments and the figures in her Elections BC candidate financing report will be reported in Part 2. Council’s own record is the subject of separate BC Politics Watch reporting, available on our site. The purpose of this article is the same as that work: that Victorians, and British Columbians, know how they are governed.

Sources

• Elections BC results via Wikipedia: Grace Lore

• Elections BC results via Wikipedia: Nina Krieger

• Times Colonist: Green leader left with no seat as NDP retains Victoria-Beacon Hill (Oct 2024)

• BC NDP: Victoria-Swan Lake acclamation release (Aug 2024)

• CBC: Grace Lore stepping back for cancer treatment (Dec 2024)

• BC Government: Cabinet ministers list (rev. June 2026)

• CHEK: Lore cancer treatment update (Oct 2025)

• Victoria Buzz: Lore cancer update (July 2025)

• The Tyee: Can Grace Lore Fix the Ministry of Children? (Oct 2024)

• Capital Daily: Victoria MLA in hot seat after critical RCY report (July 2024)

• RCY: No Time to Wait report (July 2024)

• BC Government: Rising to the Challenge Accord (Sept 2024)

• The Tyee: One boy’s death and BC child welfare (July 2024)

• Ha-Shilth-Sa: Nine fatal overdoses in 11 days after Pandora clearing (Nov 2024)

• Black Press: Lore candidate profile on Pandora (Oct 2024)

• Oak Bay News: Letter: Victoria MLA won’t meet with constituents

• Capital Daily: Crystal Pool referendum result (Feb 2025)

• Times Colonist: Cabinet shuffle: Victoria MLA steps into public safety (July 2025)

• Krieger ministerial mandate letter (July 2025)

• BC Government: film tax credit increases (Dec 2024)

• Black Press: “A wild ride”: Krieger on public safety role (Nov 2025)

• BC Government: extortion task force (2025)

• Island Social Trends: Krieger on E-Comm cost download (Nov 2025)

• BC Government: chronic property offending initiative expansion (June 2026)

• Times Colonist: firearm regulations to curb extortion violence (Apr 2026)

• BIV / Rob Shaw: Stats only part of the story on BC public safety

• BC Government: “Public safety investments deliver strong, measurable results” (Jan 2026)

• CRD: 2025 Point-in-Time count results (Sept 2025)

• Victoria Buzz: DVBA: urgent action needed (June 2025)

• Times Colonist: “Don’t need another plan”: DVBA AGM (Nov 2025)

• Victoria News: “Our city is in crisis”: CSWB plan endorsed (June 2025)

• CBC: Victoria approves $10.35M for community safety (July 2025)

• Victoria News: “We have done more than enough” (Jan 2026)

• CHEK: Victoria tells province to pay up for homelessness costs

• Victoria Buzz: VicPD funding: $220K C-STEP vs city $1.35M (July 2025)

• CBC: VicPD chief “chronic underfunding” and provincial budget rulings (Nov 2025)

• CHEK: construction begins on ~300 Victoria homes (May 2025)

• Victoria News: Caledonia: 158 affordable homes in Fernwood (May 2026)

• Times Colonist: BC delegation to LA to promote film industry

• Times Colonist: new police training sites in Vancouver and Victoria (Mar 2026)

• Times Colonist: HealthIM digital tool at VicPD (Jan 2026)

• The CJN: BC politician targeted by protesters at fundraiser (June 2025)

• Times Colonist: Royal BC Museum appoints Allison Bond as CEO (Mar 2026)

• CHEK: Royal BC Museum finds new CEO, fifth in five years (Mar 2026)

• CTV: witness recounts Victoria machete attack near Beacon Hill Park (July 2026)

• Victoria Buzz: charges laid in Dallas Road assault (July 2026)

• Wikipedia: 2026 Tumbler Ridge shooting

• CBC: Tumbler Ridge investigation in final stages (2026)

• Powell River Peak: joint commission into Tumbler Ridge shooting “an option”: Krieger

• Globe and Mail: how fentanyl transformed Pandora Avenue into an open-air drug market (May 2025)

• CTV: scrutiny for supervised consumption site; downtown vacancy 10.7% (2025)

• Victoria Buzz: pedestrian or cyclist struck every day of 2026: VicPD (Jan 2026)

• CTV: pedestrian seriously injured in suspected hit-and-run (July 2026)

• Fernwood NRG: SD61/City land swap for Vic High lands housing (2019)

• CHEK: SD61 approves sale of land next to Lansdowne Middle School

• Vibrant Victoria: RBCM CEO search lands on Victoria mayor’s spouse (Mar 2026)

• Business in Vancouver: Oak Bay-Gordon Head riding brief, Gibson and Councillor Thompson (2024)

• Matt Dell campaign bio: fifteen years in BC government policy

• Jeremy Caradonna bio: provincial climate policymaker, Climate Change Secretariat

• Times Colonist: Conservative Jeff Kibble wins Cowichan-Malahat-Langford (Apr 2025)

No government in this region keeps a list of these fires. None has ever examined them together. This publication built the first inventory and followed every fire through the land records, the permit files, the council minutes and the courtrooms, to answer one question: what happens to a protected building in this city after it burns?

The answer is already in the record, and it is precise. The owner now receives everything the law previously denied: the designation is removed, the protected trees are cleared, the insurance payout is freed from any obligation to rebuild, and the zoning is upgraded.

Two fires below are documented from ignition to redevelopment. In one of them the arsonist is known, convicted and sentenced: a man with a personal grudge and no interest in real estate. The building came down anyway. The land is being redeveloped anyway. That is the central finding of this piece. In Victoria, the outcome of a fire does not depend on who lit it or why. Fire, from any hand, for any reason, delivers what a demolition application cannot, and no institution publicly has ever asked who that arrangement benefits.

The Map

Lay the fire inventory over the City’s own planning maps and the overlap does not require interpretation.

The Plaza Hotel burned at Pandora and Government, the dead centre of downtown, steps from Centennial Square, on the edge of what the City brands its Arts and Innovation District. The house at 1112 Caledonia burned inside the North Park Community Village designation, where the plan permits triple the density that stood there. The fires on the 2500-block of Government Street, and an unattributed heritage-building fire at 2531 Government, sit in the same North Park planning area. Ricky’s All Day Grill burned on the Douglas Street corridor at Burnside, the city’s principal densification artery, and Island Outfitters burned at 3319 Douglas, inside Saanich’s Uptown-Douglas Plan. The developer who later bought that site put the location’s significance best when announcing the rental project that replaced the burned store: “this corridor,” said Aryze Developments principal Luke Mari, “is going to anchor Saanich’s downtown.”

Every address above carries its planning designation in a public document.

Old, cheap, half-empty buildings burn everywhere, which is exactly why a cluster of fires sitting on redevelopment land is a data question, and why every serious jurisdiction treats it as one. Toronto ran the analysis and changed policy; Edmonton ran it and filled a courtroom. Victoria holds the same data, the incident files, the title records, the permit history, and in fourteen years has never run it. This map does not prove intent. It proves nobody checked.

The House on Foul Bay

In 2014, a development company called Large and Co. bought a designated heritage house at 902 Foul Bay Road, a 1911 Arts and Crafts estate on a half-acre corner lot, with a plan to build townhouses. Foul Bay is the honest exception to the corridor map: it sits in quiet Gonzales, designated Traditional Residential, with no densification plan in sight, and what it had instead was the oldest development pressure there is, a half-acre of prime land under a house that could not legally come down.

The company asked council to remove the designation and permit demolition, citing the building’s condition. The city’s heritage panel recommended refusal, and other developers, councillor Pam Madoff said at the time, had wanted to buy the house and restore it.

Before council could decide, the house burned, on January 25, 2016, in a blaze that took twenty-six firefighters to bring under control. The building was vacant and boarded at the time.

A year later, Victoria police arrested Earl Large, the company’s 80-year-old principal, on recommended charges of arson and fraud over $5,000. Crown counsel did not approve the charges, and Large, who has never been charged with anything, says squatters caused the fire; his company had restored heritage buildings before, including on Dallas Road. No official cause has ever been made public, though a 2022 City of Victoria staff report describes the house, in passing, as “destroyed by arson.”

Image: The heritage-designated house at Foul Bay Road and Quamichan Street.Source: DARREN STONE c/o Times Colonist

Then the file starts moving, and every step is dated.

Within weeks of the fire, council granted demolition of the remains, “reluctantly” in the reporting of the day. The designation itself stayed on the title for six more years, protecting a house that no longer existed, because nothing in provincial law required anyone to reconcile the two, and nobody did until the site’s new developer needed clean title.

In March 2022, council amended the designation. The motion was moved by then-councillor Marianne Alto and carried seven to one, councillor Geoff Young opposed. The amending bylaw states its purpose in words no critic could improve: to remove the house “due to a fire that destroyed the house in 2016,” and to remove the land and trees “as the proximate protected house no longer exists.” Seventeen designation-protected trees went with it, on the city’s own reasoning that the trees “derived their heritage significance from the house.” The protected heritage property at 902 Foul Bay Road now consists, by law, of a stone wall and an iron gate.

The rezoning that followed wrote a custom zoning district for the single property and approved eighteen stacked townhouses, developed by Aryze, which had initiated the project in 2019, three years after the fire, on a site its own letter to council described as “empty as it has since 2016.” Council attached a public benefit: four homes sold at twenty percent below market, in perpetuity, secured by covenant with the regional district, with an option and right of first refusal for the housing corporation, and drafted so that not even the destruction of the buildings could cut it short.

Fourteen months later it was gone anyway. In September 2023, Aryze wrote to council that interest rates, construction costs and lending terms had made the project unviable as approved, and that under the City’s new Missing Middle rules the affordable units would never have been required at all. Staff agreed and recommended supporting the discharge. At the November 16, 2023 Committee of the Whole, councillors Chris Coleman and Marg Gardiner tried to attach a price of $250,000 to the housing reserve, and by the end of the morning the condition had been bargained down to “a minimum of $60,000.” The final vote was five to three: Mayor Alto, councillors Caradonna, Dell, Loughton and Thompson in favour, Coleman, Gardiner and Hammond opposed. The same application removed the carports, the green roofs and the playground.

Now the arithmetic, using only numbers on the public record. The half-acre was valued around $2.5 million as a vacant lot in 2021. The project it carries, marketed as Wisteria Row, lists three-bedroom homes from $1,050,000 and one-bedrooms from $585,000, so sixteen three-bedrooms and two one-bedrooms at those starting prices gross about $18 million, on land that works out to under $140,000 per home. At those prices, the four discharged below-market homes represented roughly $650,000 in buyer discounts on the first sales alone, and more on every resale, forever. Council released that obligation for a minimum of $60,000, about nine cents on the dollar before counting perpetuity. These are calculations from assessed values and marketed starting prices, not a pro forma; the numbers a pro forma would add are the ones nobody publishes. Aryze’s own stated economics cut against a profit story: it told council that simply subdividing the lot would have made three million dollars with none of the friction, and that the townhouse route penciled to a two percent annualized return.

Nothing connects any purchaser to the fire. Nothing needs to. The fire did its work for whoever came next.

The House on Caledonia

If Foul Bay leaves any doubt that the machine runs on its own, 1112 Caledonia Avenue removes it, because there the arsonist is known, convicted, and provably indifferent to real estate.

In April 2022, a former priest named Walter Theo Machinski set fire to the 1891 house beside the Ukrainian Catholic Church of St. Nicholas while the pastor’s family slept inside. Children jumped from second-storey windows. In June 2026 he pleaded guilty to arson with disregard for human life and was sentenced to three and a half years, a personal grievance fully prosecuted, and the one fire in this inventory with a complete answer.

The building’s path to demolition did not differ from Foul Bay’s by one degree.

Pictured: 1112 Calendonia Avenue, Victoria, BC. Source: Chek News

The house sat vacant and bled value through break-ins, stolen copper, smashed original windows and, twice, fires lit inside by intruders trying to keep warm. City staff recorded that the owner “has not taken any action to remediate, repair or restore the building since the fire,” while the church says it fenced and boarded the building and was defeated anyway, and there is no reason to doubt it. Its insurance offer, roughly $600,000, is disputed and unresolved.

In 2024 the church applied to demolish the house and pave its footprint as parking for an eleven-unit rental project next door. Its architect’s letter disposed of the city’s heritage guideline in one line: “not applicable, heritage designated single family dwelling heavily damaged by fire to be removed.”

Here is what council had in front of it on December 11, 2025. A structural assessment finding the fire damage contained and repairable: replace the floor joists, the stairs, the roof. A letter from Nickel Brothers confirming the house could feasibly be moved off the disputed lot line. Staff’s written conclusion that the demolition “does not comply with the heritage land use policies and is therefore not considered supportable.” And a staff slide showing two Victoria heritage homes that burned and were saved, 1017 Burdett relocated and restored, 223 Robert Street restored in place.

One thing council did not have was a price. When councillor Stephen Hammond asked what repair or relocation would cost, staff answered twice that no figures had ever been provided. The Heritage Advisory Panel’s dissenting member had made the same complaint in March: the demolition case was “not justifiable,” repair options “inadequately explored,” the panel materials silent on the restored precedents and the insurance money. “We have not seen any cost estimates,” another member said. The panel recommended approval anyway, one vote opposed.

Council approved the demolition six to three: Mayor Alto, councillors Caradonna, Hammond, Thompson, Dell and Gardiner in favour, Loughton, Kim and Coleman opposed. Councillor Caradonna, who moved the motion and disclosed a relationship with the pastor, called the building “a source of trauma,” and councillor Hammond cited the church’s finances. Every reason was human and sincere. The president of the Victoria Heritage Foundation wrote to council that the deliberations had been “very much colored by the tragic nature of the fire” and that “a far more fitting future for the house and the property would be to give them both a new life.” Councillor Kim, voting no: “I don’t feel we’ve adequately explored all the options before we close these doors.”

The designated heritage property at 1112 Caledonia will soon consist of salvaged bricks, eight brackets, fish scale shingles and an interpretation panel beside a parking lot. Its designated twin next door is now, in staff’s own word, “orphaned.”

A convicted arsonist with a personal grudge started this one. Everyone after him acted lawfully and with reasons. The outcome was identical.

The Mechanism

Two cases, six years apart, one sequence. Five parts, each documented in the city’s own records.

Protection dies with the structure. Foul Bay’s amending bylaw says it in its own words, quoted above, and the consequences ran outward from the house: seventeen protected trees lost their status because of a building that had been rubble for six years, and at Caledonia the designated twin next door lost part of its registered heritage value, its documented connection to its sibling, the day council released the sibling for demolition. In the city’s own paperwork, one fire dissolves every layer of protection around it.

Nobody enforces the wait. Section 616 of the Local Government Act lets any BC municipality set minimum maintenance standards for designated heritage property, enforceable by Supreme Court order for compliance or restoration, and Langley Township adopted such a bylaw in 2018. The three years of decay staff documented at Caledonia met no enforcement of any kind; nothing of the sort appears anywhere in the file. The deterioration that eventually justified demolition accumulated in full view of a city holding a legal tool built for exactly this.

The insurance money is unrestricted. Asked directly at the Heritage Advisory Panel in March 2025 whether the disputed $600,000 offer had to be spent on the building it was paid for, the church confirmed it did not, and that the proceeds would “benefit somehow.” The building the money was paid for is coming down. The project replacing it is where the benefit lands.

Fire manufactures consent. In November 2024, the Fernwood community association told council that residents wanted the Caledonia ruin demolished “as soon as possible”: an eyesore, a magnet for break-ins, “an ongoing source of trauma.” Those were the same blocks that had watched the house stand for 131 years. Two years of blight converted them, and by the December 2025 vote, demolition was the humane position. The only party still arguing for the designation was the city’s own policy manual, and it lost.

The public arrives after the decision. Bill 44, the province’s 2023 housing legislation, prohibits public hearings for rezonings consistent with an official community plan, so the housing approvals in these files could not lawfully receive one. The only hearing the law still requires attaches to removing the heritage designation, and at Caledonia that hearing was scheduled after council had already voted its direction at committee. Readers of this publication saw the same sequence on the harbour file in June: the consequential decision first, the public process after.

The Inventory

The full list, 2014 to 2026, buildings and real property only, each fire with its honest status. Vehicle, dumpster and playground fires excluded.

June 2014. House, 3800-block Saanich Road, Saanich. Suspected arson per police. No resolution ever reported.

January 2016. 902 Foul Bay Road, Victoria. Detailed above. Owner arrested; charges never approved; no public cause determination.

2018. 1201 Fort Street, Victoria. Vacant character house reported burned; not yet verified against primary records. (Unverified as arson)

May 2019. Plaza Hotel, 603 Pandora, Victoria. Heritage hotel. Deliberately set, per police. Live-in caretaker missing at the time. Unsolved seven years. Site sold 2026; hotel redevelopment planned.

January 2020. Island Outfitters, 3319 Douglas. Deliberately set, per Saanich police. No arrest ever reported. The land sold within six months; a six-storey, 169-unit rental project followed.

2020. Carey Road, Saanich. Vacant house, hours after police attended a landlord-tenant dispute there. Suspicious. No resolution reported.

December 2020 to January 2021. A series of arsons and one attempted arson across Saanich, police file 20-29304.

March 2021. 1700-block Carnegie Crescent, Saanich. Two occupied homes, twelve residents fleeing, deemed arson. No arrest ever reported.

August 2021. 95 Battleford Avenue, Saanich. Rooming house. Initially suspicious; later ruled no criminality. Kept on this list because classifications move in both directions, and an inventory that kept only the sinister ones would be propaganda.

April 2022. 1112 Caledonia, Victoria. Detailed above. Solved: conviction, personal motive.

March 2023. 600-block Polyanthus Crescent, Saanich. Attempted arson on an occupied home. Targeted, per police. No resolution reported.

June 2023. Ricky’s All Day Grill, 2900 Douglas, Victoria. Arson, per police. Suspect images released; no charge reported. The site sold after the fire; the application that followed was a three-storey furniture showroom. A low-rise outcome that cuts against any simple density story, reported here for exactly that reason.

June and July 2023. Government Street corridor, Victoria. Multiple fires. Solved: Edwin Singh, spree arsonist, seven fires, 53 prior convictions, six years.

July 2023. 2531 Government Street, Victoria. Heritage commercial building, mid-renovation, “towering flames,” in a corridor slated for rezoning. This investigation confirmed through Singh’s court record that this fire was not among his seven. It remains unattributed to this day.

November 2023. 736 Princess Avenue, North Park. Fire reported at an industrial property; not yet verified against primary records. (Unverified as arson)

November 2024. The Cadence, Quadra Street, Victoria. A rental building under construction by Abstract Developments burned to total loss, ruled non-suspicious. The developer was the victim. Kept for the same reason Battleford is.

2024 to January 2025. A North Saanich house fire with an arrest; a View Royal house fire investigated as arson by West Shore RCMP. Outcomes unreported.

May 2026. 1200-block Johnson Street, Victoria. A string of downtown fires treated as arson by VicPD’s Major Crime Unit. Open.

June 2026. Garden Fork restaurant and, nineteen days later, the Truffles Catering complex directly across the street, Keating Cross and West Saanich Road, Central Saanich. Under active investigation; no cause determined, no suspect named. The Garden Fork property was listed for sale before it burned: $2.1 million for a 40,000 square foot lot. Open.

Twenty-plus incidents. Four resolved: a spree-setter, a personal grievance, one ruled not criminal, one construction fire ruled non-suspicious. The open files sit on the land somebody could use.

Elsewhere in Canada, They Checked

None of this is unique to Victoria, and elsewhere it has been investigated instead of ignored.

In Toronto, CBC News investigated what a councillor called “demolition by neglect”: old downtown buildings bought for development sites, left vacant for years, then burning, among them the historic Sheard Mansion. The city’s review concluded that empty buildings awaiting redevelopment are a known temptation for arson and should be secured or occupied.

In Edmonton, it became a prosecution. Project Gaslight, a police investigation into more than forty incidents, uncovered an extortion ring burning homebuilders’ projects, linked in court records to the Brothers Keepers gang. Multiple men have pleaded guilty, with sentences running to seven and a half years, and fires at Edmonton housing projects and vacant properties are up 66 percent since 2022.

In Vancouver, more than $60 million in vacant real estate burned in a single month of 2016, and a national insurer warned publicly that real estate arson rises when the economy turns. The insurer’s phrase: not a coincidence.

In Montreal, a fatal 2023 fire in a heritage building at Place D’Youville killed seven people, and in March 2026 the owner was charged with seven counts of manslaughter and eight of criminal negligence. In the litigation surrounding the fire, heritage regulations were blamed for the building never being brought up to standard. Heritage protection as a liability is not a Victoria theory. In Montreal it is now part of a manslaughter file.

Arson that serves real estate is not a conspiracy theory in this country. It is a conviction sheet. The only open question in any given city is whether anyone is checking, and checking means one specific thing: joining the files. Fires against titles, permits against outcomes, beneficiaries across cases. Individual Victoria fires got individual investigations; at Foul Bay, police even recommended a fraud charge. Then each file closed and was never looked at again.

One institution could join those files tomorrow, with no warrant, no FOI request and no one’s permission: the City of Victoria. It runs the fire department that wrote the incident reports, issues the demolition permits, keeps the heritage registry, and processes the development applications. As this publication has previously reported, the City contracts an analytics firm to model its fire service data. Every dataset this analysis requires sits inside one building at 1 Centennial Square, and the City has never joined them. The inventory above did not come from any institution. It took a residents to build it.

From Councillor Alto, to Mayor Alto

Follow one official through the whole arc. In March 2022, then-councillor Marianne Alto moved the motion that stripped the designation from 902 Foul Bay, the bylaw whose purpose clause cites the fire. In November 2023, as mayor, she presided over the meeting that released the site’s affordability covenant, and voted for the minimum-$60,000 version. In December 2025, she chaired the Caledonia meeting and voted with the majority to allow demolition over her own staff’s written advice.

It was also Alto, chairing that December meeting, who described the loophole better than any critic has. Reaching for a precedent to justify the vote, she recalled a heritage home that “was burned to the ground. There was nothing left. And yet, the designation remained on the property, which caused, as you can imagine, enormous challenges for its future use.” She was describing, in everything but address, the property whose de-designation she herself had moved three years earlier. She expressed the hope that Caledonia “would not be a precedent” but “at least is an exception,” and announced a heritage program review “in the next year or two.”

No single vote here was improper. Each came with reasons, debate and dissent. Together they document something else: continuity. The same council leadership has personally operated every stage of this pipeline, named its defect out loud from the chair, and scheduled its examination for some year after next.

Councillor Marg Gardiner, voting with the Caledonia majority, said the quiet part about the wider record: “We’re taking down a lot of heritage homes, though, an awful lot. And they’ve gone down.” She called Caledonia a one-off because the applicant was a church. The inventory above is what the one-offs look like in a row.

And in November 2023, on the same morning council released the Foul Bay covenant, it approved a new heritage designation at 515 Foul Bay Road with an extraordinary sweetener recorded in the minutes: a commitment that a demolition permit “would be issued” if the building were significantly damaged by fire or flood. The promise is not in the bylaw, likely because no bylaw can bind a future council. It lives in the minutes, off title. Heritage designation in this city has become a liability owners must be compensated to accept, and the compensation on offer is a pre-approved fire exit.

The city now promises the loophole in advance.

The Next Test

While this investigation was underway, it happened again.

At three in the morning on June 6, 2026, fire destroyed the Garden Fork restaurant at Keating Cross and West Saanich Road in Brentwood Bay. Nineteen days later a second major fire hit the Truffles Catering complex directly across the street. Both are under active investigation by Central Saanich police. No cause has been determined. No suspect has been named.

Two facts about the first property are already public. It was listed for sale before it burned: $2.1 million, for a 40,000 square foot lot carrying a 4,000 square foot building and modest rental income. The listing was selling land. The building standing between a buyer and that land no longer stands.

Image: Garden Fork Restaurant Source: Alana Turner originally posted Vibrant Victoria

The investigation is open. No cause, no suspect, and the region’s solved fires were set by a bored man and an angry man, so the mundane explanation leads until the file says otherwise. What an investigation like this one can do is what no institution here has ever done: state its tests in advance, in public, with a date on them. July 2026. If these fires served a balance sheet, the record will eventually show it: a post-fire sale to a land-focused buyer instead of a rebuild, a demolition permit followed by a development application instead of a restaurant, a price that did not suffer for the loss of the building. If the site rebuilds, or sells at a discount to an unrelated buyer years from now, these fires join the mundane pile and this publication will say so. Either way, the outcome gets measured against this paragraph.

The Solution

There is a version of heritage law under which none of this works, and it fits in one sentence: what burns gets rebuilt.

Make the designation survive the building. If a protected structure is destroyed, by fire, by neglect, by anything, the designation stays on the land and the only permitted development is reconstruction of what stood there, at the density that stood there, for a fixed span of years. No de-designation of ashes, no custom zone for the cleared lot, no “not applicable.” The tools to build this already exist in BC law: section 616 maintenance bylaws with court-ordered restoration, covenants tying insurance proceeds to the building they were paid for, and council’s existing power to say no.

Under that rule, run every fire in this inventory again. The spree-setter’s fires change nothing, because the buildings come back. The grudge fire changes nothing, because the building comes back. The fire on the demolition-blocked lot produces a demolition-blocked lot with a reconstruction obligation on it, the insurance money has one lawful destination, and the neighbours are spared the years of blight that manufacture consent, because the wait has a deadline and an enforcement order behind it. Every path through the pipeline dead-ends at the same place: the building, back.

We do not claim to know how many of Greater Victoria’s fires would stop, and most of them, on this record, were never about property value. But we know exactly what would stop: the payoff. This publication is willing to state the bet plainly. If the reward for a burned heritage building were an obligation to rebuild it, the pattern documented in this piece would not survive the decade. A city that believed its fires were all innocent would lose nothing by taking that bet. Victoria’s heritage program review is the table, and the wager is on it.

Disclaimer

This article implies no wrongdoing by any person or company named in it. No developer, owner, official or organization identified here is alleged to have caused, arranged or benefited improperly from any fire. Where individuals were investigated, the outcomes are stated exactly: one conviction, on a personal motive, and one arrest in which Crown counsel declined to approve charges, leaving that person uncharged and entitled to the presumption that follows. The purchasers named acquired their properties openly, on the market, years after the fires in question, and their documented conduct throughout was lawful. The subject of this article is a structure of law and policy, and the record of the institutions that administer it.

Sourcing

Bylaw purpose clauses, motions, votes and tree counts are quoted from adopted bylaws, registered land title instruments and official minutes. Council discussion quotes are drawn from meeting recordings and are being verified against the City’s official webcast. Fire classifications for the 2014 to 2021 entries rest on police statements and contemporaneous reporting by the Times Colonist, Capital Daily, Victoria News, CBC and Citified; the primary incident files are the subject of freedom of information requests now in preparation. A property-by-property verification log supports each claim. Neither Victoria nor Saanich maintains a public arson registry; additional incidents may exist that public records do not capture. That gap is part of the story.

Corrections: contact.bcpoliticswatch@proton.me

This letter is written in support of Victoria City Councillor Marg Gardiner’s motion to close The Harbour, the drug consumption site at 941 Pandora Avenue in Victoria. It is accompanied by a documented brief, drawn entirely from the public record, that sets out the basis for that support in detail. Readers may find it copied in full below.

We did not set out to write it unprompted. In the days leading up to the July 2 vote, sitting Victoria councillors publicly encouraged residents to contact Mayor and Council in opposition to the motion. Those calls were clear, repeated, and visible. We read through the hundreds of responses that followed. Opposition to the motion was being actively solicited and amplified by members of Council themselves. It seemed only reasonable that support for the motion be placed on the record with equal clarity and care.

Yet this letter is not ultimately about a single site, or even a single council. It is addressed more broadly, to every mayor and council in British Columbia, because what is unfolding in Victoria is not unique. As the capital of British Columbia, Victoria should set a standard of transparency, accountability, and public trust that other communities can look to. Instead, it risks becoming an example for mayors and councils across the province of what not to do: stop listening, restrict public input, and advance ideological approaches at the expense of the broader community.

Year after year, public funds continue to flow into the drug harm reduction sector, an organized and well-funded network of service providers, advocacy organizations, and operators of drug consumption sites. The data used to justify that funding is often produced by the same organizations that receive it. Those making decisions and those benefiting from them frequently operate within a small, overlapping circle. And when residents raise questions, they are too often told that to ask is to lack compassion.

That overlap extends beyond service delivery into influence and narrative-setting. The organization operating The Harbour, SOLID, includes on its board individuals with longstanding roles in politics, media, and public advocacy. These include former Victoria city councillor Philippe Lucas, as well as figures connected to major media platforms: Jody Paterson, a longtime Times Colonist journalist and a contributor to The Globe and Mail, and Paul Willcocks, a senior editor at The Tyee. These affiliations are a matter of public record and reflect a concentration of influence across governance, funding, and public narrative.

In that context, there is a reasonable concern that a motion such as this will not be considered within a fully balanced public environment. Given the reach and coordination of this advocacy network, we believe it is necessary that the full evidentiary record be made available publicly and in advance.

That is why this brief is being published now, ahead of the July 2 vote, so that residents, media, and decision-makers alike can review the underlying facts directly.

Across British Columbia, residents are pushing back, not against the existence of services, but against how they are implemented, where they are placed, and how decisions about them are made. In Richmond, hundreds marched on City Hall, and more than sixteen thousand residents signed a petition opposing a proposed drug consumption site. In Vancouver, the mayor moved to halt a new downtown overdose-prevention site after an earlier one was closed following sustained public complaints. In Abbotsford, a new site was met with immediate and organized opposition. In community after community, people are asking to be heard on decisions that directly shape their neighbourhoods.

In Victoria, that request has too often been met with resistance rather than engagement. A councillor was ruled out of order for raising questions about a permit. Residents have had microphones cut during public input. Comment functions on official communication channels have been disabled. A motion reflecting genuine community concern has been publicly characterized by members of Council as reckless and cruel.

The consequences of speaking out have also been made visible. A Victoria firefighter who raised concerns with the Premier about first-responder safety in proximity to these sites was suspended without pay, an action the Premier himself later acknowledged warranted an apology. The signal this sends is difficult to ignore.

What emerges from all of this is a question that extends well beyond Victoria itself: at what point does a small, organized, publicly funded drug harm reduction sector come to outweigh the broader community that elected officials are sworn to serve? And why are elected officials unwilling to answer, plainly and on the record, the plain questions their residents are asking about their own money and their own streets: how public money is spent, and how public safety is managed?

What follows is not a slogan, nor a form letter. It is a documented case. We ask that it be read in full, entered into the public record for the July 2 meeting, and answered on its substance.

It is offered to Victoria first, but it is intended for every council in British Columbia that will, sooner or later, be asked the same questions.

BC Politics Watch

BRIEF TO THE MAYOR AND COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF VICTORIA

In support of Councillor Gardiner’s motion respecting the supervised consumption site at 941 Pandora Avenue, and respecting the conduct of Council and the public funding of SOLID

Submitted for entry into the public record

BC Politics Watch | July 1, 2026

I. Statement of the matter

This brief is submitted in support of Councillor Gardiner’s motion to seek the closure of The Harbour supervised consumption site at 941 Pandora Avenue, and to place on the public record a documented set of concerns about the conduct of this Council and its stewardship of public money directed to SOLID, the society that partners in that site’s operation. Its thesis is straightforward: this Council has, over successive decisions, privileged one funded constituency over the community as a whole, declined to enforce its own permits and answer basic questions about the lawful use of public funds, and treated the residents and colleagues who raise those questions as adversaries to be managed rather than constituents to be answered. Every factual assertion below is drawn from the public record: council proceedings, corporate and charity filings, Elections BC records, contribution agreements, and court filings. All of it is presented as fair comment on matters of public interest. Where a matter is not established, it is put as a question, and we ask that it be answered as one. Beyond supporting the motion, this brief asks Council to submit its own conduct on this file to a full, independent audit, of the Mayor and every member of Council, because the pattern documented here can no longer credibly be assessed by the body that produced it.

II. Summary of findings

1. The motion before Council asks it to request that Island Health cease operations of The Harbour at 941 Pandora, and that the federal exemption not be renewed when it expires on June 30, 2027. The Harbour is operated in partnership with SOLID.

2. The blocks around The Harbour have absorbed years of concentrated disorder and business loss, and first responders have faced escalating danger, including a paramedic assaulted on Pandora and first responders swarmed by a crowd.

3. Under a now-concluded federal contribution agreement (authorized up to $2,051,986), the City of Victoria was the named Recipient for a program operated by SOLID and was responsible for certifying its lawful operation to Health Canada. Separately, and more recently, the City has directed roughly $700,000 of its own to SOLID. The largest stream is provincial: SOLID receives millions of dollars a year from Island Health, its largest funder.

4. The cannabis Temporary Use Permit for SOLID’s 1056 North Park site expired on July 28, 2025, yet the program continues to operate, unlicensed, without enforcement.

5. When a resident sought the contribution agreement by Freedom of Information, the City refused to produce it.

6. Several of the individuals closest to SOLID hold direct professional, financial, or political interests in the sector, including a board member who has made recorded campaign contributions to a sitting councillor.

7. Public spending across the sector has risen year over year while the region’s homeless count and drug-poisoning deaths have climbed, and bodies producing the justifying data are themselves substantially government-funded.

8. Council has repeatedly moved to silence or delegitimize residents and Councillor Gardiner when these questions are raised, including on the public record.

III. The motion, The Harbour, and why this is not an ordinary site

The matter before Council on July 2 is Councillor Gardiner’s motion respecting The Harbour, the supervised consumption site at 941 Pandora Avenue operated by Island Health. The motion asks that Council formally request, by letter to Island Health’s President and CEO and its Board Chair, that Island Health cease operations of the site at the earliest opportunity, and that Council write to the Minister of Health asking that the federal exemption under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act not be renewed when the current three-year exemption expires on June 30, 2027. It is a request from Council to the health authority and the federal government; it commits the City to nothing beyond advocacy, and it is well within Council’s right to make.

This is not an ordinary consumption-site debate. The Harbour is operated in partnership with SOLID Outreach Society, the same organization whose funding, leadership, permits, and conduct are examined in the balance of this brief. That connection changes the question. Councillor Gardiner and the Downtown Victoria Business Association have described the site as having become, in the motion’s words, “a magnet for those addicted to drugs and for drug dealers who prey on the weak and ill,” with real consequences for the safety of the city, the wellbeing of residents, and the viability of downtown businesses. One need not accept every word of that to see the point. The operator behind the site, and the City’s handling of that operator, bear on whether Council should keep lending the arrangement its support.

For that reason, the background that follows is central to the motion, not separate from it. The Harbour is Island Health’s facility, but SOLID is its operating partner, and SOLID separately runs other publicly funded sites in the same neighbourhood, the Access Hub at 2155 Dowler Place and the cannabis-substitution site at 1056 North Park, under arrangements this Council has funded and is responsible for overseeing. The governance, funding, permit, and conduct concerns set out below go to the credibility of the body now deciding the motion, and to whether the public can trust that this Council is weighing The Harbour on its merits rather than shielding a funded operator and the political relationships that surround it.

IV. The case for closing the site

Set the governance questions aside for a moment and look at the street. The blocks around The Harbour have absorbed years of concentrated harm. Open drug use, dealing, and disorder have settled into the Pandora corridor, and the businesses along Pandora, Yates, Government, and Johnson have catalogued a steady loss of storefronts. Many long-standing residents live with it every day. First responders bear the sharpest edge: a paramedic was assaulted on Pandora and first responders were swarmed by a crowd of roughly sixty people, and front-line workers describe a mounting aggression around these services. A supervised site may reverse overdoses within its walls, and its defenders point to that. But a policy that concentrates active addiction in the middle of a residential and commercial neighbourhood, and treats the surrounding blocks as acceptable overflow, has failed the people who also live there.

The wider picture does not favour staying the course. Across the region, the counted homeless population and the drug-poisoning death toll have both risen year after year, even as spending has climbed. Whatever The Harbour achieves, it is not turning that tide in the neighbourhood, where the disorder is worst. The honest question is not whether harm reduction has value anywhere. It is whether this site, in this location, on these terms, is the right way to deliver care, or whether the same money and effort would do more good redirected into the detox, treatment, and recovery capacity the region has never properly built.

Closing The Harbour is not abandoning anyone. The motion asks the City to request that Island Health wind the site down and that the federal exemption not be renewed when it expires in June 2027. That leaves time to stand up alternatives and to move people toward stabilization and recovery, rather than simply off one block. A Council serious about compassion and about its own neighbourhoods at the same time would treat that as a reasonable request, not an outrage.

V. Public money and the City’s compliance obligations

The money has never been squared with the public. SOLID’s Dowler Place operation was funded under Health Canada Contribution Agreement No. 2526-HQ-000070, which authorized up to $2,051,986, with the City of Victoria as the named Recipient. That funding term has now run out. The federal term ended on March 31, 2026, and the City’s downstream term on June 30, 2026. While it ran, the City passed federal money through to SOLID at a rate of roughly $170,998.83 a month. Separately, and more recently, the City has directed roughly $700,000 of its own funds to SOLID, a recent commitment that has never been reconciled on the public record. And the end of the federal grant is not the end of the money. SOLID Outreach draws the bulk of its funding from Island Health, its largest funder, reported in the range of $3 million or more a year, within a total annual revenue of roughly $7.2 million that is almost entirely public. The federal pass-through was only one stream among several. And as Recipient, the City, not any resident, was the party that had to certify to Health Canada that the program operated lawfully.

That responsibility gives rise to pointed questions this Council has not answered. During the period in which the cannabis Temporary Use Permit had expired, what did the City certify to Health Canada about the program’s compliance? Were those certifications accurate? Do the false-or-misleading-information and default provisions of the agreement apply to anything the City or the operator represented? And when a resident sought the agreement itself through a Freedom of Information request, why did the City refuse to produce a document the public paid more than two million dollars to fund?

What the public knows of this arrangement, it knows largely because of Freedom of Information, not because the City volunteered it. The contribution agreement surfaced only after it was obtained by FOI, once the City had refused to release it, and without that disclosure the terms of the deal and the City’s plans for the site would have stayed out of view. A City confident in the arrangement would have published it. This one had to be forced.

VI. The expired permit and unlicensed cannabis distribution

Consider the cannabis program at 1056 North Park. It operates with no provincial retail licence, on a Temporary Use Permit that expired on July 28, 2025, in a zone that does not permit cannabis sales. None of that is in dispute. In 2022, SOLID’s own senior director told this Council that retail zoning and a licence are required to handle cannabis, and that a licensed operation cannot simply give it away. The program now does what he said could not be done. For any other operator, enforcement would be swift. Why not here, and what does the answer say about the even-handedness of the City’s bylaw enforcement?

VII. The operator and the City’s due diligence

Start with something a proper check would have caught. The City’s agreement for the operation was signed by an Executive Director publicly identified as Jack Phillips. Yet SOLID Four Directions Society (BC Registry Inc. No. S0077110), the related entity registered at the same 1056 North Park site, lists a different name, Philip Bannikoff, among its directors. We do not assert that these are the same person. We note only that the public filings carry different names for the leadership of closely related entities operating from one address, which is exactly the kind of discrepancy a funder is supposed to resolve before committing public money. Anyone looking properly would check. Separately, and as a matter of public record, the Philip Bannikoff named in that filing was the subject of a 2013 Crime Stoppers public notice describing him as a person who should be considered violent. We draw no conclusion about the man today. We raise both points for one reason: to ask what due diligence the City actually performed on who stands behind this organization. When a resident tried to put that question at a September 2024 community meeting, they were shut down, and the Mayor, seated on the panel, did not intervene. The question still stands. If proper due diligence was done, the City should be able to show it. If it was not, that is the City’s failure to own.

None of this is about denying anyone a second chance. People rebuild their lives, and much of the work of helping others recover is done by those who have come through addiction and hardship themselves. That is not the issue. The issue is that when a public body hands millions of dollars to an organization, in a neighbourhood already living with real violence and disorder, the moment calls for more scrutiny of who is running it and how the money is spent, not less. A background that is a matter of public record is no reason to shame anyone. It is a reason for the City to have looked carefully, and to be able to show that it did. Everything on this file points the other way: less examination exactly where there should have been more.

VIII. Selective enforcement: one operator funded, another seized

Now look three blocks over. The Victoria Cannabis Buyers Club has served roughly 8,000 chronically ill members since 1996 and has never taken a public dollar. Its reward is a Provincial civil-forfeiture claim against its building, a certificate of judgment against a volunteer director’s home, and repeated enforcement raids attended by City bylaw officers. SOLID’s expired-permit site, three blocks away, runs on untouched while the City wires it federal money every month. One operator takes no public money and is being dismantled. The other is publicly funded and left alone. Residents are entitled to ask why.

IX. Whose voices Council is hearing: conflicts of interest

Council should scrutinize the interests behind the voices that defend these programs, and require that those interests be disclosed. Start with Philippe Lucas, listed on SOLID Outreach’s board in the public filings. Lucas has deep commercial and professional ties to the cannabis and substance-use field this debate turns on: a former Victoria city councillor, a former vice-president at the cannabis producer Tilray, the founder of one of Canada’s first medical-cannabis dispensaries, and today a cannabis and psychedelics researcher and clinic executive. According to Elections BC records, he has also made five separate contributions to Councillor Caradonna’s municipal campaigns. The concern is not that a researcher may also hold views. It is that his published research bears directly on the harm-reduction and substitution approaches these programs deliver, while he sits on the board of a funded operator and holds interests across the commercial cannabis and psychedelics sector. His is not a disinterested voice, and Council should not receive it as one. The board also includes Jeremy Kalicum, a co-founder of the Drug User Liberation Front, found guilty in November 2025 of three counts of possession for the purpose of trafficking, with those convictions held in abeyance pending a constitutional challenge. And it includes two senior journalists, Jody Paterson and Paul Willcocks, who have continued to write on harm-reduction policy in Victoria outlets while serving on the board of the organization at the centre of it. That conflict is not theoretical: Jody Paterson has publicly circulated a template letter opposing Councillor Gardiner’s motion, urging supporters to “just copy this one if you like” and “fill up some inboxes.” A serving board member of SOLID, who also writes commentary on the issue for the city’s daily paper, is openly organizing the write-in campaign that Council will then receive as public feedback.

Councillor Krista Loughton, who votes on these matters, is an documentary filmmaker whose body of work centres on Victoria’s street community. None of these facts is disqualifying on its own, and we allege no unlawful conduct. Together, these facts raise a fair question: how much of the correspondence and endorsement this Council treats as independent public support in fact comes from people with a direct stake in the funding continuing, and has every member of Council with such a connection, including any who has accepted campaign contributions from SOLID’s directors, disclosed it and recused where the conflict-of-interest rules require?

X. The wider pattern: funding that grows as outcomes worsen

The problem is not confined to one site. Across Greater Victoria, public spending on the homelessness, drug, and mental-health response has risen year after year. Over the same years, the counted homeless population and the drug-poisoning death toll have both climbed. Spending up, outcomes down. And the organizations tied to the funded network have grown through the decline: the City’s grant to SOLID jumped from about $9,300 to about $119,800 in a single year, while its Island Health contract rose from roughly $2.4 million to $3.2 million.

There is a deeper problem in the evidence base itself. Much of the data this Council cites to justify the funding is produced by organizations that depend on that funding continuing. The Community Social Planning Council produces the region’s Point-in-Time homeless count (the figure used to argue the crisis demands ever more spending), along with the housing-needs reports the City relies on in policy. Yet CSPC tells donors it receives “no regular government subsidies for core operations,” while its own charity filings show that roughly half its revenue comes directly from government, with more flowing through other government-funded bodies. An organization substantially financed by the public purse, producing the numbers used to justify further public financing, is not a neutral source of evidence; it has a structural interest in the problem being measured as large and permanent. Council should read those figures with that in mind, rather than accept them as disinterested fact.

The independence problem is sharpened by how close these relationships run. Until recently, CSPC was led by Diana Gibson, now an MLA and the spouse of sitting Councillor Dave Thompson. To his credit, Councillor Thompson recused himself from the CSPC funding decision, as the rules require. But the episode shows how tightly the circle is drawn: the organization that produces the City’s homelessness data was headed by a sitting councillor’s spouse while the City continued to fund it. Recusal manages a single vote. It does not cure an evidence base produced by a body this embedded in the network that relies on it.

This is not an isolated coincidence. The people who decide how public money is spent and the sector that receives it are not kept at arm’s length. A former Victoria city councillor now sits on SOLID’s board. When the same small circle moves between the bodies that hand out public funding and the bodies that receive it, the public is entitled to ask who is being served, and to keep watching who moves into this sector, or profits from it, after the votes are cast. Disclosure is the least that public trust requires, and on this file the City has offered the opposite.

XI. Council’s conduct toward residents and Councillor Gardiner

The pattern is visible in Council’s own proceedings. Residents attempting to ask direct questions at public meetings have had their microphones shut off. The City disabled comments on its official social media rather than field criticism. Councillor Jeremy Caradonna assured residents who raised concerns about SOLID that he was taking them seriously, while, as residents have documented, urging a resident not to take those concerns to the media; that conduct became the subject of a Code of Conduct complaint, which Council then voted to keep from proceeding on procedural grounds, and roughly six months later residents report no meaningful action.

The treatment of Councillor Gardiner is the clearest illustration. Her motions have been publicly branded “callous,” and a colleague declared she was “ashamed” to share the Council table with her over them. That rhetoric, advanced most visibly by Councillors Dell and Loughton, engages none of her arguments and casts every resident who shares her concerns as lacking basic compassion. On the public record in May 2026, the Mayor twice ruled Councillor Gardiner out of order when she sought to raise SOLID’s expired-permit North Park site, telling her “this is not relevant to this report,” and then, “you’re veering again into an unrelated topic,” at the meeting where SOLID’s federal pass-through funding was itself the agenda item. A Council confident in its decisions does not need to rule the questions out of order. It answers them.

Nor is this confined to the Council chamber. In the same week as an active public drug-poisoning alert, Councillor Loughton published a public post branding Councillor Gardiner’s motion “reckless and tone-deaf” and “politicians playing politics with people’s lives.” Councillor Matt Dell publicly called the same motion “reckless, uninformed and cruel” and “just awful.” Both directed members of the public to email Mayor and Council. It shows both the reflex among members of the governing majority to cast a colleague’s motion as an affront rather than engage its substance, and that much of the correspondence this Council receives as spontaneous public sentiment is solicited by members of Council themselves. Before treating the volume of letters on either side as a measure of independent opinion, Council should keep that in view. The response closes the loop: Philippe Lucas (a SOLID director who, as noted above, has made recorded contributions to Councillor Caradonna) publicly commented on Councillor Dell’s post that his letter had been “just sent,” thanking the councillor. The correspondence a member of Council solicits, a funded board member with a campaign-finance tie to Council then supplies. That is not independent public support; it is an organized campaign, and it should be weighed as one.

The campaign is organized down to the wording. Alongside the councillors’ calls to email Mayor and Council, a shared email template and a fill-in-the-blanks script for registering to speak at the July 2 meeting have been circulated publicly for supporters to copy and submit. There is nothing improper in residents organizing, on any side of an issue. But a volume of near-identical, templated submissions is not a spontaneous groundswell of independent opinion, and it deserves the same skepticism as any coordinated write-in campaign.

There is also the question of what Council owes residents in its dealings with Island Health. The Harbour is Island Health’s to operate, but Council is the body residents look to, to carry their safety concerns to the health authority. Those concerns are not abstract, as the conditions set out earlier in this brief make plain. Residents are entitled to know that this is being conveyed to Island Health plainly and in full. Given the disregard this Council has shown the same concerns in its own chamber, they have little reason to be confident that it is.

The cost of all this is a growing fear of speaking at all. In 2024, a Victoria firefighter was suspended without pay after writing an open letter to the Premier about first-responder safety near these services. The Premier himself said the firefighter deserved an apology and back pay. Whoever ordered that suspension, the lesson it taught was plain: raise these concerns in public and your job may be next. Residents and public employees now weigh that risk before they speak, which is how legitimate criticism is silenced without anyone having to ban it.

XII. The duty of Council, and formal notice

Council members are not bystanders to any of this. As elected officials they are trustees of public money and stewards of the City’s own bylaws and permits, and in the case of the Dowler Place funding the City was the named Recipient, responsible for certifying lawful operation to a federal department, and it remains answerable for the certifications it made. Those are legal duties, not preferences. A council may choose its policies; it may not choose to disregard its obligations to enforce its permits, safeguard public funds, and deal honestly with the governments that supply them.

“We did not look” is not a defence when the duty is to look. Declining to enforce an expired permit, refusing to release a contribution agreement the public paid for, and ruling a colleague’s questions out of order do not make the underlying problems disappear; they establish a pattern of avoidance. Where there are credible, documented concerns that public money may be supporting unlawful activity, a governing body that chooses not to investigate does not remain neutral. It assumes responsibility for what it declined to examine.

This brief constitutes formal notice. Once concerns of this kind are placed on the public record before you, no member of Council can later claim not to have known. They are the proper subject of an independent audit, of provincial oversight and freedom-of-information review, of law enforcement where the facts warrant it, and, this October, of the voters. We ask Council to act now, while acting remains a choice it makes rather than one made for it.

XIII. A note to City staff, and to Council

This notice is not directed only at elected officials. City staff and senior administration are on notice as well. Public servants are paid by the public, and while the administration reports to Council, its duty is not simply to carry out the will of a council majority. Staff are the custodians of lawful and impartial process (the Freedom of Information system, the complaints and Code of Conduct avenues, and residents’ right to be heard at meetings), and those processes exist in part to hold Council itself to account. When they are narrowed, delayed, or closed to residents, the administration shares the responsibility to defend them, and should be seen to defend them. You may regard yourselves as working for Council; you also work for the public, and part of that work is keeping Council within the rules.

And to Council directly: you are elected to weigh every issue on behalf of all residents and to act as our stewards, not as advocates for a single funded constituency. Measured against that duty, your conduct over the past four years (the silencing of residents, the delegitimizing of a colleague who does her job, and the refusal to answer plainly for public money) has been, in the view of BC Politics Watch and of many residents, appalling to watch. This brief is an invitation to change course while the opportunity to do so is still yours.

XIV. Relief requested

1. That Council support Councillor Gardiner’s motion.

2. That Council commission a full, independent audit, conducted by a party with no reporting relationship to Council or City staff, of all public money directed to SOLID and its related societies since 2022, including a full public reconciliation of the amount actually paid to SOLID against the amount the federal agreement authorized, the due diligence performed on the operator’s leadership, corporate filings, licences, and permits, and the accuracy of every compliance certification the City submitted to Health Canada.

3. That, because a governing body cannot credibly investigate its own conduct, this audit extend to the Mayor and every member of Council (examining their disclosure and management of conflicts of interest, their handling of Freedom of Information requests, and their decisions to enforce or decline to enforce the City’s permits and bylaws), and that where the City cannot examine these matters impartially, they be referred to the appropriate external authority, including the Office of the Ombudsperson and the Province’s oversight of municipal government.

4. That Council determine whether the false-or-misleading-information and default provisions of the City and federal funding agreements have been triggered by anything the City or the operator represented.

5. That Council release the Health Canada contribution agreement, and begin publishing fire, police, ambulance, and overdose data for the blocks around these sites on a regular basis.

6. That Council enforce its bylaws and Temporary Use Permits evenly, regardless of who the operator is.

7. That every member of Council with a financial, familial, business, or campaign-finance connection to a funded organization disclose it on the record and recuse where the conflict-of-interest rules require.

8. That Council cease the practice of silencing residents and colleagues, and restore the ability to speak and question at its meetings.

We ask that this brief be entered into the public record and answered on its substance, not with a form reply, and not with a further appeal to compassion in place of an answer.

Respectfully submitted,

BC Politics Watch

Note

Every factual claim in this letter and the accompanying brief is drawn from public sources: council records and meeting audio, Statements of Financial Information, Canada Revenue Agency charity filings, BC Registry entries, Elections BC records, Health Canada contribution-agreement records, court filings, Freedom of Information releases, and published reporting. Where a figure is given as approximate, it is because the complete records have not been made public. We sought the underlying documents, including through Freedom of Information, and where the City declined to release them we have said so and relied on the best available public data, identified as such. Our interpretations and characterizations are our own and are offered as fair comment on matters of public interest. If any factual claim here can be shown to be inaccurate, we will correct it promptly and publicly. Corrections may be sent to contact.bcpoliticswatch@proton.me.

On September 24, 2016, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, now the Prince and Princess of Wales, came to Victoria, and the province dressed itself in its fullest ceremonial regalia to receive them. The future King of Canada stood among the assembly. Beside him stood the two figures in whom the Crown in British Columbia is most directly vested, Premier Christy Clark and Lieutenant Governor Judith Guichon, and each, in the course of the visit, declared the ground beneath them to be the traditional, unceded territory of the Lekwungen peoples, naming the Esquimalt Nation a modern successor to them.

Two years on, those words sat in a courtroom. In August 2018 the Esquimalt Nation collected that royal-visit recitation, together with a decade of similar declarations by senior officials, itemized them, and entered them into the Supreme Court of British Columbia as part of its action against the Crown over rights and title. The most ceremonial sentence the province can utter, spoken before the heir to the throne, had been turned into evidence by the very people to whom the courtesy was addressed.

The courtroom is one destination for an acknowledgment, and this essay returns to it. The graver story unfolds earlier, before any of these words reach a judge, inside Victoria’s own council chamber, where an unresolved legal claim has hardened into daily civic liturgy, migrated into formal policy, become the premise for public expenditure, and been placed beyond the reach of a vote. What follows is an account of that transformation, and of why the certainty the ceremony projects dissolves on contact with the record.

A contested claim, recited as fact

Begin with the words, whose meaning is far less settled than the confidence of their delivery would suggest.

To say the city rests on unceded territory is no pleasantry. It is a legal proposition of precise content, holding that no treaty ever lawfully surrendered the land and that Aboriginal title was therefore never extinguished. That proposition remains unproven. It is the central question in a body of live litigation, and it turns on a dispute that no court has ever finally resolved. Much of southern Vancouver Island lies under the Douglas Treaties, a cluster of agreements struck in the early 1850s, and their meaning has been argued over ever since. The Crown has long read them as instruments of cession and purchase, by which the Nations sold their land and surrendered their title. Many of the First Nations party to them read them in almost the opposite sense, as covenants of peace and friendship that preserved the right to hunt, fish, and use unoccupied land while surrendering no title whatever. The gulf between those readings has never been bridged by a judgment, and it is the fault line beneath everything that follows, the reason the word unceded can be spoken in good faith over land the Crown insists it bought.

The morning land acknowledgment passes over all of this. The City does not say that the question of title is disputed and presently before the courts, which would be both accurate and defensible. It declares, in the flat grammar of fact, that the land is unceded, adopting one side of an open argument and pronouncing it closed. Mayor Marianne Alto delivers the acknowledgment at the opening of council, naming the territory unceded before the meeting’s business begins. She is not the first in the chair to state the disputed reading as settled. Her predecessor, Lisa Helps, did it in plainer terms in 2022, telling a reporter that the Douglas Treaty was “never meant to give away their land,” a confident rendering of one disputed interpretation as established history, offered by the city’s most senior official on a question that historians and judges alike treat as unresolved.

Nor are these brief gestures. By this publication’s own attendance, the acknowledgments offered before a Victoria council meeting run long, a sustained passage of recognition delivered before the first item is reached and received in the room as a settled courtesy to be endured rather than a claim to be weighed. The length is not incidental, because it alters the character of the act. A short nod is a gesture; several minutes of declarative recitation, repeated meeting upon meeting before the public’s business may begin, approaches liturgy, and liturgy solicits assent. The resident in the gallery who does not share the certainty being recited is offered no room to dissent. He is expected to sit, to be seen receiving it, and to understand that any visible disagreement will be read as discourtesy rather than as a legitimate and competing view of an open question.

This publication’s position, offered as opinion, is that a municipal government has no business doing any of this. Reasonable and well-informed people differ over whether the Douglas Treaties surrendered title. A city is free to hold a view; it is not free to install that view as compulsory civic truth, recited before the public’s business can commence and presented to every resident present as a fact he is expected to accept. The complaint is not with remembering the Lekwungen peoples, nor with the documented history of how the city was raised, nor with the Nations, whose claims are real and belong to the courts. The complaint is with the conversion of an open legal question into a closed one, repeated until disagreement begins to feel like rudeness.

The restraint the City chose against

Unceded is a loaded word, and it was never the only one available. A milder formulation lay readily to hand, on the same harbour, in daily use by a body at least as invested in reconciliation as the City professes to be.

The Greater Victoria Harbour Authority, the not-for-profit that owns and operates the deep-water terminal, the marinas, and the upland holdings around the harbour, recognizes on its own website that its properties sit “within the Traditional Territory of the Lək̓ʷəŋən People,” whose historical relationships with the land and harbour, it adds, continue to this day. That is the whole of it, presence and continuity, expressed with respect and nothing more. No mention of unceded, no assertion that the land was never surrendered, no position taken on who holds title. The University of Victoria, on the same ground, has settled on nearly identical language.

This is no body holding reconciliation at arm’s length. The harbour authority has seated Xwsepsum and Songhees representatives on its board since its founding in 2002, runs a First Nations economic development committee with the Nations, has commissioned Lekwungen art the length of the inner harbour, and holds a gold rating from the Canadian Council of Indigenous Business for its Indigenous relations, the program’s highest tier. An organization built around the Nations from its first day, certified gold for the work, nonetheless judged it neither necessary nor fitting to assert the disputed legal conclusion. It recorded the history and stopped.

Against that restraint, the City of Victoria reaches further, to unceded, and its own materials confirm the reach is deliberate. The City’s own published workbook defines the word, telling its staff and public that unceded means the land “was never surrendered, relinquished or handed over.” There the disputed conclusion stands as plain definition, on a question the Crown denies and no court has closed. The most reconciliation-engaged institution on the waterfront declined to make that assertion. The City wrote it into its teaching materials.

The framework, not the phrase

Were this only ceremony, it would matter less. But Victoria has taken the disputed framing and built it into the architecture of municipal governance.

The City’s reconciliation program states openly that it has adopted those of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action it considers within municipal authority, among them the call to adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as the framework for reconciliation, and the call to repudiate the doctrines that once underwrote European sovereignty, the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius. Whatever their merits, and they have defenders, these are not neutral administrative housekeeping. They are a particular and contested reading of law and history, adopted as the settled stance of the municipality. The City has done more than recite a sentence about unceded land. It has bound itself, on paper, to the interpretive framework in which that sentence is true.

Here is the same move made at the level of policy. A disputed conclusion is treated not as one defensible position among several, open to argument, but as the fixed foundation from which spending and governance descend as though they were obligations rather than choices. Once the framework is enshrined as official truth, the acknowledgment ceases to be a revisable courtesy and becomes the daily restatement of a decision already taken, while the room is invited to ratify a determination made without it.

The words travel

The royal visit repays a second look, because the Esquimalt file shows with unusual clarity why these declarations are not the harmless gestures they are taken to be.

When the Esquimalt Nation filed its pleadings in 2018, it did not gather the acknowledgments idly. It filed them to perform specific legal work, legible on the face of the document. The first was continuity. Every Aboriginal rights case must reckon with whether the people in the courtroom today are the rightful successors of those who held the rights generations earlier, and here was the Crown, repeatedly and at the highest level, affirming that very continuity, naming the Esquimalt a successor to the Lekwungen. The second was the answer to delay. The Crown’s defences leaned on the suggestion that the Nation had waited too long and effectively let its claim lapse, an uncomfortable argument to press when the Premier and the Lieutenant Governor keep standing up to acknowledge the territory and name the Nation. The Crown’s own senior figures were affirming the claim its lawyers said had been abandoned.

The Nation did not plead them as admissions of title, and admissions of title they are not. A government may stand at a ceremony and pronounce the land unceded and still march into court to contest title, which is precisely what British Columbia did. Yet the words were filed regardless, as statements against the Crown’s interest, admissible and awkward for it. Whether they carried the case is beside the point. What matters is that experienced counsel surveyed a decade of official recitation and judged it worth placing before a court. Words spoken as courtesy do not remain in the room. They enter the public record, and the public record is available to anyone with a use for it, including a litigant arrayed against the very government that spoke them.

Governments grasp this, and some have acted on it. In neighbouring New Brunswick, after the Wolastoqey Nations filed a title claim over a large portion of the province in 2020, the Attorney General the following year directed government employees to cease making acknowledgments that referred to unceded or unsurrendered territory, out of an express fear that the province’s own words might be wielded against it in the litigation. A government silenced its own acknowledgments, not from hostility to reconciliation, but from a sober recognition that the words carry evidentiary weight and could be turned in court. The claim that a land acknowledgment is pure ceremony, devoid of legal consequence, sits poorly beside a Crown law officer forbidding his own staff to make them for fear of exactly that consequence. The honest description lies between the extremes. Not a transfer of title, and not nothing either, but something consequential enough that one government bans its own acknowledgments while another files them as evidence.

Even a court won’t call the words binding

At the centre of Victoria’s certainty sits an irony. The courts, which actually determine what these statements are worth, decline to treat them as the settled truth the City recites them to be.

On October 1, 2025, the Quebec Superior Court ruled in a matter concerning Mount Royal in Montreal. Among the arguments before it was the contention that McGill University and the Ville de Montréal, by acknowledging that they occupy unceded Indigenous land, had thereby recognized Indigenous ownership and sovereignty over the mountain. Justice Gregory Moore rejected the step without hesitation. Those acknowledgments, he held, were not admissions of ownership or sovereignty, and he returned to the matter later in the judgment, calling the equation of a land acknowledgment with a recognition of ownership inaccurate.

Consider what that means for Victoria. A court, asked what a land acknowledgment legally establishes, answered that it establishes neither ownership nor sovereignty. The words are not, in law, the settled truth they are recited to be. Yet the City of Victoria speaks them each morning as though the question were closed, and then ventures further than any court will go, spending public money on the strength of a conclusion the judiciary itself treats as unproven. The inversion is striking. The institution with no power to decide title, the council, asserts the greatest certainty; the institution that does decide it, the court, asserts the least. The ceremony claims more than the law will grant.

Why the certainty is no longer cheap

There was a season when acknowledging unceded territory cost a city nothing and meant little, a phrase that named a grievance without naming a consequence. That season is closing, and it is worth understanding why the certainty now carries a weight it did not carry before.

In August 2025 the Supreme Court of British Columbia, in Cowichan Tribes v. Canada, declared Aboriginal title over land in Richmond after one of the longest trials in Canadian history, and went where no Canadian court had gone, declaring certain ordinary private fee simple titles held by government to be defective. That victory was built on evidence, on traditional knowledge of pre-sovereignty occupation, on oral history, and on the legal test for title, and on no acknowledgment that anyone ever recited. The two must be kept apart, since careless commentary will rush to collapse them. Acknowledgments did not win Cowichan. Proof did. The governments have signalled their intent to appeal.

Even so, the vocabulary on which the Cowichan court relied, unceded, never surrendered, never lawfully extinguished, is the very language a Victoria mayor speaks at the opening of council. Once, those words named a claim. Now they name a set of conditions a court has shown itself willing to treat as sufficient to declare title over land long assumed to be settled. The words have not changed; what they can produce in a courtroom has. A city alert to that shift would grow more careful, not less, about stating a disputed conclusion as established fact, for the conclusion is no longer abstract. It stands a single successful proof away from consequence. Victoria has chosen this moment to state it with greater confidence and to spend public money on its strength.

The money

None of this stays at the level of words. The City has placed public dollars behind the claim, twice, and engineered one of the mechanisms to endure.

In its 2022 budget, on a 6 to 2 vote, council approved a $200,000 reconciliation grant to the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations, drawn from the 2021 surplus. Former mayor Lisa Helps, who brought the idea forward, had first proposed something far larger, a grant pegged at 15 percent of new assessed revenue, the fresh tax money the City collects from development each year, compounding from one year to the next. The design merits a moment’s attention. New development arrives first as new assessed revenue and then recurs annually as ordinary property tax, so a grant tied to that figure and compounding would have climbed without ceiling, a permanent and swelling charge upon the City’s tax base. Public pressure pared it back to the flat $200,000, but that figure has not vanished; it recurs, appearing again as an annual line in the City’s later budget materials.

A second mechanism followed, built for permanence from the outset. In 2022 the City established a Reconciliation Contribution Fund, inviting property owners to add a voluntary sum, set at 5 or 10 percent of their property taxes, to be passed to the two Nations. The scheme was developed with a Victoria non-profit, the Reciprocity Trusts, which has been assembling a regional model in which residents contribute to south island Nations through their property taxes, and Helps was candid that the intention was a program in perpetuity, set to run every year. In its first year the fund drew 161 contributions totalling $36,153.44, from roughly 32,800 properties that received the notice.

The voluntary fund is the least troubling element here, since it compels no one, and a resident who believes in the cause may act on that belief directly. The grant is another matter. It is not voluntary. It is public money, drawn by council from revenue raised across every taxpayer and directed to particular Nations on the stated ground that the City’s wealth derives from their land, which is to say on the strength of the very title conclusion the courts have not reached. The logic is circular. The land is unceded, therefore the City’s wealth is owed back, therefore the grant; but the opening premise, that the land is unceded, is the disputed proposition rather than an established fact, and the whole rationale for the spending rests on treating it as settled.

Dissent was voiced at the table, and it struck this exact nerve. Councillor Stephen Andrew, the lone vote against the contribution fund, objected that reconciliation of this order is the constitutional business of the federal and provincial governments, not a municipality, and that the City was venturing into a jurisdiction not its own. The objection is no fringe complaint. It is a serious argument about the purpose of a city and the proper use of money raised for municipal services, and it was outvoted rather than answered.

The vote they would not allow

The sharpest fact in the whole affair is not the spending. It is what occurred when residents asked to vote on it.

When the grant and the fund were proposed, the City put its budget items to the public for comment. Of nearly fifty items, the reconciliation grant ranked near the very bottom: 52.8 percent of respondents strongly disagreed with it, against 40.2 percent who strongly agreed. On the City’s own consultation, the single initiative most closely bound to the land acknowledgment drew the strongest opposition. The figure is the City’s own evidence that the certainty recited from the chair is not shared by those seated before it.

A local taxpayers’ group pressed for the obvious next step, a referendum, on the sound ground that a permanent, land-based public transfer is consequential enough to warrant direct democratic sanction. Council refused. Councillor Ben Isitt called a referendum “an extremely bad idea,” and his reasoning rewards close reading, for it is the whole grievance distilled. A referendum, he argued, would draw out the worst elements of the community and furnish them a platform for views he considered reprehensible.

Read as a principle of government, the statement is remarkable. The public may not vote, because the public might vote wrongly, and the wrong vote is too contemptible to be permitted a hearing. That is not an argument against a referendum but an argument against dissent as such, a frank declaration that disagreement on this subject is not a position to be weighed but a disorder to be denied a microphone. A council that recites a disputed claim as settled truth each morning, then refuses to let residents vote on the spending that flows from it because their objections are presumed disreputable, has closed a loop upon itself. The framing is asserted as fact, the spending follows from the framing, and the vote that might interrupt the sequence is refused on the ground that the objectors are unworthy of being heard.

Here is the genuine cost of placing a political position beyond question, and the answer to anyone who calls the whole subject harmless courtesy. It does not remain a matter of manners. It hardens into a rationale for bypassing the ordinary democratic checks and for casting the people on the other side as beneath the dignity of a ballot. The City is entitled to a view about reconciliation. What it has done instead is judge the competing view illegitimate, and arrange its procedures so that view cannot be expressed where it would count.

The land across from the legislature

The clearest instance of the City abandoning institutional neutrality lies a short walk from city hall, on two parking lots.

Through the treaty process, the Songhees Nation seeks to acquire three provincially owned sites in downtown Victoria, two of them among the most valuable surface parcels in the city. The lot at 1112 Wharf Street carried a recent assessment of $23.4 million. The lot at 430 Menzies Street, directly across from the legislature and bordered by Kingston and Superior streets, was assessed most recently at $25.9 million. Together the two approach fifty million dollars. The third site, on Pandora Avenue in Old Town, holds a building. The land belongs to the Province, not the City, and Victoria is not a party to the treaty negotiations.

None of which restrained the City from throwing its weight behind the claim. In March 2022, at a ceremony in Centennial Square, the City of Victoria did what it had never done, formally and publicly backing the Songhees Nation’s land-claim negotiations with a letter of support placed in the hands of Chief Ron Sam. The City, then Mayor Helps explained, could obstruct the transfers or stand aside and support them, and it was, in her words, “choosing to stand and support.” In the letter, Helps wrote that the City anticipated building a working relationship with the Nation as the sites became treaty settlement lands. The City was not neutral. It declared, in writing and in ceremony, that it stood on one side.

The consequence of that side prevailing is concrete. Should the parcels pass to the Songhees through the treaty, they cease to be ordinary municipal land. They fall outside the City’s zoning, its bylaws, and its property taxes, and come under the governance of the Songhees Nation instead. Two of the highest-value lots in the downtown core, one of them facing the seat of provincial government, would depart the municipal tax base and the municipal regulatory regime altogether. A city government that endorses that outcome supports the removal of prime public land from its own jurisdiction and its own tax rolls, in favour of one of the two Nations it acknowledges each morning as equals. Whatever else that is, it is not a courtesy.

A deeper history sharpens the matter. The legislature precinct itself was once the subject of a claim. The grounds were set aside as an Indian reserve in 1854 by Governor James Douglas, then reclaimed for the legislature site without a surrender of the reserve, and in 2007 Canada and British Columbia settled the resulting lawsuit by paying $31.5 million, divided equally between the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations, to release every claim to that parcel. The seat of provincial government in British Columbia stands on land that was claimed, litigated, and paid for, with no admission of liability. The parking lot across the street is the living, present-day chapter of the same long account. When the City recites that it sits on unceded Lekwungen territory, this is the ground it means, and it has taken a side in who should hold the portion of it still in play.

The even hand that isn’t

A further thing the morning recitation conceals bears directly on whether the City is the neutral party it presents itself as.

Victoria names the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations together, in a single even-handed phrase, as joint representatives of the Lekwungen. The parking lots show how little that evenness survives contact with the disputes that carry real weight. The City recites both Nations as equals each morning and then lends its institutional weight to one of them, in a matter worth tens of millions, while breathing none of it from the chair. A resident listening to the acknowledgment would never know the City had chosen a side. The ceremony shows an even hand; the conduct contradicts it.

The evenness is fictional in a second respect, for the two Nations named in that single breath are not at peace with each other. In the spring of 2026 the Esquimalt Nation went to court to halt the transfer of Hatley Park, the grounds of Royal Roads University, to the Songhees Nation through the Te’mexw treaty process, asserting that Esquimalt itself holds Aboriginal title to the land and that surrendering it to the Songhees would be an unjustified infringement of that title. The acknowledgment speaks of the Lekwungen as one settled whole, two Nations sharing a single estate; the litigation reveals two Nations adverse over the same ground. The City recites the unity each morning, and the court record dissolves it. The disagreement casts no doubt on either Nation’s rights, which is a separate question for the courts. It casts doubt on the City’s tidy phrase, which asserts one settled answer the Nations themselves do not share.

The mayor who says the words everywhere

All of it runs through a single office, and through Mayor Marianne Alto, who embodies the contradiction more fully than any phrase could.

Alto makes land acknowledgments as a matter of course. She makes them everywhere, at the council table, at public events, in the ordinary conduct of the office, recognizing the unceded territory of the Lekwungen peoples, and the practice is constant and central to how she presents the work of governing. Her reconciliation involvement, by the City’s own materials, is extensive and unbroken. She sits on the regional reconciliation advisory committee, the renamed successor to the Te’mexw Treaty Advisory Committee, through which affected municipalities feed their concerns into the treaty process. She is a member of the Capital Regional District’s First Nations Relations Committee. She is the named head of the City Family, the City’s standing reconciliation collaboration with the two Nations, and she chaired that District’s earlier Special Task Force on First Nations Relations during her years as a regional director. When the reconciliation contribution was debated, it was Alto who put the governing principle most directly, that those who “have a benefit from the land have an opportunity to share” it, the clean articulation of a worldview in which the disputed title conclusion is never argued but simply assumed.

A detail in how she performs the acknowledgment deepens the difficulty rather than easing it. Alto reads no fixed, adopted text. She improvises one at every meeting, and across her Committee of the Whole openings in 2026 no two are alike. One morning she dwells on the Nations’ resilience and patience; another adds a passage on the waters that surround the land, prompted, she says, by something at a recent event; another folds in a reflection on remembering what came before, with the arresting aside that the City is “not beholden to that work” but should respect it. The surrounding language is reinvented each time, composed fresh from the chair rather than read from a ratified text.

The implication will not stay hidden. No wording was ever adopted. No council vote settled what the acknowledgment asserts. No public scrutiny attaches to a statement that shifts with the speaker every morning and is delivered, at length, before the public’s business begins. The single most frequently repeated official statement about whose land this is has no fixed content at all.

What recurs across most of the openings is the consequential element. Time and again Alto declares that the city sits “in its entirety” on the two Nations’ territory, the whole of it, every parcel, offered as plain preamble. Even that is not invariable; in one opening the claim softens to working “on the territories” of the Lekwungen people through partnership with the Nations, the totalizing phrase quietly dropped. So the central proposition is itself unstable, pitched at full strength on most days and eased on others, at the speaker’s improvisation. A claim of that magnitude, touching the ownership of an entire city, ought to be the most carefully fixed sentence a council speaks. Instead it is the most freely reinvented, asserted as settled fact in language that was never settled at all.

Set this beside the rest. The City’s most senior official recites a disputed claim as established truth more often and more visibly than anyone, presides over public spending premised on that claim, sits inside the treaty machinery whose output two of the named Nations are now fighting over in court, and leads a council that would not let residents vote on the money. A mayor engaging with the questions that shape her city is doing her job, and misconduct is not the charge. Position is the charge, and the manufactured quality of the certainty. The acknowledgment issues from the chair as though the question were closed, and the official delivering it is the one best placed to know that it is not.

She does not speak for all of us

Marianne Alto won the mayor’s chair in 2022 with 15,090 votes, fifty-five percent of the ballots cast. The win was clear and the office is hers. But fifteen thousand votes in a city of more than ninety thousand buys four years of administering Victoria. It does not buy the authority to settle, on everyone’s behalf and before business each morning, a question two Nations are still arguing in court, then write that answer into policy, spend public money on it, and refuse the residents who pay the one vote that would let them object.

What she models does not stay within the fifteen thousand, or within the city. Victoria is the capital, the largest and most closely watched council in a region of nearly four hundred thousand people spread across thirteen municipalities, and the smaller councils take their cues from it. The recited claim, the framework folded into policy, the spending built on an unsettled question, the referendum killed because the wrong side might win, all of it becomes available to the next council the moment the capital treats it as routine. Nobody across the region votes on any of this. They inherit it, because the flagship did it first.

When the chair announces that the whole of Victoria sits on unceded land, it reaches for the first-person plural, as though the city had decided something it has not. We recognize. We acknowledge. Fifteen thousand people elected a mayor. They did not resolve who owns the ground beneath an entire city, and nobody at that table has the standing to resolve it for them, much less to make it the example a whole region is handed. She can speak for the council. She does not speak for all of us.

BC Politics Watch is an independent civic accountability publication. Factual claims here are drawn from court and tribunal decisions, City of Victoria records and budget materials, the City’s own public consultation results, and published reporting. The opinions in this piece are identified as opinions. The observation that council acknowledgments run long reflects this publication’s own firsthand attendance. The question of title is genuinely unresolved, and nothing here asserts that the Douglas Treaties did, or did not, surrender it; the criticism falls on a government reciting a live legal question as settled fact, not on either answer to it. The Songhees and Esquimalt Nations’ claims are live legal matters, and nothing here comments on their merits, which belong to the courts. The disagreement between the two Nations bears on the City’s framing, not on the legitimacy of either Nation’s rights.

Sources: The 2016 royal-visit acknowledgments and their later filing, Esquimalt Nation Replies, Supreme Court of British Columbia, Victoria Registry No. 180715, filed August 2018. The legal effect of acknowledgments, Kahentinetha c. Société québécoise des infrastructures, 2025 QCCS 3528 (Quebec Superior Court, October 1, 2025), paragraphs 45 and 60. The New Brunswick acknowledgment directive and the Wolastoqey title claim, CBC News, 2021. Cowichan Tribes v. Canada (Attorney General), 2025 BCSC 1490. The $200,000 reconciliation grant, the 6 to 2 vote, the original 15 percent of new assessed revenue proposal, the 52.8 percent strong-disagreement figure, Councillor Stephen Andrew’s objection, and Councillor Ben Isitt’s opposition to a referendum, Times Colonist and CBC News, 2022. The Reconciliation Contribution Fund, the Reciprocity Trusts partnership, the perpetual design, and the 2022 contribution total, Times Colonist, CHEK News, CBC News, and the City of Victoria, 2022. Former Mayor Lisa Helps on the Douglas Treaty, Times Colonist, 2022. The Greater Victoria Harbour Authority’s territory acknowledgment, its Songhees and Xwsepsum board representation since 2002, and its gold rating from the Canadian Council of Indigenous Business, Greater Victoria Harbour Authority. The University of Victoria’s territory acknowledgment, University of Victoria. The City’s own definition of unceded, City of Victoria UNDRIP workbook. The City’s adoption of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action, UNDRIP, and the repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius, City of Victoria reconciliation materials. The three downtown sites sought by the Songhees Nation, the Wharf Street and Menzies Street parking lot assessments, the City’s March 2022 letter of support, and the loss of municipal zoning, bylaw, and tax jurisdiction on transfer, Times Colonist, CBC News, and CHEK News, March 2022. The 2007 legislature-lands settlement, the 1854 reserve and its taking for the legislature site, and the $31.5 million paid to the two Nations, Government of British Columbia and Government of Canada news releases, 2006 and 2007, and the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia. The Hatley Park claim, Times Colonist and CHEK News, 2026. Mayor Marianne Alto’s reconciliation roles and the City Family, City of Victoria. Mayor Marianne Alto’s spoken acknowledgments and their variation, Victoria City Council Committee of the Whole openings, 2026. The 2022 Victoria mayoral result, Alto’s 15,090 votes and 55 percent share and the roughly 36.8 percent turnout, Times Colonist, CBC News, CTV News, and CivicInfo BC, 2022. The City of Victoria population of 91,867 and the Greater Victoria regional population, 2021 Census, Statistics Canada. Douglas Treaties interpretation, Legislative Assembly of British Columbia and published historical sources.

A decision that reshapes Victoria’s working waterfront was made in a single afternoon, without a public hearing and without directly informing the neighbourhoods most affected. On Thursday, June 25, 2026, the City of Victoria’s Committee of the Whole took up Zoning Bylaw Modernization, Phase Two, and by the end of the day the bylaw had passed unanimously and been given final approval. Staff said the rush was deliberate, designed to get the change through before Council broke for the summer. The result was a sweeping rewrite of the rules governing much of the city’s industrial waterfront, with James Bay and Vic West largely left out of the process.

No one in James Bay was told. Not the neighbourhood association, not the residents who live closest to the harbour. They found out the same way a stranger would have, by reading the meeting agenda when it went online a few days before the vote.

Here is what that single day accomplished. Council dispensed with the public hearing that would ordinarily have allowed residents to speak. It rewrote the zoning on the strength of consultation conducted almost entirely with the harbour businesses that stood to benefit from the change. It concluded that the federal government, which owns the harbour waters and operates a Coast Guard base on the waterfront, was unaffected and therefore required no consultation. And it made heavy industrial activities, including ship dismantling and other potentially polluting operations, a permitted use on a residential harbour as of right.

None of this was unlawful. That is precisely the point.

The legislation allowed the public hearing to be waived. The consultation requirements were minimal. Almost no one knew the rezoning was taking place. Yet, in the course of a single afternoon, Council fundamentally changed the future of a harbour that belongs to the entire city.

That is not how a democracy should make decisions of this magnitude.

This is not about whether industry belongs on the harbour. It does, and it always has. It is about how the decision was made, and who was kept out of informing its making.

What The Bylaw Does

The City sold Phase Two as housekeeping, a tidy-up of old zoning rules. It is much more than that. It creates two new industrial zones, one for light industry and one for heavy. It changes the marine industrial zone to allow ship breaking, the business of taking old vessels apart, and marine vessel recycling. It raises the height limit along the industrial waterfront to as much as twenty-five metres for buildings and thirty for equipment. It removes the requirement to provide parking. And it cancels the Harbour Road design guidelines, the rules that had controlled how that stretch of waterfront is built and how it looks.

These are not small fixes. They decide how tall, how intensive, and how dirty the activity on a working harbour can be, on land that sits at the edge of one of the oldest and most crowded residential neighbourhoods on the coast. A change this large is exactly what a public hearing is for.

The Hearing

A 2023 provincial law called Bill 44 lets a city skip the public hearing for a rezoning, as long as the city decides the change fits its Official Community Plan. That Plan is the long-term blueprint for how a city grows, and Victoria adopted a new one in October 2025. Because staff described the new industrial zones as simply carrying out policies already in that Plan, they advised that no hearing was needed, and Council agreed.

The argument depends entirely on how you describe the Plan. The Plan included only a broad label for this land, an Urban Industrial Reserve, and that label did go to the public for comment. What never went to the public were the actual rules, the taller buildings, the longer list of permitted uses, the deleted parking requirements, the cancelled design guidelines. Residents were asked about a heading. The fine print that governs the land showed up a year later, in a step the City called implementation and exempted from a hearing. The public never got to weigh in on the rules that matter.

Council had one chance to slow down, and the way it turned that chance down is worth watching closely. Before staff had even begun their presentation, Councillor Marg Gardiner asked that each councillor be given more time to ask questions and comment, seventeen minutes instead of ten. Her reason was specific. This was the first time Council had seen all three industrial zones for the entire reserve at once, including land close to homes, and it had landed on short notice after a flood of resident emails over the previous two days. Councillor Stephen Hammond seconded her request.

Councillor Susan Kim spoke against it, and her objection is revealing. Residents had already been given notice, she said, an email from staff listing the agenda items. That was the notice. An email naming the topics, sent shortly before the meeting, was offered as the City’s answer to the complaint that no one had been properly informed. The request needed a two-thirds majority, six votes. It got three, from Gardiner, Hammond, and Councillor Chris Coleman. Voting against were Councillors Matt Dell, Susan Kim, Jeremy Caradonna, Krista Loughton, Dave Thompson, and Mayor Marianne Alto.

The extra time was refused. Staff then presented the report, which had been submitted by the City’s Acting Director of Planning and Development, Alec Johnston, and a team of planners walked Council through it. Council gave the bylaw final approval the same day. The request to slow down lost, and the decision kept moving.

Who Was Consulted

The City’s own report describes its public engagement as targeted work with industrial landowners and businesses. There was a workshop in January 2026, held at Point Hope Maritime, a private shipyard. There were postcards mailed to industrial owners. The letters of support attached to the report came from the established players, the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority and the harbour operators. The James Bay Neighbourhood Association, the residents of James Bay, and the young ocean-technology companies that need waterfront space were not part of it in any real way.

What makes that worse is what came before. These same residents had taken part in the earlier Phase 1 consultation, the one about housing, and no one raised the Phase 2 industrial zoning with them at the time. People who had shown up and engaged in good faith on one round were given no warning that a second round would remake the harbour itself. Their complaint is not that the City broke a law. It is that the City invited them into one conversation and held the consequential one without them.

There is a detail that sharpens this. The councillor who serves as Council’s liaison to James Bay is also the City’s appointed representative on the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority board, the very body the City consulted on the rezoning. The one person who sat in both places, the neighbourhood’s link to Council and the City’s link to the harbour authority, gave the neighbourhood no warning. James Bay found out from the public agenda, the same as everyone else. That is councillor Matt Dell.

Councillors said as much on the record. Chris Coleman, in his closing remarks, said the report had missed the mark by not really considering the neighbourhoods that would be affected, and noted that one alternative open to Council was simply to refuse the staff recommendation to waive the public hearing. Others described the package as largely housekeeping. The engagement had reached the industrial owners; whether the new industrial uses belonged beside homes was the question the report did not seriously take up.

One distinction has to be kept straight, because it is easy to get wrong. City staff wrote the report, not the harbour authority. What the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority sent in was a letter of support. But the authority is not a neutral party. Its job is to promote and grow harbour activity, so its letter argued for the outcome it wanted. The honest question is not who wrote the report, which is clear, but how closely the wishes of an interested party matched the policy Council adopted. The record shows the authority’s support. Whether that support shaped the result is something a reader can judge from the documented process.

The Federal Government

The City did not only leave the neighbourhood out. It also declared, by formal vote, that the senior governments with a direct stake in the harbour did not need to be consulted at all. Recommendation 7 had Council formally find that the federal and provincial governments, the regional district, and neighbouring municipalities were not affected by the rezoning and did not need to be consulted.

That finding is hard to defend. The Canadian Coast Guard’s West Coast operations sit on the James Bay waterfront, and as of September 2, 2025, by federal order, the Coast Guard was moved into the Department of National Defence. Transport Canada owns and manages the harbour water, from the Ogden Point breakwater to the Selkirk trestle. The harbour is federally regulated water and fish habitat. A city rezoning of the industrial land around it touches all of those federal interests, whether the City says so or not.

Councillor Marg Gardiner moved to delete the words declaring the federal and provincial governments unaffected. Staff confirmed that deleting them would force the City to consult those governments. Gardiner pointed straight at the federal departments with direct interests in the harbour: the Department of National Defence, which now holds the Coast Guard base; Transport Canada, which owns and manages the harbour water; and Fisheries and Oceans Canada, whose mandate covers the fish habitat the Fisheries Act protects. She also pointed to the federal defence money now headed for the harbour. A majority of Council voted her amendment down. The City will say it keeps a working relationship with Transport Canada and consults agencies when needed. That is a different thing. A friendly call to a harbour master is not formal consultation with the federal departments that own the land and the water, and when Gardiner moved to require that consultation, Council said no.

The change in the Coast Guard’s status is not a technicality. For most of its history the Coast Guard was a civilian fleet under Fisheries and Oceans Canada. The September 2025 order moved it into the Defence portfolio and broadened its security role. It is still a civilian, unarmed agency, and it did not become part of the military. That distinction matters, and the honest version of this argument depends on it. But its base on the James Bay waterfront is now a Defence facility that, by its own account, needs new buildings and infrastructure to handle a larger fleet.

That is exactly why the federal government deserved to be consulted, and the point has an unusually well-placed champion. Jeff Kibble is the Conservative Member of Parliament for Cowichan-Malahat-Langford, a twenty-eight-year veteran of the Royal Canadian Navy, and a member of the House of Commons defence committee. He has spent much of his time in Parliament on a single argument, that the Coast Guard’s move into Defence is being treated as real on paper while nothing changes in practice. He has questioned how the government counts Coast Guard spending toward Canada’s NATO targets, and pressed for a clear answer on which department the agency now reports to.

Put his complaint next to what Victoria did, and they line up. If moving the Coast Guard into Defence is meant to mean something, then a city rezoning the waterfront around one of its bases, and formally declaring the federal government unaffected, is a clear example of that change meaning nothing on the ground. This is not a claim that the rezoning threatens national security. The Coast Guard is civilian and unarmed, and a city bylaw cannot bind federal land in any case. It is a point about basic coordination. A federal facility whose status changed nine months earlier was waved off without anyone in the responsible departments being asked. That is the on-paper-only problem Kibble has warned about, made local, and it sits in a lane a federal representative can act on, by asking the responsible ministers whether the Coast Guard and Defence were consulted, and by pressing the City to consult them when the master plan comes.

A careful process would also have asked how all this fits on one small harbour. James Bay already carries the busiest cruise terminal in the country, the floatplane approach, the Coast Guard base, and constant ferry and car traffic, all packed into one residential waterfront. Adding a taller, more intensive industrial zone on top of that, with no hearing and without asking the federal operators in the middle of it, raises an obvious question about whether these uses can coexist. The City did not answer it. By formal recommendation, it declared the question did not exist.

A Few Owners

It is worth being precise about how much of the harbour belongs to how few owners. The Ralmax Group of Companies, a family of industrial businesses operating around the working harbour, owns a long list of its operations. One is Point Hope Maritime, the shipyard whose constraints the rezoning eases by cancelling the Harbour Road design guidelines. The others include the Esquimalt Drydock Company, United Engineering, Ralmax Contracting, Ralmax Properties, and more. Ralmax is also a partner with the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations in a marine industrial venture called Salish Sea Industrial Services. The Greater Victoria Harbour Authority, which wrote the lead support letter, is the landlord and operator of the public waterfront, and its board has included seats for the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations since it was founded in 2002.

These are the parties the rezoning helps, by raising heights, adding uses, and removing design rules, and these are the parties the City consulted. The public, the neighbourhood associations, and the ocean-technology firms were not consulted. Strip the process to its core and that is what remains. In rewriting the rules for the public’s waterfront, the only outside voices the City sought belonged to the businesses that profit from the change.

There is a standard in public life that fits a process like this one. The test is not whether a decision-maker was actually biased. It is whether a reasonable, informed person, looking at the situation, might wonder whether a process was fair when it consults the people who benefit and skips a hearing for everyone else. That test, called the reasonable apprehension of bias, was set by the Supreme Court of Canada in Committee for Justice and Liberty v National Energy Board. It requires no proof of a deal, only circumstances that would give a reasonable person pause. A rezoning whose only outside consultation was with the businesses it enriches, adopted with the hearing waived, is exactly the kind of circumstance that invites the question.

The Same Method, Twice

Phase Two is the second time the City has reached this same destination, a major change with no public hearing, and the same official ran both. The Phase Two report was submitted by Alec Johnston, the City’s Acting Director of Planning and Development. The same Alec Johnston was the senior planner in charge of the Phase 1 work, signing in his earlier role as Assistant Director on behalf of the Director. One official carried the file from the first round to the second.

Phase 1 was the larger package. The first step came in July 2024, when Council took up a fourteen-storey tower in James Bay. Then, in October 2025, the City adopted the new Official Community Plan and a set of zoning changes together. Inside that final document, which ran to roughly eleven hundred pages, the lots for that tower were quietly moved on the maps into the Downtown Core Area. The boundary change was buried in a greyscale map on page 194 of Appendix C. Once the property sat inside that boundary, it counted as consistent with the Plan, and under the Local Government Act as amended by Bill 44, a rezoning consistent with the Plan cannot go to a public hearing. The boundary change did not alter the Plan in any way the public was asked to review. Council did not notice the change until fourteen days after the vote, when the James Bay Neighbourhood Association wrote to flag it. The project was referred back to staff for further review, and by March 2026 the lots were listed for sale.

What the Phase 1 changes did is the point that connects the two phases. They raised how much could be built in parts of James Bay and opened the door to projects the old rules would have stopped. James Bay’s housing in Phase 1 and the industrial waterfront in Phase 2 are two runs of the same method. Change the underlying framework first, then push the consequential approvals through afterward, with the hearing already ruled out.

The James Bay Liaison

The missed warning on the harbour file was not a one-time lapse. The councillor who serves as James Bay’s liaison has a record of voting against the very tools that let the public reach Council.

In August 2023 he supported a change that removed members of the public from the City’s Code of Conduct complaint process, so that only Council members, staff, and committee members could file a complaint about a councillor’s conduct. The mayor herself called the change “narrowing far too dramatically,” and another councillor said it broke even the whole concept of what they were trying to do. In 2025 he voted against setting up a public engagement program on the draft city budget and having staff analyze that feedback for Council. And on the harbour rezoning, while serving as both James Bay’s liaison and the City’s representative on the harbour authority board, he gave the neighbourhood no advance notice. Each is a separate, documented act. Together they describe a liaison whose record on public access runs in one direction, which sits awkwardly beside the open-and-accountable image he runs on.

Stewardship and Shipbreaking

The City presents itself, in its strategic plan and its public messaging, as a leader on climate and the environment. The staff report for this very rezoning lists environmental stewardship among the goals it claims to advance. Then the bylaw allows ship breaking and vessel recycling on the marine industrial waterfront. Taking ships apart is one of the dirtiest activities a harbour can host. It can release heavy metals, fuel and oil, and other pollutants into water that is protected fish habitat under federal law. Those uses were added as a matter of right, with the hearing waived and the federal environmental regulators, Fisheries and Oceans Canada and Environment and Climate Change Canada, declared unaffected and not formally consulted.

This does not require guessing at anyone’s motives. It is a plain gap between a stated value and a specific decision. Staff noted that ship breaking already happens at the Upper Harbour shipyards, which is true and a fair point about today. It does not explain why a city that brands itself on the environment would widen that activity, as a right, on a fish-bearing harbour, with no hearing and without asking the federal regulators whose laws the work engages.

The same gap shows up on the City’s other signature commitment. Victoria places reconciliation at the front of its public identity, and one concrete piece of that is an ongoing funding relationship with the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations, including a $200,000 yearly Reconciliation Grant and a voluntary contribution program that lets property owners direct a portion of their taxes to the Nations, both adopted by Council in 2022 under the previous council. That is offered only as background on how the City presents itself. The grant is unconditional, predates this bylaw, and has nothing to do with the harbour consultation or any vote. The narrow point is that a city built around the language of stewardship and reconciliation ran a harbour rezoning that declared both the environmental regulators and the federal owners unaffected, and voted down a move to require consulting them.

There is also a plain land-use point, separate from anyone’s motives. Heavy ship recycling belongs at the heavy facilities already built for it, the Upper Harbour shipyards and the Esquimalt Graving Dock, which the federal government describes as the largest non-military commercial drydock on the west coast of the Americas, operated by Public Services and Procurement Canada. It does not belong, as a matter of right and with no hearing, spread across industrial lots near homes. Victoria cannot order the work into a neighbouring town, since it can only zone its own land. But writing dirty uses into the rules across a waterfront next to housing, instead of keeping them at the heavy sites built for them, is exactly the kind of choice a hearing exists to test. That test was waived.

What Comes Next

The real future of these harbour lands has been handed to a master plan led by the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority, followed by a future rezoning brought by whoever applies to build. Staff confirmed the plan is still being written, with most of it expected by the end of the year.

The clearest sign of where the real decisions now sit came from the James Bay councillor himself. His own amendment sent the future of Ogden Point to that harbour-authority master plan, the document the authority is still writing. By his own motion, the most contested stretch of the waterfront was handed to the very operator that stands to gain from how it is developed.

Residents should be clear about what the harbour authority is. It is a not-for-profit body that runs the marinas and the terminal, and its board includes First Nations representation and reconciliation committees. But it is not a neutral planner. It is the commercial landlord and operator of the harbour, with a stated goal of getting the highest and best use out of its properties, and a new chief executive hired to realize their full potential. A master plan written by the party that profits from development is not something the public can simply be handed and asked to approve. That is why the consultation attached to it has to be genuine, and why residents need to be involved while the plan is being written, not shown a finished version and asked to sign off.

There is a quieter effect worth naming. When a city marks a waterfront as a priority for growth, the bodies built into that waterfront, the harbour authority as landlord and the operators who hold the land, gain more than new permitted uses. They gain status. Each time the harbour is pushed toward development with the public left out, those bodies are confirmed as the City’s natural partners for the next round of planning and decision. That is how a small group stays in charge of what comes next.

Ogden Point

There was one partial retreat, and it is being sold as a victory. Ogden Point was pulled out of the rezoning. Councillor Stephen Hammond first raised taking it out, asking staff whether Ogden Point could be removed from the motion or sent to its own public hearing. Councillor Matt Dell then moved the amendment that carried, delaying any rezoning of Ogden Point until the harbour authority’s master plan is finished, citing the volume of email from residents, and it passed unanimously. One councillor called it breathing room for the neighbourhood. The earlier fear, that ship breaking would be allowed as of right at the cruise terminal at the mouth of the harbour, is for now off the table.

Residents should think hard before treating that as a win and relaxing. Ogden Point was not protected. It was postponed, and postponed to the very process the harbour authority controls, the master plan and the rezoning that follows it. Its future uses are unsettled, not safe. The carve-out became the reassuring headline of a day on which the rest of the working harbour was rezoned with no hearing, in a single sitting. A neighbourhood that takes the comfort and stops paying attention will have misread the day. The one piece that was paused is the one piece still genuinely up for grabs, and it will be decided in a process run by the operator with the most to gain.

So the real lesson for James Bay is the opposite of standing down. The record of other Victoria files is that this Council’s promises need pressure to hold, and that protections without enforcement get watered down later. If the neighbourhood wants Ogden Point’s future to reflect the people who live around it rather than the body that profits from building on it, the master plan and its rezoning are the fight that counts, and the time to organize is now, while the document is still being written.

The Campaign Launch

A smaller note, offered as a contrast and nothing more. The mayor held her re-election launch at the COAST ocean innovation hub, run by the South Island Prosperity Partnership, the region’s economic development agency, whose work covers ocean technology and Indigenous economic reconciliation. Campaign launches are routinely staged to signal where a politician stands. The contrast is simply this. That hub is the home of the ocean-technology sector, the future harbour users who needed a say in how the industrial land gets allocated and who were left out of this rezoning, while the established industrial operators were consulted. The venue says nothing about the bylaw. It is only a reminder that the city’s enthusiasm for ocean innovation, and the people that enthusiasm is meant to serve, did not turn into a seat at the table on this file.

The Record

None of this requires assuming a hidden motive. The procedural failures are on the record, and councillors named several of them out loud. Looking at the whole of it, a reasonable resident can conclude that the harbour is being run by a small circle of insiders and the businesses that profit from it, with consultation used to confirm decisions instead of testing them.

Victorians are entitled to transparency from their city. On this file they did not get it. The hearing was waived, the neighbourhood was not told, the federal owners were declared unaffected, and the whole thing was finished in an afternoon. A council that wanted to hear the public had every chance to ask, and chose not to, again and again, through the day. That record is the answer. The master plan that decides the harbour’s real future is being written now, due by the end of the year, and this Council faces the voters in October 2026. Both deadlines fall while residents still have time to do something about them.