In recent years, Victoria has undergone one of the most radical shifts in housing and zoning policy in its history. But a crucial question remains: where are these policies coming from? The material below draws directly on the written responses provided by four sitting Victoria City Councillors to Homes for Living in response to a question from that organisation about their top housing actions on Council.

Homes for Living (HFL) is a highly active advocacy organisation closely allied with the Urban Development Institute. It scores Greater Victoria candidates on housing using a rubric that combines a Survey Score and Platform Score for everyone, plus a Housing Reform Score and Vote Tracker Score for incumbents or a Public Statements Score for newcomers. Each of the four Councillors referred to here would have completed questionnaires prior to running for Council in 2022 and presumably will complete them again for the current election cycle.

The HFL score is reminiscent of how the National Rifle Association in the United States scores every federal election candidate. Both share the same underlying logic: a single-issue advocacy group converts a candidate’s record, statements, and questionnaire answers into a ranking that doubles as an endorsement signal and a pressure mechanism on incumbents who want to keep their score up.

The Loyalty Test and the Coordinated Bloc

According to HFL’s internal summary of the responses, the four Councillors delivered precisely what was demanded of them. They collectively supported an OCP and zoning overhaul to allow 4 to 6 storey buildings city-wide, a high volume of housing approvals driven by a “strong pro-housing stance,” parking reform including the removal of parking minimums and a shift to “car-lite” development, and the streamlining of development through “as-of-right” zoning and fewer rezonings.

Looked at objectively, this is not a list of organic neighbourhood compromises. The respondents read from the exact same script, collectively championing the dismantling of regulatory barriers to ensure high-volume development.

The Responses Show Legislating from the Shadows

Each Councillor’s response highlights their commitment to the HFL playbook, revealing a timeline and political strategy that should deeply concern any resident who values public consultation.

Councillor Dave Thompson boasts about initiating a massive housing motion just four weeks after taking office. He proudly notes that this sweeping directive was established before the Missing Middle debate was finalised, before the 2023 to 2026 Strategic Plan was written, and before the OCP and Zoning Bylaw work even began. The major housing and zoning policies of the last four years were not shaped by data, staff analysis, or public consultation. According to Thompson, he set a “strong pro-housing direction and precedent” before the city’s official planning mechanisms were even engaged. The agenda was pre-written.

Councillor Matt Dell’s response is perhaps the most politically transparent. He begins by directly thanking HFL for their influence, stating: “Your pro-housing advocacy made a huge difference in the 2022 elections.” He then pivots to warning HFL about residents who might oppose them, characterising legitimate neighbourhood concerns about tree canopy loss and actual affordability as “misleading arguments.” He boasts that by rezoning the entire city to allow 4 to 6 storey buildings everywhere, “developers will no longer need to worry about the rezoning process.” For Dell, the goal is explicitly to remove the public’s ability to scrutinise developer applications.

Councillor Jeremy Caradonna’s response to HFL reads like a corporate quarterly earnings report. He boasts that the city “smashed every record possible when it comes to housing approvals,” citing 8,904 total homes approved. He celebrates that the current Council “changed the narrative and approved nearly every proposal brought forward.” When an elected official brags to a third-party sponsor that they “approved nearly every proposal,” it ceases to be municipal planning. It is blind rubber-stamping designed to satisfy a volume metric demanded by a lobby group.

While focusing slightly more on non-market housing than her peers, Councillor Krista Loughton’s response still aligns with the HFL mandate of deregulation. She highlights her work in passing the new OCP and Zoning regulations to unlock city-wide multiplexes, and reports back to HFL on her efforts to expand the Affordable Rental Housing Revitalization Tax Exemption, explicitly detailing the financial mechanisms council has implemented to incentivise development.

The Transparency Deficit

There is nothing inherently wrong with advocacy groups engaging with candidates. The danger arises when that engagement crosses into institutional capture.

During the 2022 municipal election, HFL registered as a third-party sponsor to legally fund advertising and endorse candidates. Yet they remain unregistered on the BC Lobbyists Registry. This dual status allows them to influence elections openly while keeping their ongoing backroom influence over sitting councillors hidden from public disclosure.

When elected officials pre-commit to a third-party sponsor’s agenda to secure a favourable rating, public consultation becomes a charade. As Councillor Dell’s response proves, genuine neighbourhood concerns are now viewed by the Council majority as anti-housing obstacles to be bypassed.

Reclaiming City Hall

Victoria has witnessed a historic rewrite of its zoning rules and a top-down mandate for density. The question is no longer whether these policies exist, but who is truly holding the pen. Based on the uniform submission of four of our elected officials to this questionnaire, all running again for office, it appears that HFL has made the decisions and will continue to do so unless residents demand a return to independent governance.

Public policy is only legitimate when it is debated openly, understood clearly, and grounded in transparent, evidence-based decision-making. We must decide if we want a council that answers to the voters, or one that answers to an unregistered shadow lobby. This post is not an allegation of legal impropriety but rather a necessary exercise in democratic transparency. It examines how elected officials engage with and potentially capitulate to external pressure groups on the most defining issues facing our city. Any factual errors will be corrected, and the individuals referenced are openly invited to respond and provide their own context.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and construction law specialist campaigning for City Council in 2026. He has examined how cities can align growth with infrastructure, affordability, and democratic consent.

That is how long Homes for Living (HFL) existed before it helped elect a Council majority in Victoria.

The organisation was incorporated on August 28, 2022. The election was October 15, 2022. In the intervening 48 days, it registered with Elections BC as a third-party advertising sponsor, surveyed candidates across three municipalities, published candidate rankings, ran advertising, and helped deliver Council majorities in Victoria, Saanich, and Oak Bay simultaneously.

Who built this? Where did the money come from? And what does it want from the Council it helped elect?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are ones Victoria voters should have been asking since November 2022.

What Homes for Living Says It Is

A registered BC Society, volunteer-run, composed of homeowners and renters passionate about housing affordability. Developers and politicians cannot be voting members, the organisation says. Donations from developers and politicians are prohibited.

These are reassuring rules. Here is the problem: they are entirely self-policed. No external verification. No audit. No regulatory oversight of who is actually funding the organisation.

And the funding question matters, because over 93% of donations to Homes for Living during the 2022 election were anonymous, disclosed by CRD Watch through FOI research published in 2025. The prohibition on developer donations is a policy. The donation anonymity is a fact. You cannot verify one against the other.

Consider one named HFL member’s own biography at the material time. Robert Berry describes himself as a lifelong Victoria resident unhappy seeing housing shortages and price escalation displace his friends. That is the community volunteer framing. Here is where Robert Berry works: QuadReal Property Group, a global real estate company managing over $73.8 billion in assets across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and the Asia Pacific. QuadReal’s 72-page Activity Report for 2021 to 2022 contains no mention of “affordable housing.” None. This is not an allegation against Mr. Berry personally. It is a structural observation. When a real estate industry employee’s public bio aligns perfectly with his employer’s commercial interests, maximum density, maximum development throughput, minimum regulatory friction, the distance between “community volunteer” and “industry representative” deserves scrutiny.

What Homes for Living Actually Does

Its founding two-sentence constitution is worth reading carefully: “We want to take a data-driven approach and transparently cast a light on what Councillors support or don’t support so that people can pressure them to support policies that are the most impactful.”

That is not an advocacy organisation describing itself. That is a pressure group describing its mechanism. The target is Councillors. The instrument is public exposure. The goal is compliance.

And it works. The organisation maintains an active vote tracker monitoring sitting Councillors through the current term. The relationship between Homes for Living and the Council it helped elect did not end on election night. It is ongoing.

What It Won in 2022

Six of the nine members of Victoria’s current Council, including the mayor, were endorsed, surveyed, and platform-assessed by Homes for Living before the election. Marianne Alto was assessed as having “arguably the most comprehensive” survey responses. Since taking office, she has approved all housing projects at public hearings, rental homes, and voted for every major reform HFL championed. Dave Thompson’s survey was rated “among the strongest overall.” Pre-election, Thompson published an op-ed in the Vancouver Sun titled “Affordability requires abundance: We need more housing,” a pure supply-side argument substantively identical to HFL’s agenda. On Council, he co-authored housing motions advancing HFL priorities. Jeremy Caradonna was assessed as showing “holistic understanding of housing issues” and received the full triple endorsement: Homes for Living, Victoria Labour Council, and departing Mayor Lisa Helps. Susan Kim’s survey answers were described as “thoughtful and comprehensive.” Matt Dell’s showed “comprehensive understanding.” Both received triple endorsements. Krista Loughton’s survey “supported most solutions to the housing crisis” and she also received the triple endorsement, co-authoring a housing motion with Thompson on parking minimums, house conversions, and suite permissions.

The three Councillors not endorsed by HFL, Chris Coleman, Stephen Hammond, and Marg Gardiner, voted as a bloc against the new Official Community Plan in October 2025. The HFL six voted for it. The alignment is perfect. Not one crossover vote in either direction across the entire council term.

What It Does Off-Council

Homes for Living does not appear on the BC Lobbyists Registry. It is legally required to register if its members are paid to communicate with government officials for the purpose of influencing decisions. HFL says its members are volunteers and therefore exempt.

And yet: HFL has sent letters directly to Premier David Eby and then-Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon. It has “served as a stakeholder to the provincial government” in developing housing policy. Its vice-president has authored opinion pieces advocating for development. Its policy positions on punishing municipalities for insufficient development mirror those of the Urban Development Institute, the registered lobby arm of BC’s development industry.

CRD Watch’s Sasha Izard documented this through FOI research. CityHallWatch published the findings nationally in August 2025. The parallel between HFL’s agenda and the UDI’s registered lobbying positions was not coincidental, the research concluded. It was structural.

One More Connection

The pipeline has a specific financial foundation worth tracing.

Ken Mariash, the developer behind Bayview Place, one of the largest and most contested rezoning applications in Victoria’s recent history, donated $1,200 to Lisa Helps’ 2018 mayoral campaign, the maximum permitted donation at the time. Helps went on to record a “100% score” on Homes for Living’s vote tracker during her term as Mayor, meaning she voted in favour of every housing application put before her.

In 2022, as she left office, Helps endorsed Marianne Alto for Mayor and five specific candidates for Council, the group that became the Gang of Five. Three candidates Helps did not endorse, Gardiner, Hammond, and Coleman. The Gang of Five went on to vote unanimously in favour of the Bayview rezoning picking up Coleman along the way.

After leaving office, Helps was appointed Strategic Advisor of Housing Supply to NDP Premier David Eby at $160,000 per annum. She subsequently appeared in promotional advertising materials for Bayview Place, the development whose developer had funded her campaign.

Draw your own conclusions about the pipeline.

The Question This Leaves

Homes for Living says it represents community volunteers passionate about affordability. That may be true of its members. But its anonymous donation structure means we cannot verify who funded the 2022 campaign that delivered three municipal council majorities. Its unregistered lobbying means we cannot track its influence on provincial housing legislation. And its policy agenda, supply-first, market-led, penalty-for-non-compliance, is indistinguishable from what the development industry’s registered lobbyists are simultaneously demanding from Victoria City Hall and the BC government.

Who does Homes for Living actually represent?

Their constitution says: the people. Their donation records say: we don’t know. In a democracy, that gap is not a minor administrative footnote. It is the whole question.

With 2026 approaching, it deserves an answer.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor, former construction lawyer, and 2026 Victoria Council Candidate. His recent writing examines governance, bureaucratic culture, and the growing disconnect between official narratives and operational reality at City Hall. He is campaigning for a searchable public lobbyist registry of all meetings between city staff, Council, and development proponents. If a developer is making the case for a project at City Hall, the public has a right to know it.

Sasha Izard is a 2026 Saanich Council Candidate.

The word “apparatchik” once referred to career officials embedded in the permanent machinery of the Soviet state. These were people whose authority flowed not from popular mandate but from deep immersion in institutions, processes, and internal alignment. In modern democratic politics, the term has evolved but remains resonant. Today, it describes a governing style: managerial rather than visionary, procedural rather than participatory, and comfortable within the system it administers.

By that definition, Victoria Mayor Marianne Alto exemplifies the municipal apparatchik.

Alto’s political worldview was forged not through insurgent politics, private-sector risk, or adversarial advocacy, but through early immersion in government itself. In the early 1990s, she held policy and advisory roles within the provincial apparatus under the Harcourt NDP government, including work in ministries responsible for health and central government coordination. These were not casual or junior postings; they were staff positions embedded in the machinery of government, where success depends on coordination, policy execution, and political risk management rather than public challenge or democratic disruption.

That early professional formation matters. People whose careers begin inside that apparatus tend to internalise its assumptions: that good governance flows from careful process, that conflict must be managed rather than confronted, and that legitimacy derives as much from consultation frameworks and institutional endorsement as from elections.

After leaving provincial government, Alto did not step outside this institutional world. She remained firmly within it. Her consulting firm, Azimuth Research and Consulting, specialises in facilitation, strategic planning, stakeholder engagement, project management, and outcome-based organisational change. This is the vocabulary of system maintenance, not system challenge. Such work aims to align organisations with policy environments, reconcile competing interests, and smooth friction rather than disrupt entrenched structures or question foundational assumptions.

Her extensive record of volunteer, board, and committee roles reinforces this pattern. Homelessness coalitions, community associations, arts institutions, parent councils, transit authorities, housing corporations, university liaison roles, and regional district boards all feature prominently in her resume. Individually, these roles are respectable and often valuable. Collectively, they reveal something more: a career spent almost entirely within publicly funded or publicly adjacent institutions, where influence is exercised through procedure, consensus-building, and governance networks rather than open political contest.

This background illuminates a governing style that prioritises balance over choice, engagement over accountability, and process over outcome. Apparatchik governance assumes that if the right procedures are followed, consultations held, committees struck, and stakeholders engaged, the result is inherently democratic. Yet for many Victoria residents, particularly in debates over development, density, affordability, and heritage, the experience has been the opposite: decisions feel predetermined, dissent feels managed, and public input feels ritualised rather than decisive.

None of this implies corruption, incompetence, or bad faith. Apparatchiks are often hardworking, intelligent, and sincerely committed to the public good. But they are also products of the systems they inhabit. When city halls become dominated by apparatchiks, politics gradually transforms into administration. Big questions are reframed as technical problems. Disagreement becomes something to be facilitated rather than resolved through clear democratic choice. Accountability diffuses into process.

Victoria now faces profound challenges: a housing crisis, deep public distrust in planning processes, growing resistance to rapid densification, and a widening gap between civic institutions and the communities they govern. These are not problems of insufficient process. They are problems of political legitimacy.

The real question is not whether Marianne Alto is capable or experienced. It is whether a city grappling with conflict, polarisation, and declining trust is best served by another phase of apparatchik governance, or whether it needs leaders willing to step outside the machinery, accept genuine political risk, and reopen decisions to real democratic contest rather than managed consultation.

That is a debate Victoria should be having openly in the lead-up to the next election, before administration fully displaces our politics.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor, former construction lawyer, and 2026 candidate for Victoria City Council. He writes frequently about municipal governance, infrastructure capacity, emergency services, and the hidden downstream costs of bad planning.

The October 2026 municipal election in Greater Victoria will be fought, publicly, on the familiar ground of housing, public safety, and the cost of city services. But underneath those headline issues sit a set of structural questions that rarely get the direct scrutiny they deserve. These are questions about how this region governs itself, who it holds accountable, and whether the democratic arrangements it has inherited still make sense.

Amalgamation is one of these issues. It is on the ballot by the Mayor’s own commitment, yet the debate around it remains remarkably thin given the scale of what it would mean for residents on both sides of the Victoria-Saanich boundary, the only two municipalities where amalgamation is currently on the table.

In the posts ahead, I will be working through these questions directly: amalgamation, electoral structure, accountability, and the consistency of the principles politicians invoke when they want reform and quietly set aside when reform would inconvenience them. The piece below is the first of those examinations.

Mayor Alto’s Proximity Problem. A Ward Crusade vs. Her Own Address

Mayor Marianne Alto has made residency the cornerstone of her case for electoral reform at the Greater Victoria School Board. Her argument is straightforward. She believes that trustees should live in the communities they represent. In her view, geographic proximity produces accountability, or distance produces drift.

It is a defensible position. It is also one she does not apply to herself.

Do as I Say, Not as I Live

Alto resides in Saanich while serving as Mayor of Victoria. This is legal even if democratically ill-advised. Our Community Charter, unlike the Vancouver Charter, imposes no residency requirement on mayors. But legality is not the standard she has set. The standard she has set is that a representative who does not live among the people they serve cannot fully understand or be accountable to those people. She has used that standard to argue for restructuring an elected board. Her own office sits on the wrong side of it.

Merge with Me, Ward with Them

The inconsistency is sharpest on the amalgamation question. Alto has committed to placing a Victoria-Saanich amalgamation referendum on the 2026 ballot, premised on the idea that the two municipalities are functionally one community and should be governed as one. But you cannot simultaneously argue that geographic boundaries matter enough to require ward-based trustees and that they matter so little that two municipalities should merge. These are not complementary reforms. They pull in opposite directions. Ward systems sharpen local boundaries while amalgamation dissolves them. Holding both positions at once suggests the democratic principle being applied by the Mayor is whichever one is most useful to her now.

Drawing the Line

The boundary question adds a further complication. A ward system for SD61 would not simply trace existing municipal lines. The district spans Victoria, Saanich, Oak Bay, Esquimalt, View Royal, and several smaller jurisdictions, and ward boundaries would need to be drawn to achieve rough population equality among trustee electoral areas. So this is a requirement that cuts across municipal boundaries rather than following them. A ward trustee might end up representing a portion of Saanich and a portion of Victoria simultaneously, which quietly undermines Alto’s clean residency principle.

There is also the question of who draws those boundaries and by what criteria. The Province holds significant authority over school board structure, and boundary-drawing is where the real political power in any electoral reform sits. Alto’s advocacy positions Victoria City Council as the champion of a reformed SD61. But the shape of that reform, which communities end up in which ward, whose voices get concentrated and whose get diluted, will largely be determined elsewhere. That is a significant amount of democratic consequence to attach to a principle whose geographic logic has not yet been tested against an actual map.

The Political Consequence Is Straightforward

Critics of the SD61 ward proposal, particularly those in Saanich and Esquimalt who worry about being absorbed into a Victoria-dominated board, can point directly at the Mayor’s residential address and ask one simple question. If residency is essential for a trustee, why is it optional for the Mayor who is leading this charge? Alto has no clean answer to that question, because there is not one.

Alto’s support for ward-based representation may well be the right policy. But credibility on a principle requires living by it. She has staked her electoral reform argument on a residency principle she does not herself meet. Rather than resolve that contradiction by moving to Victoria, Alto has decided to move Victoria.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor, former construction lawyer, and 2026 candidate for Victoria City Council. He writes on how cities lose legitimacy when political narratives replace measurable results.

Why Victoria’s voters should demand the same standards from Council candidates that any responsible employer would demand from a job applicant.

There is a quiet assumption embedded in how most of us approach municipal elections, and it is worth naming directly. We tend to vote for Councillors the way we choose neighbours, based on whether we like them, whether they seem decent, whether their yard signs are on the right streets. Competence, in any rigorous sense, rarely enters the conversation.

That assumption is costing us.

City Council is not a ceremonial body. It is the governing board of a corporation with an annual budget exceeding half a billion dollars, responsibility for the infrastructure, housing, climate resilience, and public safety of 92,000 people, and statutory authority that touches every aspect of daily life in this city. The people who sit on that board make decisions about whether and where affordable housing gets built, how much you pay in property taxes, whether the city’s climate commitments translate into concrete action or remain aspirational documents, and how public money is stewarded across decades of capital planning.

No private organisation of equivalent scale would populate its board by popularity vote among the general public. No hospital, no university, no Crown corporation, no substantial charity would look at its governance obligations and conclude that likability was a sufficient qualification for directorship. They would advertise, screen, interview, and appoint candidates to defined standards of experience, knowledge, financial literacy, and judgment.

We should hold our own standards to the same rigour.

What the Job Requires

Consider what a genuine job description for a City Councillor would demand. To responsibly fulfil the role, a candidate should demonstrate at least five years of progressively responsible work in environments requiring complex decision-making, stakeholder management, and accountability for outcomes, not simply having held jobs but having been tested in roles where decisions carried real consequences.

Financial literacy is equally essential: the demonstrated ability to read, interrogate, and form independent views on budgets, capital plans, reserve fund projections, and financial risk. A Councillor who cannot read a balance sheet is, in budget deliberations, entirely dependent on staff interpretation and cannot exercise meaningful oversight.

Policy and governance knowledge matters too, specifically a working familiarity with the legislative framework within which the city operates: the Community Charter, the Local Government Act, the quasi-judicial obligations that attach to public hearings, and the critical distinction between setting policy direction and managing operations. Councillors who blur that line, who try to direct staff rather than govern through policy, are a persistent source of dysfunction on municipal councils across the country.

Communication and deliberative capacity are also required: the ability to speak clearly and precisely in formal public proceedings, to listen with genuine open-mindedness rather than performative patience, and to engage with technical evidence and expert analysis rather than defaulting to ideology or instinct.

Judgment and temperament matter: the resilience to sustain good decision-making under public pressure, media scrutiny, and the inevitable criticism that follows any consequential choice, without either capitulating to the loudest voice or retreating into defensiveness.

Finally, candidates need genuine community knowledge: not a general sense of goodwill toward Victoria, but substantive, detailed familiarity with its neighbourhoods, its demographic realities, its housing stock, its history of planning decisions, and the lived experience of residents across its full economic range.

These are not exotic requirements. They are what any responsible organisation would look for in people given authority over half a billion dollars of public money and the long-term wellbeing of a city.

What an Honest Assessment Reveals

In applying this framework to the sitting Council, using publicly available biographical and professional information, a candid picture emerges that Victoria’s voters deserve to see clearly. Not all members of Council demonstrably meet all these criteria. Some come up short on professional experience. Some show limited evidence of financial literacy. Some whose public profiles emphasise community passion and personal values offer little evidence of the technical and governance knowledge the role genuinely requires.

This is not an attack on anyone’s character or intentions. It is an observation about qualifications, and it is an observation that in any other hiring context would be entirely unremarkable.

The False Comfort of Democratic Legitimacy

The standard response to this line of argument is that election confers its own legitimacy and that if voters chose someone, that choice is the right one. There is something to this, but it is far less reassuring than it sounds.

Voters choose with the information available to them. That information is almost always thin: a campaign sign, a candidate forum, a newspaper questionnaire, a social media profile. Voters are not given CVs, references, or structured competency assessments. They are given impressions, and impressions, the warmth of a smile at a community meeting, the familiarity of a surname, the endorsement of a well-liked neighbour, are not a reliable guide to whether someone can govern a complex organisation effectively.

Democratic legitimacy is real and matters. But it does not transform an unqualified candidate into a qualified one. It does not ensure that the person casting votes on your behalf on a $500 million budget has ever read one of comparable scale. It does not guarantee that the councillor presiding over a public hearing on a contentious rezoning understands the procedural fairness obligations the Local Government Act attaches to that role.

Popularity and competence are not the same thing. We have been acting as though they are.

What Voters Can Do

The remedy is not complicated, though it requires more of us as voters than most municipal election campaigns typically demand.

Ask the hard questions at candidate forums, in letters to campaigns, in the questions you put to candidates at the door. What is your experience with budget oversight at this scale? Have you read and do you understand the Community Charter? Can you describe a situation in which you had to weigh competing expert analyses and reach an independent conclusion? What do you know about Victoria’s capital reserve position and the infrastructure liabilities on its horizon?

Watch for the answers that are non-answers. Watch for a pivot to values, the reiteration of commitment, the appeal to passion for the community. Passion is not irrelevant. But it is not a substitute for the knowledge and experience the role requires.

Discount candidates who cannot demonstrate the core competencies the job demands. This does not mean you dismiss them as human beings, but discount them as candidates for this role, just as a search committee would discount an applicant who lacked the required qualifications for a position they had advertised honestly.

And support candidates who have done the work, who have developed genuine expertise in the areas that matter for municipal governance, who can speak with authority about financial management, planning law, intergovernmental relations, and infrastructure, and who bring that expertise alongside, rather than instead of, community rootedness and civic values.

A Higher Standard Is Not an Unreasonable One

Victoria deserves a Council whose members are genuinely equipped for the complexity and consequence of the role they hold. That is not an elitist argument. It is an argument for taking democratic responsibility seriously. The ballot in your hand is not a gesture of goodwill toward pleasant people. It is a hiring decision, made on behalf of 92,000 residents, for a role that shapes this city for decades. Treat it that way.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor, former construction lawyer, and 2026 candidate for Victoria City Council. He focuses on the gap between what City Hall promises, what it approves, and what residents experience on the ground.

The juxtaposition of Victoria City Council’s rejection of the Blanshard tower against their approval of the Bayview project exposes a breathtaking hypocrisy driven by pre-election politics. This erratic application of planning rules proves the recent vote is not a principled retreat from overdevelopment, but a calculated performance to placate voters.

Weaponising Planning Documents

At its regular Council meeting on March 12, Council narrowly rejected a 321-unit, 35-storey tower on Blanshard Street proposed by Reliance Properties. The proposal was rejected on the pious grounds that it conflicted with the Official Community Plan and Downtown Core Area Plan. Yet the Bayview Roundhouse project was aggressively pushed through under an older, demonstrably stricter OCP framework. To approve Bayview’s massive density, Council willingly orchestrated bespoke amendments to that old OCP, treating the policy document as a wish list for one developer while weaponising the new OCP as an immutable text against another. Though contested, on one construction of the drawings for buildings on the Bayview site, heights could reach 37 storeys.

Scale and Heritage Disparities

The sheer scale of this double standard defies logic. The Blanshard proposal was for a single 35-storey building on the site of a mundane, nondescript low-rise office. In stark contrast, Bayview encompasses nine towers and nearly 1,900 units looming directly over a designated National Historic Site featuring six intact heritage buildings.

The Gang of Five’s Cracking Coalition

To fully understand the hypocrisy of this single vote, one must look at the fracturing political alliances on Council. For most of this term, Council has been rigidly divided into two main factions. On one side are Councillors Marg Gardiner and Stephen Hammond, who have consistently voted against reckless overdevelopment. On the other side sit Mayor Marianne Alto and her “Gang of Five,” a union-endorsed supermajority that has historically voted in lockstep to push through massive density projects like Bayview and Harris Green. Meanwhile, Councillor Chris Coleman serves as the swing vote, drifting between the two blocs depending on the issue.

So why did Caradonna and Kim switch sides? The answer appears to be political self-preservation. Perhaps sensing that the development-at-all-costs bloc is in deep trouble with the electorate, these members scrambled to manufacture a track record of prudence just in time for the upcoming election.

For Councillor Caradonna, the pivot required a stunning display. In voting with the conscience bloc to kill the Blanshard project, Caradonna piously lectured the proponent that any new building “has to fit the city’s scale, character and regulations.” Yet this is the exact same Councillor who personally moved to approve the massive Bayview rezoning while admitting that Bayview’s towers were “out of keeping with the scale and character of Victoria,” right before voting in favour of them anyway. These statements are impossible to reconcile.

While Caradonna attempts to rewrite his voting record, Councillor Kim’s defection appears rooted in the collapse of her political standing within the ruling faction. Her political capital was decimated in November 2023 after her name appeared on a controversial open letter regarding Gaza that cast doubt on reports of sexual violence committed by Hamas. The ensuing outrage triggered a petition with over 8,500 signatures demanding her resignation, forcing her to issue two public apologies and resulting in an independent investigation concluding in June 2024 that she had breached the City’s Code of Conduct.

This instability was only compounded by Kim’s tone-deaf public defence of her union endorsements on another matter, during which she dismissed glaring conflict-of-interest concerns as merely “superficial.” As a result, the City Hall rumour mill strongly suspects Kim’s union backing has evaporated, and she has already been ousted from the ruling bloc.

Ultimately, with Kim politically isolated and Caradonna transparently scrambling to save his political skin, the Blanshard proposal rejection was never about a sudden respect for the Official Community Plan. It was simply the byproduct of a fractured, unpopular voting bloc desperately trying to reshape its image before voters head to the polls.

The Canary in the Coal Mine

Bayview was never just about Vic West. It was the canary in the coal mine that warned of the governing philosophy taking hold at City Hall. Neighbourhood associations beyond Vic West were put on notice that this project foreshadowed Mayor Alto’s wish for a dramatic transformation of the city. Bayview represented the last clear chance to stop the city’s reckless momentum before this sweeping density agenda became the inescapable default.

Pre-Election Political Choreography

What happened on Blanshard is not a newfound respect for planning law by some in the Gang of Five, but a calculated performance to open a path to re-election. No one should be reassured by this single vote, as the exact same development-at-all-costs majority remains firmly entrenched on Council. This tactical rejection is simply optics designed to create false comfort, allowing the majority to return to business as usual once the election is safely behind them.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor, former construction lawyer, and 2026 candidate for Victoria City Council. He advocates for transparent government, neighbourhood consent, and evidence-based decision-making.

Most people understand that politicians break promises. What fewer people understand is that some of those promises carry legal weight, and that Canadian courts have, in recent years, dramatically strengthened the tools available to hold parties to their obligations when they act in bad faith.

This matters for Victoria. And it matters for the 2026 election.

The Bhasin Revolution in Canadian Law

In 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada decided a case called Bhasin v. Hrynew 2014 SCC 71, [2014] 3 S.C.R. 494.The judgment was described by legal scholars as one of the most significant developments in Canadian contract law in a generation.

Before Bhasin, Canadian law had no general principle of good faith in contracts. Parties were largely free to act in their own interests, subject to specific rules. After Bhasin, the Court recognised good faith as a general organising principle, meaning that in all contractual relationships, parties must have appropriate regard for the legitimate interests of their counterparties.

The Court identified four specific duties that good faith produces. A duty to cooperate between the parties to achieve the objects of the contract. A duty to exercise any contractual discretion in good faith rather than arbitrarily or for improper purposes. A duty not to evade contractual obligations in bad faith. And a duty of honest performance, which means you cannot actively mislead your counterparty about your intentions or what you are doing.

The Court has since extended and refined these duties in two subsequent cases: CM Callow Inc. v. Zollinger 2020 SCC 45, [2020] 3 S.C.R. 674 and Wastech Services Ltd. v. Greater Vancouver Sewerage and Drainage District 2021 SCC 7, [2021] 1 S.C.R. 102. Together, these three cases, sometimes called the Bhasin trilogy, have fundamentally changed how Canadian courts look at contractual relationships, including the exercise of discretionary power within contracts.

Contracts, Councils, and Master Development Agreements

Why does this matter for Victoria municipal politics?

Because the relationship between a City Council and a developer is a contractual one. In the Bayview case, this took a specific legal form: the Roundhouse Master Development Agreement, a contract between the City of Victoria and Focus Equities signed in 2008 and amended twice thereafter.

Under that agreement, the city granted significant height and density concessions. In exchange, Focus Equities committed to the restoration and redevelopment of the Roundhouse and associated heritage buildings, six in total. That is the structure of the deal: the city gave; the developer promised.

When Focus Equities returned years later, without having performed its heritage obligations, and asked for further concessions, the question of good faith arose directly. The duty not to evade contractual obligations in bad faith was engaged. The question of whether the developer had been honest in its performance of what it had undertaken too was engaged. So was the question of whether the city, in exercising its discretionary authority to consider the new application, did so in good faith toward all the parties whose interests it was obligated to consider.

These are not rhetorical questions. They are questions that the Bhasin framework equips courts to ask.

The Larger Contract with Residents

The MDA is the formal contract. But there is a larger sense in which Councils make commitments that create legitimate expectations.

When a city adopts an Official Community Plan, it makes a public commitment about how it will govern. When it adopts a Neighbourhood Plan, it makes a more specific commitment about what a particular area will look like. When it approves a rezoning in exchange for stated undertakings, the residents who rely on those undertakings, in choosing where to live, what to invest, what to expect, have a legitimate interest in their being honoured.

The Bhasin duty of honest performance applies here with particular force. If a Council tells residents that it approved a prior rezoning on the basis of specific undertakings, heritage restoration, development at a stated density and scale, and then advances a subsequent application that abandons those undertakings while telling the public there is no alternative, it is not performing honestly. It is performing in a way that misleads the people it is supposed to represent about the nature of the choices being made.

Wilful Blindness and Constructive Knowledge

There is one further legal concept from this framework worth naming, because it applies directly to what happened with Bayview.

Courts applying good faith doctrine do not allow parties to insulate themselves from their obligations by deliberately avoiding information. The concepts of constructive knowledge, knowing what you ought to have known, and wilful blindness, deliberately not asking questions whose answers you do not want, are relevant. A Council that declines to investigate a developer’s track record, that ignores its own planning staff’s analysis, that disregards its Heritage Advisory Panel’s recommendations, is not exercising ignorance innocently. It is, in legal terms, choosing not to know what the evidence would have told it.

Good faith requires that parties engage honestly with the information available to them. The standard is not perfection. It is the honest exercise of judgment.

What This Means for 2026

A Council that takes good faith seriously governs differently. It holds developers to what they agreed. It gives its own planning staff and heritage advisors genuine weight rather than managing around them. It tells residents the truth about the choices it is making and the alternatives that exist. It exercises its discretionary authority with appropriate regard for everyone whose interests are affected, not just the applicant standing in front of it.

That is not a utopian standard. It is the legal standard Canadian courts now apply to contractual relationships. It is the standard Victoria’s governance should meet.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor, former construction lawyer, and candidate for Victoria City Council in 2026. He led much of the opposition to the Bayview rezoning over the course of its 3 day public hearing.

Julian Brook, raised an excellent point recently asking to what degree the centralisation of municipal power and the constraint of future Councils we see in Victoria, often framed around climate networks like C40 and global sustainable development commitments, are happening elsewhere in BC, Canada, and Europe. He rightly asked whether these global frameworks act as “a greenwashing cover for de-democratisation.” The short answer is yes. This is a documented, structural shift happening far beyond our city limits.

Victoria residents should start asking whether City Hall is still governing through open democratic choice, or whether key policy directions are increasingly being locked in through senior-government mandates, staff-driven implementation systems, and transnational policy networks that sit at a distance from ordinary local democratic control.

What troubles me is less the substance of some of these policies than the way they are being embedded through a governance model that appears designed to limit future democratic reconsideration. The issue is bigger than any one zoning amendment, climate plan, or housing initiative. It is about whether local government is still meaningfully accountable to residents, or whether key policy directions are increasingly being locked in through actions beyond the reach of local voters.

That concern is not unique to Victoria. It is a structural shift happening across British Columbia. The Union of BC Municipalities has explicitly detailed how the Province has overridden traditional municipal planning discretion to impose standardised rezoning and density requirements, shifting power further away from locally elected councils and toward provincial ministries. Whatever one thinks of the housing goals, the political effect is clear: this represents a coordinated effort to shift planning power upward and away from communities, effectively hollowing out civic forums for public input. This dynamic reflects a broader national problem that overlapping jurisdictions in Canada frequently leave municipalities vulnerable to top-down intervention while still being blamed locally for outcomes they no longer control.

What makes the Victoria situation even more critical is that this upward shift of power is increasingly justified by reference to global climate and sustainability frameworks. When residents point out that these frameworks can serve as a cover for de-democratisation, they are not peddling conspiracy theories; they are echoing established academic critiques. Research from Utrecht University concluded that sustainable development rhetoric is frequently used to camouflage “business as usual” power dynamics. Analysis from the Transnational Institute argued that the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals reinforce the hegemony of neoliberalism and market fundamentalism, steering global development in a way that bypasses democratic control over economic life.

When we look at Victoria’s participation in networks like C40 Cities and United Cities and Local Governments, the same accountability gaps emerge. Academic research has found significant issues with these transnational urban climate networks, arguing that they reinforce existing imbalances in world politics and function as advertisement boards rather than genuine drivers of progressive climate policy. Documentation of mayors collectively committing to sweeping international climate frameworks illustrates how policy commitments are coordinated transnationally at a level removed from individual local Council debate or resident consultation. This creates a closed loop of top-down policy.

While transnational networks like C40 provide the elite policy frameworks, groups like Dogwood provide the highly organised, sophisticated grassroots pressure required to force local BC politicians to adopt them. Their success in changing campaign finance laws has also fundamentally altered who holds power in municipal elections, paving the way for a new generation of political leadership more aligned with their decarbonisation goals.

We can also see clear parallels to this technocratic centralisation in Europe. Research on French urban governance found that new intermunicipal structures were designed more to boost executive cooperation than to promote democratic management, concentrating power in municipal executives rather than citizens. Scholars across the European Union have tracked a growing democratic deficit, documenting how democratic backsliding and the erosion of local agency can follow when political authority is transferred upward away from accountable local institutions.

That is why the right question for Victoria is not simply whether you support climate action or housing construction. The real question is whether these goals are being pursued in a way that preserves open political contest and local accountability. If City Hall wants public trust, the answer is not more branding or appeals to global organisations. The answer is real democratic accountability, transparent authorship of policy, and a refusal to treat long-term ideological commitments as immune from public revision.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor, former construction lawyer, and candidate for City Council in Victoria’s 2026 election. His recent writing focuses on governance, transparency, and the widening gap between public process and political reality at City Hall.