In 1924, Lord Hewart wrote that it is “not merely of some importance but is of fundamental importance that justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done.”

A century later, that principle governs every administrative decision-maker in Canada, including a municipal council conducting a public hearing. The standard is not only that the right outcome be reached. It is that the process visibly and demonstrably reflect open minds.

At the third and final day of the Bayview Place public hearing on January 25, 2024, that standard was not met.

The Record Before the Hearing Opened

The pre-judgment concern did not begin on the third day of the public hearing. It began months earlier.

At a Committee of the Whole meeting on May 4, 2023, Mayor Alto supported abridging the normal City action period for the Bayview file from 90 to 60 days, and voted in favour of a motion making the file paramount over all other files before the City. Councillor Caradonna moved that motion.

By October 2023, three months before the public hearing opened, Mayor Alto told the Times Colonist: “It is, in fact, something that will be transformational. This is a vision of the future, which is inevitable.”

A public hearing is a quasi-judicial process. The decision-maker must approach the evidence with an open mind, not a predetermined conclusion. The standard in administrative law is clear: would a reasonable observer, knowing the relevant facts, conclude that the decision-maker had already decided?

A Mayor who has publicly described the outcome as “inevitable” three months before the hearing opens has, on any objective assessment, provided that reasonable observer with the answer.

Formal allegations of pre-judgment and conflict of interest were filed with the City Clerk on January 4, 2024, one week before the hearing’s first day. They asked that the allegations be placed before Council at the opening of the hearing, and that the Mayor and Councillor Caradonna either recuse themselves or face a Council motion to that effect. Neither recused. No motion was brought. The hearing proceeded.

What Happened on the Third Day

Public hearings in BC typically unfold over multiple sessions. At Bayview, the first two days were given to submissions from the developer and the public. The third day was designated for Councillors to question the proponent and city staff.

At 2:43 PM, the Mayor announced that all opportunities for questions had concluded and that the hearing would now close. She called for a motion for third reading.

What followed was not a vote. It was a series of prepared statements. Councillor Thompson spoke at 2:44, referring to notes on his monitor: “Probably going to be voting in favour.” Councillor Dell at 2:55, reading at speed: “Mark me down for a yes to this development.” Councillor Caradonna at 3:22, reading from papers: voting in favour. Councillor Loughton at 3:31, reading: “I will be voting in favour.” Councillor Coleman at 3:35: “On balance I can support this application.” Mayor Alto at 3:50: “I will be supporting it tonight.”

Most of them were reading. Several arrived on the final day of a public hearing with pre-drafted remarks declaring their support for the rezoning, before all the evidence had even been received.

The hearing, it later emerged, technically remained open. The Council had not yet resolved a Transport Canada consultation, a significant procedural gap that Harbour Air had raised on the first hearing day and that had not been addressed by the third. The Mayor introduced a “matters arising” motion at the close apparently as cover for ongoing discussions with Transport Canada and Harbour Air.

If the hearing remained open, then the Councillors who delivered prepared approving remarks had done so before the hearing concluded. They had made up their minds before all the evidence was in.

“It Smacked of Pre-Judgment Bias”

I put these facts to Professor Ken Norman, a distinguished administrative law professor at a Canadian law school. His assessment: there was “an apparent leap to judgment” and the conduct “smacked of pre-judgment bias.”

He is right. The question is what follows from that.

In administrative law, there are two standards relevant to decision-maker conduct. The historical standard required only a “reasonable apprehension of bias”: would a reasonable observer, knowing the facts, conclude that the decision-maker had prejudged the outcome? On that standard, Councillors arriving with prepared approving remarks at an open public hearing present a serious problem.

The current state of Canadian law has moved toward greater deference to administrative decision-makers. Courts now generally require evidence of “actual bias,” not merely the appearance of it, before setting aside a decision. That is a higher bar and a harder one to meet.

The legal reality is therefore uncomfortable: the conduct described may well be unreviewable in court. A judicial review application might fail not because the process was fair, but because courts have retreated from scrutinising the appearance of fairness in favour of protecting administrative finality.

That is not a reason to accept the conduct. It is a reason to name it clearly.

What Fair Process Actually Requires

A public hearing is not a formality. It is the mechanism through which the community participates in decisions that will shape its future. For that participation to be genuine, decision-makers must listen with open minds, not as a matter of sentiment, but as a matter of legal and democratic obligation.

Arriving with prepared remarks that announce a predetermined outcome, before all evidence is received, before all questions are answered, before the hearing is formally closed, is incompatible with that obligation. It does not matter how sincerely a Councillor believes they have considered the evidence. The test is not subjective. It is objective: would a reasonable member of the public, watching the proceedings, conclude that the outcome had been decided in advance?

At the Bayview hearing, several Councillors read from their papers. Others referred to prepared notes. Caradonna at least acknowledged: “The critiques of this proposal are not unfair.” He then voted yes anyway.

The disconnect between what the public said and how the Councillors voted is jarring. They voted from prepared scripts. It is a question of process. I can accept almost any decision that emerges from a genuinely fair process. What I cannot accept is a decision that was visibly, demonstrably made before the process concluded.

The Standard Citizens Are Entitled to Expect

Even where the law does not intervene, democratic legitimacy has its own requirements. A Council that conducts public hearings to satisfy a procedural obligation, while arriving with prepared conclusions, is not honouring the purpose those hearings exist to serve.

Lord Hewart’s principle was stated in a court of law. But it belongs equally to any body that exercises public power over people’s lives. Justice must be seen to be done. Not behind closed doors. Not through the performance of openness while the outcome is already written.

The residents of Victoria are entitled to a Council that treats public hearings as genuine deliberative processes, not as scripted formalities that precede a predetermined vote. Whether or not a court would intervene, the standard is plain. And at Bayview, it was not met.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor, former construction lawyer, and candidate for City of Victoria Council in 2026. He served for 16 years on statutory tribunals in Hong Kong, including appointments to the Appeal Tribunal (Buildings) and the Inland Revenue Board of Review (“tax court”), exercising quasi-judicial functions in administrative and regulatory matters.

“I do what I can to keep citizens informed and to advocate for more openness and transparency. Unfortunately, it has been a losing battle. If you value careful and deliberate discussion in civic affairs, please make your voice heard.”

That is not the assessment of an opposition candidate or a campaign critic. Those words were written by Marg Gardiner, a sitting Victoria City Councillor, in her August 2023 newsletter. She called the piece “Where Have All the Voices Gone?”

Her colleagues had not yet finished answering the question.

Three Doors Closed

Gardiner documented three specific ways that the Council majority had, by the summer of 2023, moved to limit public participation in Victoria’s civic life.

The first concerned accountability. When Council revised its Code of Conduct, a proposal was put forward to establish an independent third-party body to assess complaints against councillors. The Gang of Five (Dell, Caradonna, Thompson, Kim and Dell) voted it down. Complaints would be handled internally. The people being complained about would remain part of the process for handling those complaints.

The second concerned access. The majority moved to limit the opportunities residents have to address Council directly. The public gallery is not infinite, and the time allocated to it is a political choice. That choice was made smaller.

The third concerned the city’s future. As Council undertook work on a new Official Community Plan, the majority moved to constrain how much public input would be accepted into that process. The OCP sets the rules for land use, density, and neighbourhood character for a generation. Fewer voices were invited into it.

Each of these decisions, taken alone, might be explained as an efficiency measure or a procedural housekeeping choice. Taken together, they form a pattern. The same bloc of Councillors voted, consistently, to reduce the mechanisms through which residents could complicate, delay, or challenge Council’s agenda.

The Pattern in Practice

The Bayview Place rezoning application provides the clearest illustration of what this pattern looks like in action.

During the public hearing process on that application, the Mayor abridged the standard 90-day consultation period to 60 days, citing no specific public interest justification. A motion to prioritise the Bayview application over every other project before the city was narrowly defeated after planning staff raised concerns. The Heritage Advisory Panel voted to decline the application. City planning staff recommended a lower density than what was ultimately moved forward. The Gang of Five voted to override the staff recommendation and advance the application to a public hearing.

At each point where a process existed to slow down, scrutinise, or interrogate the application, the majority moved past it. This is not a description of a Council making difficult judgment calls under pressure. It is a description of a Council that had already decided and was managing the process around a conclusion it had reached before the public hearing opened.

Who Built This Council

How did Victoria end up with a Council majority that votes as a unified bloc to limit public input while advancing a pre-determined development agenda?

The short answer is that it was organised that way. In 2022, a network of aligned groups, operating through coordinated endorsements, shared databases, and a layered campaign structure designed to keep institutional fingerprints clean, delivered a Council majority whose accountability runs to the organisations that built it, not to the broad consensus of the city.

What Marg Gardiner’s newsletter documents is what happens inside City Hall after such a machine wins. The tools of democratic participation, complaint mechanisms, speaking rights, consultation periods, are not neutral infrastructure. They are the machinery through which residents exercise influence. When a Council majority systematically reduces them, it is not managing process. It is managing opposition.

What This Means Going Into 2026

The same organisational infrastructure that delivered the 2022 majority is already running for 2026. A paid Municipal Election Campaigner position was posted by Dogwood, part of the same provincial network in December 2025, targeting three municipalities on a nine-month contract beginning February 2026. Two further positions have bee added to it.

The question for Victoria voters in 2026 is therefore not simply which candidates they prefer. It is whether they want a Council that treats public input as a resource to be managed, or one that treats it as a right to be protected.

Gardiner’s question, where have all the voices gone, has a structural answer. They were voted out of the room. The 2026 election is an opportunity to vote them back in.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor, former construction lawyer, and candidate for Victoria City Council in 2026. His recent commentaries often examine transparency, administrative culture, and the operational realities behind decision-making at City Hall.

What happened at the CVRD on April 22 this year matters well beyond the Cowichan Valley.

For weeks, rural residents had been warning that the draft Comprehensive Zoning Bylaw was not just a technical clean-up exercise, but the implementation stage of a much larger planning agenda years in the making. As I wrote earlier, in The Playbook, the pattern was familiar: set the direction at the high-level policy stage, embed it in an Official Community Plan, then move to implementation through zoning and related regulatory tools once the real consequences become harder to resist. In other words, Marianne Alto’s superpower.

What was at stake was not abstract. Residents were facing a proposed regional land-use framework that would affect what could be done on rural properties, while the formal public-hearing protections people once assumed would exist were no longer guaranteed in the same way if the bylaw was framed as consistent with the existing OCP. On April 22, the issue before the board was a motion to stop that process: retain the public input already received, cease staff and consultant work on the Comprehensive Zoning Bylaw, local area plans, development permit areas, and modernised OCP amendments until after the October 2026 election and a new strategic plan, and instead focus staff on processing the backlog of existing applications.

Then the directors said the quiet part out loud.

1. On the failure of the policy and public backlash”

"We've lost it. The OCP can't be saved. Leadership isn't about doubling down on when you're wrong, it's about correcting course." – Director McClinton (08:21)

1. On the loss of democratic mandate and trust:

"Nobody here sitting at this table was elected with more than 30% of the vote in their area. And many of us with much less. And we cannot continue to act like we have a mandate to rule over everybody and push this forward." – Director McClinton (10:31)

1. On the severe emotional impact on residents:

"The last one, which I think is probably the most concerning, was the lady that spoke about tiny homes and uncertainty. And she used the term living in fear... We're in a democracy. We're in a free country. And if somebody feels that they're living in fear from something that we're bringing forward, just ain't right." – Director Wilson (16:33)

1. On acknowledging the damage caused by the board’s process:

"At this point, like it's very clear, trust has eroded to a level where we can't move forward constructively, really on much of anything." – Director Segal (26:11)

1. On being forced to retreat by the pubic:

"There's a tone across this country where elected officials are walking back decisions... And now through the good works of a lot of community members, a lot of residents, spending time coming out... we have heard and some people like myself need to stand corrected." – Director Abbott (29:29)

Only the electoral area directors could vote on this land-use matter, and it carried unanimously, halting the bylaw-related work until after the fall 2026 local election. That pause aligned with the recommendation previously advanced through the Electoral Area Services Committee and the CVRD's own public update on deferring the process.

The lesson for Victoria should be obvious

Cowichan residents didn't win by assuming someone else would deal with it. They paid attention, showed up, made the issue politically impossible to ignore, and forced elected officials to confront the collapse of public trust in real time. Citizens in Greater Victoria need to do the same when major policy frameworks, OCP amendments, process changes, and implementation bylaws get advanced under the language of modernisation, alignment, efficiency, or engagement.

The real battleground is never just the final bylaw. It is the earlier architecture: the strategic plans, OCPs, growth frameworks, procedural changes, and delegated processes that make later decisions easier to impose and harder to reverse. That was the warning in Cowichan, and it is the warning for Victoria too.

If Victoria residents want a different future at City Hall, they need to do what Cowichan just did: read early, organise early, show up in numbers, refuse to be managed by consultation theatre, and turn civic frustration into electoral consequence in October 2026. Only then will we see the same mea culpa that was just witnessed in Cowichan.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and former construction lawyer campaigning as a Councillor for Victoria City Hall in 2026. He has consistently argued that accountability in government means more than consultation language; it requires enforceable commitments, public reporting, and consequences for failure.

One question I have been asked from time to time is how did I get started on opposing Bayview and how did I know what to do. Friends know I have also lived overseas and some see the two as contradictory.

The honest answer is that I did not what to do in Victoria, at first. But, I am a former construction lawyer and now a law professor. This means I knew how to read a contract, assess a regulatory process, and identify the gap between what institutions say they are doing and what they are doing. That said, I did not return in Victoria with a plan to spend years documenting municipal governance failures but that is what has happened.

What I mostly had though, and what turned out to be sufficient, was the disposition to pay attention; the patience to read the documents, and the stubbornness to keep trying after each time my carefully prepared letters to Council were politely acknowledged then procedurally ignored.

None of those latter qualities are professionally specialised. Each one of them is available to any resident who decides to use them.

This City Has Done This Before

I want to situate what I have been doing in a longer tradition, because civic engagement in Victoria did not begin with the Bayview fight and will not end with this election.

Victoria’s relationship with its own built environment has been contested, often fiercely, for as long as the city has existed. The heritage preservation movement that saved much of what makes Victoria worth visiting today was not the work of many politicians albeit with two exceptions, Pam Maddow and Geoff Young. It was the work of citizens who organised, documented, argued, litigated, and in some cases physically obstructed the demolition of buildings that the development logic of the era identified as obstacles to progress.

Chinatown, the heritage commercial district of Government Street, the residential streetscapes of James Bay, Rockland and Fairfield, none of these survived by accident. They survived because people cared enough to fight for them, in the specific institutional ways that effective civic engagement requires: applications for heritage designation, submissions to planning processes, pressure on politicians, and, when necessary, legal action.

That tradition did not end when the most dramatic battles were won. It continued, in quieter and less visible ways, through the neighbourhood associations and the heritage advisory panels and the public hearing culture that has characterised civic life in Victoria for decades. It continues now, in the work of organisations like the James Bay Neighbourhood Association and the dozens of other community groups that maintain the institutional memory of what their neighbourhoods have been and advocate for what they should become.

What Civic Engagement Looks Like

There is a gap between what people imagine civic engagement requires and what it actually requires. People imagine it requires expertise, connections, professional credentials, or a particular political identity. It does not.

What effective civic engagement requires, at its core, is attention. And attention, it turns out, is the scarcest resource in municipal politics.

Victoria’s Council meetings are public. The agenda packages, the staff reports, the appendices, the technical assessments, the financial analyses that accompany every decision on the agenda are published online before every meeting, usually several days in advance. They are long documents, often tedious, occasionally impenetrable with acronyms and planning jargon. Most residents never read them. Most decisions that affect daily life in this city are made by councillors who have read those documents and residents who have not.

That asymmetry is not fixed by education or professional expertise. It is fixed by attention. If you read the agenda package before a Council meeting, you know as much about what is being decided as the residents who sit in that chamber to watch the vote. You are in a position to write a letter, make a call, file a freedom of information request, or organise neighbours who are affected by the same decision.

The Bayview file began with exactly this, I read the documents. I read the 2008 Master Development Agreement and compared it to what was being proposed in 2018 and found they did not match. I read the Official Community Plan and compared it to the staff report recommending approval and found that the staff report was not accurately characterising what the OCP required. I attended the public hearing and watched the process, and what I saw was inconsistent with what the process was supposed to produce.

None of that required a law degree. It required reading, and the patience to do it carefully, and the willingness to ask what the gap between the document and the reality meant.

The Forum as a Model for What One Person Can Do

I started the Victoria City Hall Forum as a Facebook group, late in the Bayview fight, as a place to share analysis with a broader audience than the handful of neighbours immediately affected by the Roundhouse rezoning.

The Forum now has over 400 members and posts routinely receive many more hundreds of views. I have published just around posts between mid-February and mid-June after on Council decisions, planning policy, campaign finance, heritage, housing, and the structural incentives that produce the governance outcomes among others. It is read by journalists, researchers, Councillors, and most importantly, by residents who use it to understand from a critical perspective what is going on at City Hall. I hold them to account in almost every post.

I am not describing this to claim credit. I am describing it to make the point that one person, with no institutional backing, no political connections, and no staff, can create a meaningful civic platform by doing the work that the press and public institutions perform inadequately: paying close attention, documenting what is found, and making it available to the people who are affected.

The Forum did not require special resources. It required time and discipline. The research takes time as does the analysis. The writing is easier, because the analysis generates the argument. It really is no different than what I have been doing for four decades as both an academic and a practising lawyer.

That model scales. It scales to neighbourhood blogs, to ward-level newsletters, to organised public hearing preparation, to coordinated freedom of information requests across a group of residents. Any of these are available to anyone in Victoria who decides that civic life is worth their time.

The Specific Things You Can Do

I want to be practical about this, because vague invitations to civic engagement are less useful than specific ones but here are some things you might try.

Read the agenda. Victoria City Council publishes its meeting agenda packages at victoria.ca. The packages for Committee of the Whole meetings, where the real deliberation happens, before matters go to Council for a vote, are particularly valuable. Reading one agenda package, carefully, will teach you more about how the city makes decisions than a year of reading about it.

Attend a meeting. Not a dramatic public hearing on a controversial project, those are important, but they are also crowded and mostly predetermined. Attend a routine Committee of the Whole meeting, on a Wednesday afternoon, when the gallery is often empty and the decisions being made will shape the city for years. Watch how the deliberation works. Notice which questions get asked and which do not. Notice the relationship between the staff recommendation and the Council vote.

File a freedom of information request. The process is straightforward. You identify the records you want, a specific staff report, correspondence between officials, a contract, a financial document and you submit a request through the city’s FOIA portal. The cost is $10. What you receive will, in most cases, surprise you. Not because the documents reveal dramatic wrongdoing, but because the gap between what public institutions say in public and what they write to each other is often illuminating.

Write a letter. A substantive letter that asks a specific question and requests a specific answer. Councillors are required to read correspondence. They are not always required to answer it, but a well-crafted letter that identifies a specific inconsistency between a Council decision and the city’s own policies creates a record. It is on the file. If the decision is later challenged, the letter is part of the evidence that the concern was raised. For me that is Bayview and now so much more. I believe a reckoning on that project may still come in part because of the record.

Show up at a public hearing. If a development in your neighbourhood is going through the public hearing process, attend and speak. The five-minute limit is a constraint on rhetoric, not on substance. Five minutes is long enough to make five specific, documented points. That is more effective than five minutes of general concern.

The Stakes of Attention

There is a reason that the current Council majority prefers low turnout, short public comment periods, and a civic culture in which most residents assume that local government is someone else’s concern. Concentrated interests, developers, unions, political machines, benefit from a disengaged public. In contrast, they are organised. They know the agenda. They show up. When everyone else does not, they get what they came for.

The Bayview fight demonstrated that sustained civic attention changes the calculus. It does not always change the outcome, the rezoning was ultimately approved, the litigation concluded, and by conventional measure the fight was lost. But it changed what the city had to justify, publicly and on the record. It put information in front of residents that would not otherwise have existed. It produced a vast archive of documents that shows how one development file moved through Victoria’s planning system. At some point I shall return to it and publicise the lessons.

The Forum demonstrates that sustained civic attention builds an audience. That audience was not there before. It exists because someone decided that building it was worth the time.

The question I want to leave you with is not rhetorical: what would sustained civic attention look like in your neighbourhood?

You do not need to replicate Bayview. You do not need to start a Forum. You need only decide that what happens at City Hall matters to you because it happens to you, in your neighbourhood, in the character of the streets and the buildings and the community institutions that make the place what it is and that the minimum response to that is attention.

This is your city. That phrase is not a slogan. It is a factual description of the relationship between a democratic municipality and the people who live in it. The city belongs to its residents. It does not belong to the Mayor and Council. But the gap between what is and what should be is not closed by frustration or by passivity. It is closed by the accumulation of exactly the ordinary acts of democratic participation described in this post.

The citizens who saved the heritage buildings Victoria now celebrates did not know, when they started, that they would succeed. They showed up anyway. That is the tradition. It is available to you.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and former construction lawyer campaigning as a Councillor for Victoria City Hall in 2026. He believes Victoria’s civic life, and supports planning policies that grow communities without erasing the character, walkability, and local institutions that make them worth living in.

There is a word that gets used in Victoria’s planning debates to dismiss concerns about neighbourhood character, heritage buildings, street trees, and human-scale design. The word is “aesthetics.” As in we cannot let aesthetic preferences stand in the way of necessary growth. As in beauty is a luxury, and housing is a need, and the two are in competition.

This framing is wrong in a specific and consequential way. It treats as a preference what is in fact a productive asset and in treating it as a preference, it authorises decisions that destroy value while claiming to create it.

Victoria’s character is not an aesthetic. It is infrastructure. And infrastructure, when you demolish it, does not grow back.

What Drives Victoria’s Economic Appeal

Start with the numbers that the city’s own economic development office promotes. Victoria’s tourism sector generates more than $2 billion annually. It employs roughly 17,000 people. It is one of the two or three largest drivers of the regional economy, alongside the public sector and the knowledge economy.

What are tourists coming to see?

They are not coming to see the new market-rate towers on Douglas Street. They are not coming to bask in the reflected glow of the new Telus sign. They are not coming for the glass condominiums being approved at densities that exceed the Official Community Plan. They are coming for the Inner Harbour. The Empress Hotel. The Government Street heritage commercial streetscape. The James Bay neighbourhood. James Bay, well none other than Colliers International’s own marketing materials for the One Point development described it as “one of Victoria’s most walkable and bikeable neighbourhoods” and “an historic, human-scaled bedroom community.” They used those words as a selling point, the neighbourhood’s character was the argument for why the site was worth developing. Unmentioned was that the development they proposed would have eroded precisely the character they cited.

This is a contradiction that appears throughout Victoria’s development debate and is almost never named: the heritage and human-scale character that defines Victoria’s economic appeal is being systematically consumed by the development activity that claims to be improving the city. Bayview is the classic obscene example: 9 towers clustering around 30 storeys each on top of a national historic site. The fact of this approval should be disqualifying for the Mayor and six Councillors who voted in favour: Caradonna, Dell, Thompson, Dell, Loughton and Kim. The only Councillors standing with Victoria and opposed to the project were Hammond and Gardiner.

The Heritage Economics Case

The economic evidence on heritage conservation is more developed than most planning debates acknowledge.

Studies from Canadian Heritage, the National Trust for Canada, and comparable organisations in the United States consistently show that heritage districts deliver economic returns that exceed those of comparable non-heritage commercial and residential areas. The reasons are not complicated. Heritage buildings attract adaptive reuse investment. Heritage commercial streets generate higher pedestrian counts than comparable modern streetscapes. Heritage residential neighbourhoods command persistent price premiums, not because of nostalgia, but because the physical environment is genuinely better: higher quality materials, more intricate detailing, proportions calibrated to human experience rather than to construction economics.

More importantly, heritage cannot be replicated at any price once it is demolished. A developer can build a new building that quotes heritage materials and proportions. What they cannot build is a building that is actually 130 years old, that carries the accumulated patina of a city’s history, that connects a streetscape to the time when it was built. That quality, once destroyed, is gone. The land value remains. Everything else about that made the building valuable is gone.

Victoria is one of very few cities in Western Canada that has a significant stock of Victorian-era architecture buildings dating from the 1880s through the early 1900s, when the city was a significant commercial and governmental centre and the construction quality reflected that status. To be glib, after all, the city is called Victoria. I suppose though it could be renamed to “Generic Glass Towerville,” or the like, if every block is eventually flattened into the same anonymous development template found across North America.

No, heritage, this good, is genuinely rare. It is a Canadian asset. It is also being destroyed at a rate that, if continued, will eliminate the distinctiveness that makes Victoria worth visiting and worth living in within a generation.

The BC Heritage Register, the local heritage register maintained by the City of Victoria, and the Heritage Advisory Panel process exist precisely to manage this risk. The current Council’s record on heritage protection, suggests that these mechanisms are not functioning as designed. Heritage designations are being overridden. Advisory panel recommendations are being noted and disregarded.

The Tree Canopy as Economic and Environmental Infrastructure

Victoria’s urban tree canopy is not a landscaping feature. It is infrastructure in the most literal sense. It performs services for the city that, if the city had to replace them mechanically, would cost more than the trees cost to maintain.

A mature tree in an urban setting intercepts stormwater, a significant service in a city that pays to manage stormwater through engineered drainage. It provides cooling through evapotranspiration, measurably reducing air temperature in the surrounding area and reducing energy demand from buildings nearby. It filters air pollutants. It sequesters carbon. And it creates the canopy effect that makes Victoria’s residential streets feel the way they feel, cool, shaded, biologically alive, rather than the way streets without mature tree cover feel, which is hot, exposed, and indistinguishable from similar streets in any other city.

The economic research on urban tree canopy is unambiguous. Properties on tree-lined streets sell for more than comparable properties on treeless streets, studies consistently find premiums of 5 to 15 per cent. Commercial districts with mature street trees generate higher retail sales than comparable treeless districts. Trees reduce crime in public spaces through the mechanism urban planners call “eyes on the street”, shade creates places where people choose to be, and places where people choose to be are safer than empty plazas.

Victoria’s trees are dying at an accelerating rate under the Bill 44 upzoning and infill development pressure. When a development application proposes to build to the property line, which new density permissions permit, and a mature tree sits inside that setback, the tree loses. Not every time. But consistently enough that the canopy in Victoria’s most actively developing residential neighbourhoods, Rockland, Fairfield, parts of Gonzales, is declining in measurable ways.

The City of Victoria’s Street Tree Policy and Urban Forest Strategy acknowledge this. They establish goals and commitments. In practice, when those commitments conflict with a development application, they yield. They are aspirational documents. Infrastructure aspires to nothing. It either exists or it does not.

What Comparable Cities Have Learned

Victoria is not the first city to face this trade-off, and the evidence from cities that made the wrong call is available and clear.

Calgary demolished much of its downtown heritage commercial core in the 1960s and 1970s in pursuit of modern office development. By the 1990s, the city was investing heavily in heritage-themed streetscape improvements, essentially trying to buy back, with new construction, the feel of the thing it had destroyed. It has not fully recovered the streetscape coherence it had before.

Vancouver’s Gastown survived largely by accident, the area’s commercial obsolescence made redevelopment unprofitable long enough for the heritage designation process to catch up. The result is one of Vancouver’s most economically productive and visually distinctive neighbourhoods. The lessons: what is profitable to demolish in the short term is rarely replaceable at any cost in the long term.

St. John’s, Newfoundland, made a systematic decision to preserve its colourful Victorian residential streetscapes and harbour commercial district. The city’s identity is now inseparable from those buildings, and its tourism economy, while modest in absolute terms, is disproportionately strong relative to its size precisely because it has something that comparable cities do not; namely, a cityscape that is visually coherent, historically rooted, and genuinely distinctive.

Victoria’s physical environment is more comparable to St. John’s than to Calgary or Vancouver. It is a city whose economic appeal rests substantially on what it has preserved, not on what it has built. The development strategy that treats heritage as an obstacle and character as a luxury is not building on Victoria’s competitive advantage. It is consuming it.

The Argument in Plain Terms

Density done right, affordable, well-designed, contextually appropriate, with genuine tenant protections and process, is a good thing for Victoria. The city needs more housing. It needs it at prices that working people can afford. It needs it in locations that support transit and walking and neighbourhood commerce. None of this is in dispute.

What is in dispute is whether the density Victoria is approving is delivering those things, or whether it is delivering developer returns at the expense of the character, affordability, and economic foundation on which the city’s appeal rests.

When a 130-year-old building comes down and a glass tower goes up, the city loses heritage and gains units. Whether those units are accessible to the people who need them, at rents that reflect genuine affordability, is a question most of the current Council does not consistently require to be answered before approving the demolition.

When a street tree is removed to allow a development to reach its approved setback, the city loses canopy and gains floor area. Whether the floor area is worth more than the canopy, economically, environmentally, in quality of life, is a trade-off the planning process does not consistently evaluate.

When a neighbourhood’s visual coherence is disrupted by a building that ignores its context in scale, material, and proportion, the city approves the application and calls it housing. Whether the housing was worth the neighbourhood is not a question the approval process asks.

These are not aesthetic concerns. They are economic ones. They are the questions that a city with Victoria’s specific competitive advantages, heritage, character, human scale, natural beauty, should be asking before each decision that puts those advantages at risk.

The development lobby frames heritage as a constraint on growth. The evidence suggests it is a precondition for the kind of city that people, residents, visitors, investors, the young families the city claims it wants to attract and keep, want to live in.

Victoria is beautiful. That is not a soft fact. It is the foundation of the economic case for protecting what the city is.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and former construction lawyer campaigning as a Councillor for Victoria City Hall in 2026. He believes heritage preservation is not nostalgia but civic stewardship, and supports planning policies that protect Victoria’s historic streetscapes, neighbourhood character, and architectural identity while allowing thoughtful and context-sensitive growth.

When the Royal BC Museum concluded its so-called “international search” for a new CEO in March 2026, the result landed not in the offices of some globally recruited cultural heavyweight, but in the Mayor’s living room. The board’s choice was Allison Bond, a 35-year provincial career bureaucrat, former Deputy Minister of Social Development, and spouse of Victoria Mayor Marianne Alto. For anyone watching how this city is governed, it is a remarkable appointment, and not in a flattering way.

Compare Bond’s résumé against those of her counterparts at peer institutions and the contrast is jarring. Nicholas R. Bell, recently appointed CEO of the Royal Ontario Museum, spent over two decades in senior museum roles at the Glenbow, the Mystic Seaport, and the Smithsonian. Caroline Dromaguet at the Canadian Museum of History spent more than 20 years inside the museum sector before taking the top job. Meaghan Patterson, who leads the Royal Alberta Museum, the RBCM’s closest provincial equivalent, worked exclusively in museums for over two decades, including seven years running the Alberta Museums Association. None of these institutions would have considered a candidate whose career is, without exception, rooted in provincial social work and poverty reduction. Victoria’s museum board did.

Managing a Museum, or Managing a Crisis?

To be fair, the board was not entirely without a rationale. Chair Stan Chung stated publicly that Bond was selected for her ability to comprehend “the dynamics of change within complex public organizations” and to build trust-based relationships, particularly with First Nations communities, given her background as a former Assistant Deputy Minister of Aboriginal Affairs. The RBCM is in genuine difficulty. It carries unresolved allegations of systemic racism, the contentious closure of the First Peoples Gallery, and a massive provincial infrastructure build in the new PARC Campus collections facility.

What this reveals, though, is not a hiring success but an admission. The BC government is treating the Royal BC Museum not as a cultural institution in need of artistic leadership, but as a fractured government agency requiring a veteran insider to manage a procurement pipeline and contain a public relations problem. The museum’s mandate as a place of heritage and scholarship appears to have come second to its function as a vehicle for provincial capital spending.

When the Boundaries Dissolve

There is a structural problem here that goes beyond any single appointment. A capital city’s government functions properly because tension exists between City Hall and the Provincial Legislature. They are meant to have competing interests; that friction is not a flaw in the system; it is the system. When the Mayor of Victoria and the CEO of the city’s largest provincial crown cultural corporation share a home, those necessary boundaries disappear.

The risk is not corruption in the crude sense. The risk is something subtler and, in some ways, harder to address. That is, an ideological echo chamber in which preferred municipal and provincial policies, shaped in this case by a shared background in social welfare administration, are never subjected to the adversarial scrutiny that healthy governance requires. Multi-million-dollar public portfolios managed through domestic consensus rather than rigorous public debate is not good government. It is rather a private arrangement dressed in public clothing.

An Election Year Question

Voters go to the polls in October, and the RBCM appointment arrives at a telling moment. Mayor Alto has recently repositioned herself on homelessness, declaring the city “at capacity” and announcing that Victoria has “done enough.” It is a significant rhetorical shift from an administration that has overseen years of social infrastructure spending and resultant strain in residential neighbourhoods. Whether that shift reflects genuine reconsideration or election-year recalibration is a legitimate question.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and former construction lawyer campaigning as a Councillor for Victoria City Hall in 2026. He has consistently argued that accountability in government means more than consultation language; it requires enforceable commitments, public reporting, and consequences for failure.