In 2022, nine candidates ran for SD61 school board. Nine won. All nine had been endorsed by the Greater Victoria Teachers’ Association. The two incumbents without GVTA endorsement lost. Six candidates running on a right-wing slate received zero seats. Meanwhile, the labour-endorsed slate for Victoria City Council swept in alongside them.

That is not a coincidence. That is a machine. And it has no nameplate on the door.

How It Works

The mechanism is straightforward once you see it. The GVTA endorses school board trustee candidates through its own process. The Victoria Labour Council separately endorses City Council candidates. The two lists are then combined into a single document and circulated through the labour network – CUPE locals, BCGEU affiliates, and associated organizations to their members across Greater Victoria.

The document that arrives in teachers’ inboxes, on union bulletin boards, and in member communications is not presented as two separate endorsements from two separate bodies applying two separate sets of criteria. It reads as one list. Mayor. Councillors. School trustees. Your slate.

What this produces, functionally, is a coordinated electoral operation spanning multiple races, multiple jurisdictions, and tens of thousands of voters without any of the legal structure of a coordinated electoral operation. No registered elector organisation. No consolidated disclosure. No single accountable entity.

What the Law Says – and Leaves Open

BC’s Local Elections Campaign Financing Act banned union and corporate donations to local candidates in 2017. It also requires any individual or organisation sponsoring election advertising to register as a third-party sponsor with Elections BC, disclose their spending, and operate independently from candidates and elector organizations.

Here is the question the law has not clearly answered: does co-circulating a combined endorsed candidate list constitute election advertising under the Act?

If yes, every organisation distributing that list during a campaign period may have registration and disclosure obligations they are not meeting. If no, then the Act has a gap wide enough to drive a slate through. Promoting specific candidates to thousands of voters through organised networks is either election advertising or it is not. The answer matters, and voters deserve to know it is an open question.

This is not an accusation of illegality. It is an observation that the framework has not caught up with the practice.

The Conflict Governance Already Named

The BC Public School Employers’ Association, BCPSEA, the body that manages collective bargaining for all 60 BC school boards, updated its conflict-of-interest guidance for trustees in October 2024. The language is unambiguous: union involvement with a trustee is a clear conflict of interest for matters related to collective bargaining or collective agreement administration. Affected trustees must declare the conflict, be removed from relevant communications, and abstain from votes.

Read that carefully. The governance framework that oversees the employer side of teacher collective bargaining has already concluded that union-trustee entanglement is a structural problem requiring formal management. It deals with the conflict after election day. It has nothing to say about how the conflict was constructed before it.

The Hollowed-Out Board and the Real Prize

Here is the structural irony that makes the investment in school board races revealing.

Trustees have less actual power than most voters assume. Teacher salaries, benefits, class sizes, and core working conditions are set at the provincial bargaining table between BCPSEA and the BCTF. Individual school boards do not decide these. The Ministry of Education sets curriculum, mandates balanced budgets, and retains the authority to dismiss boards that don’t comply; it has used that authority twice against Vancouver alone. What trustees actually control is narrower: budget allocation within the Ministry’s envelope, superintendent hiring, school closures, local equity policies.

So why does the labour network invest significant political capital in school board races when the board’s jurisdiction over the issues that matter most to teachers is largely set elsewhere?

Because the school board slate is not primarily about school governance. It is about political infrastructure. Trustee races identify candidates, rehearse coordination, test messaging, and build the voter contact networks that carry forward into Council races. The trustee list and the Council list travel together not because school governance and city governance require the same political judgment but because the same political operation is running both.

What Voters Deserve

Three things this mechanism currently does not provide:

• Transparency: who sat on the endorsement committees, what criteria were applied, whether the trustee and council endorsements were coordinated or genuinely independent processes.
• Accountability: when endorsed trustees or Councillors make decisions, voters should be able to trace the political relationships that shaped them.
• A registered identity: if an operation functions as a political party, coordinating candidates across races, circulating unified slates, delivering bloc outcomes, it should carry a political party’s disclosure obligations.

The Question That Ends This

Victoria’s voters are sophisticated enough to make their own choices. The combined endorsed list was not designed for their independent judgment. It was designed to deliver a predetermined outcome efficiently. That may be effective politics.

It is not transparent democracy.

If everything about this operation is “above board”, why does it need to be invisible?

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and former construction lawyer campaigning as a Councillor for Victoria City Hall in 2026. He believes voters deserve transparent local politics and clear lines of accountability.

Here is what it costs a developer in Victoria to promise affordable housing and then walk it back: $90,000, an awkward Council meeting, and a warning from the Mayor not to ask for more favours.

Here is what Victoria residents pay when that happens: they lose the affordable units forever.

That is the story of the last seven years of rezoning approvals for Aryze Developments and Abstract Developments in the City of Victoria. I have spent the past several days going through Council records, news archives, BC Housing announcements, neighbourhood association filings, and developer websites. What follows is a full accounting. I will let the record speak, and then I will tell you what I think it means.

Aryze Developments

Principal: Luke Mari

What every Aryze project received or sought in zoning approvals from the City of Victoria in the last near seven years is shown in the Aryze Developments Table. To be fair to Aryze, Fifth Street was the real thing, 64 affordable homes, 100% below-market, delivered with BC Housing. Journal in Jubilee delivered its four below-market rental units. Aryze can build affordable housing when it commits to it. Which makes what happened at Wisteria Row harder to excuse, not easier.

The Wisteria Row Sequence

Council approved 902 Foul Bay Road in 2022 with a registered covenant, covenant numbers CB104564/CB137177, requiring four of the eighteen units to be sold below market. This was not a handshake deal. It was a legal instrument registered against the title.

In late 2023, Aryze came back to Council and asked to have that covenant discharged. The reason given: construction costs had risen 50% and loan interest had jumped from $350,000 to $1.4 million. Council voted 5–3 on November 16, 2023 to let them off the hook. Voting to keep the affordable units were the Mayor and two Councillors. Voting to discharge the covenant was only one Councillor with the remaining four names on the yes side have not been publicly confirmed in available records.

The price of four permanently affordable homes, as set by that Council vote: $90,000, or $22,500 per unit.

Aryze then returned a second time to strip additional promised amenities: the green-roof canopies, a playground, benches, and landscaping features that were also conditions of approval. Then Mayor reportedly told them: “Do not come back and ask for favours.”

The project is now actively selling. All 18 townhomes. Starting at $585,000. Up to $1,050,000. No affordable units. The covenant is gone. The $90,000 is in a reserve fund. The city got nothing it cannot buy with $90,000.

The Estoya

This was approved in September 2023 but only after a dramatic parking variance reducing parking from 60 stalls to 4 and adding a rental-only covenant. While Councillors expressed hope that reduced parking costs would produce more affordable rents, there is no binding affordability covenant. So, if rents at The Estoya come in at market rates, this will be a third example of an affordability aspiration without an enforcement mechanism. As a former projects lawyer I cannot make this stuff up.

Abstract Developments

Principals: Mike Miller and Adam Cooper

What every Abstract project received or sought in zoning approvals from the City of Victoria in the last near seven years is shown in the Abstract Developments Table

The Bellewood Park Sequence

In May 2018, Council approved Abstract’s Bellewood Park development at 1201 Fort Street, 92 market-rate units, by a vote of 6–3. The public hearing ran for two days and drew 110 speakers, near a record at the time. Council was divided. The margin was thin.

The approval came with a condition. Abstract, through its sister company NVision Properties, committed to building 10 affordable rental units, five for low-income tenants, five for moderate-income, at a separate property it controlled at 1010 Fort Street. The deadline was December 31, 2020. If the units were not built and occupied by that date, the penalty was $250,000 to the City’s Housing Reserve Fund. One Councillor at the time put it plainly: he was uncomfortable linking an approval to “a promise to build affordable units at an as-yet unseen project at 1010 Fort St.” The Victoria Downtown Residents Association formally objected to the arrangement in writing.

Those concerns were prescient. Here is what happened next:

October 2018: NVision applied to build a 9-storey rental at 1010 Fort Street with 10 affordable units. Council rejected it.

June 25, 2020: NVision returned with a 12-storey revised proposal. City staff recommended rejection. Council unanimously refused to advance it to public hearing. NVision’s response: if this project fails, they would build a 4-storey market condo under existing zoning. No affordable component.

December 31, 2020: The deadline passed. No affordable units were built. No residential building of any kind was built at 1010 Fort Street.

June 2026: 1010 Fort Street is a single-storey commercial building, currently being marketed for lease at $19 per square foot by CBRE Victoria. The parcel may be listed for sale at $2.3 million. The 10 affordable rental units promised as a condition of the Bellewood Park approval, the affordable housing that helped tip a close Council vote, were never built. It may be noted that Black and White is at 1033 Cook Street, approximately 90 metres from 1010 Fort. They are separate parcels. 1010 Fort was used as the Black and White sales office during marketing. The connection to Abstract/NVision is ownership, not parcel identity. Whether Abstract or NVision paid the $250,000 penalty to the Housing Reserve Fund has not been confirmed in any public reporting I have been able to find.

Meanwhile, Bellewood Park is built, occupied, and sold. Ninety-two market-rate units. Zero affordable.

To Abstract’s credit: Sparrow at 1301 Hillside delivered nine AHOP affordable homeownership units in 2020. It can be done. At Bellewood Park, it wasn’t.

What This Pattern Means

Both developers have delivered genuine affordable housing when they committed to it without conditions: Fifth Street, Journal in Jubilee, Sparrow. That matters. This is not a story about bad developers who never deliver. It is a story about City Hall’s system that allows affordable housing commitments to function as approval currency, useful for getting past a close Council vote or a skeptical public, but enforceable only when someone is willing to enforce them.

At Wisteria Row, Council discharged a registered legal covenant for $90,000. At Bellewood Park, a housing agreement with a $250,000 penalty clause appears to have gone unenforced or was quietly settled without public disclosure. In both cases, the affordable units that shaped the approval are gone. The market-rate projects remain.

The mechanism being exploited is straightforward: promise affordable housing to get rezoning approval, build the market units, then return later when cost pressures are real or the political moment is right and ask Council to let you off the hook. The downside risk, a covenant discharge vote, a $250,000 penalty, some unflattering headlines, is manageable. The upside, full market pricing on all units in a supply-constrained city is substantial.

This is not unique to these two developers. It is the predictable outcome of a system that has no routine public audit of whether rezoning conditions are met, no automatic consequence when they are not, and no Councillor whose job it is to track the gap between what was promised and what was built. So, I have tracked it here.

What Residents Should Be Demanding

Three things:

First, the City should publish an annual public register of all affordable housing commitments secured as conditions of rezoning approvals, what was promised, what was built, and what was paid out when commitments lapsed. If this register exists, I have not been able to find it. If it does not exist, Council should create it.

Second, the $250,000 penalty clause in the Bellewood Park / 1010 Fort Street housing agreement should be accounted for publicly. Either it was paid, in which case residents should know that the City settled 10 affordable rental units for $25,000 each, or it was not, in which case the City has an unexercised legal claim it has never explained. Both possibilities warrant a public answer.

Third, covenant discharge votes should be treated as what they are, decisions to permanently relinquish affordable housing in exchange for a cash payment. They should require more than a committee majority. They should require evidence put forward by the developer that market conditions have genuinely made delivery impossible, not just more expensive, and a clear accounting of what residents are giving up.

Victoria has a housing crisis. It does not have a shortage of rezoning approvals. What it has is a shortage of follow-through.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and former construction lawyer and running for City Council in Victoria. He has called for the use of seven legal tools by the City to prevent developers just walking away from their obligations without more.

How Victoria Council approved a $2 billion development agreement without conducting basic due diligence on the developer.

At the January 2024 public hearing on the Bayview Place rezoning, the Mayor asked the City’s Senior Planner, Mike Angrove, a straightforward question: could Council take into account concerns raised by the public about the reputation of the developer?

Angrove answered that the reputation of a developer was not a consideration on rezoning applications.

He was wrong. And the fact that no one in that room corrected him tells you almost everything you need to know about how Victoria approved a $2 billion development without asking the most basic questions a competent counterparty would ask.

A Rezoning and a Contract Are Not the Same Thing

Angrove’s answer might have been defensible if all Council was doing was approving a straightforward rezoning. Planning law does generally require Councils to assess land use on its merits, not on the identity of the applicant.

But that is not what was happening at Bayview.

The 2008 Master Development Agreement, a binding contract between the City of Victoria and Focus Equities, was going to require amendment. You cannot approve a rezoning that doubles the floor space ratio, increases the building count from four or five to nine, and alters the remediation requirements without amending the contract that governs the site.

Before a counterparty amends a binding contract, it conducts due diligence. It asks basic questions about the party it is contracting with about their track record, their financial position and whether they have honoured existing obligations. This is not a legal technicality. It is elementary commercial practice.

The city solicitor, Tom Zworski, was not in the room when Angrove gave his answer. A planning question that was actually a legal and contractual question was answered by the wrong person. Nobody flagged it. Council proceeded.

What Council Knew and Did Not Ask

The failures of due diligence at Bayview were not obscure or technical. They were, in most cases, publicly visible or easily discoverable. Council did not need special investigative powers to find them. It needed to ask.

The developer had already breached the existing agreement. The 2008 MDA was granted in exchange for specific community benefits, the restoration of the E&N Roundhouse and the remediation of the contaminated site. By January 2024, sixteen years had passed. No remediation had been completed. No construction had begun. The promised Roundhouse restoration remained unfinished. Council was being asked to expand its obligations to a counterparty that had not met its obligations under the original deal. No questions were asked about this at the hearing.

For years, Focus Equities had promoted Bayview Place with the claim that it would include a Cultural Centre designed by architect Frank Gehry. It was a striking and memorable promise, the kind of commitment that shapes public impressions during consultation processes. There was and is no such Cultural Centre. Council has never asked what happened to it.

The 2007 Ministry of Environment-approved remediation plan required the off-site removal of hazardous materials. In the revised application, that requirement was replaced with an on-site “dig and bury” approach, a significantly cheaper alternative with meaningfully different environmental consequences. Council approved the change without an independent inquiry into why the original plan was being abandoned.

The storey count submitted for the tallest building in the application was 32 storeys. The correct figure, on the plans as submitted, may be up to 37 storeys. That is not a rounding error. Five additional floors of a highrise represents a significant and material difference in what Council thought it was approving and what it approved. It is unclear at present whether the tower would be built to 37 storeys but the option was certainly left to the developer given the manner of approval.

Foor space ratio (FSR), the fundamental measure of total building density, is a separate problem. The FSR calculation submitted to Council did not establish the area occupied by the six heritage buildings on the site. Until that area is known and properly accounted for, the true FSR cannot be determined. Council approved a density figure that was, in the most literal sense, incomplete. It was not a wrong number. It was a number that could not have been right because a necessary input was never provided. Council’s own planning staff had identified concerns about the FSR and made recommendations accordingly. Those recommendations were disregarded.

Focus Equities made extensive representations about the track record and project experience of its principals. The company’s marketing described its principals as “architects”. Ken Mariash, a director of Focus Equities, represented that he held six university degrees. Council appears to have accepted these representations without verification. When concerns about the developer’s background were raised publicly, planning staff directed Council away from those concerns rather than toward them. On the holding out as an architect the Architect’s Institute of BC sanctioned Ken Mariash for illegal practice, so too was his spouse Patricia Mariash similarly sanctioned.

A civil action was filed in California naming Ken Mariash, the principal of Focus Equities, alleging fraud and other causes of action arising from his last major development in Calgary. The City of Victoria failed to inquire into this action or ensure it was before Council when it was considering whether to amend its $2 billion development agreement with the same individual. The pleadings exist. Three Councillors had copies of them. Council should have been put on inquiry by this and been informed in its decision-making accordingly.

Focus Equities had also promoted involvement in a showcase component on a tender process in Ottawa. When inquiries were made in Ottawa, the company withdrew its involvement. Whether there was any causation here is an open question. The point is where were Victoria’s questions, Victoria’s due diligence. The level of scrutiny that was applied in Ottawa’s was never applied in Victoria.

Meanwhile, back in Victoria, the City’s own Heritage Advisory Panel declined to support the project as proposed. Council disregarded its recommendation without explanation.

The Pattern

Individually, any one of these items might be explained or disputed. Together they form a pattern that any competent contracting party in similar circumstances would have investigated before proceeding.

The developer had not built what it had already been permitted to build. The developer had not completed the remediation it had agreed to complete. The developer had made public representations, about a Frank Gehry Cultural Centre, about the scope of its principals’ credentials and project experience, that seemed inaccurate. This is enough to warrant due diligence. Add to that one of the developer’s principals was the subject of a civil fraud action in California arising from his previous major development and the city should have demanding explanations. It is an open question whether they did but given the approval of the project it would seem not. The storey count submitted for the tallest building seems understated by five floors based on total height and standard floor separations. The floor space ratio could not be accurately calculated because the area of the six heritage buildings on the site was never established. How much more did the city leave uninvestigated?

When residents raised these concerns at the public hearing, the response they received was that “reputation is not a consideration.” But this was never about reputation. It was about due diligence, credibility, and whether City Hall had properly tested the representations on which one of the largest approvals in Victoria’s history depended. The answer given was not merely legally questionable. It was the institutional expression of a Council that, at some level, had decided not to look too closely.

What Good Governance Requires

A City Council entering into a major development agreement is not a passive planning tribunal. It is a contracting party, spending public assets, impacting land values, density entitlements, infrastructure capacity, and receiving promises in return.

Before it grants those assets, it has an obligation to satisfy itself that the promises it is accepting are credible, that the party making them has a track record to support them, and that any existing obligations have been met. In British Columbia, this obligation is grounded in the fiduciary obligations councils owe to the public, the contractual duties engaged by the amendment of binding agreements, and the foundational administrative law principle that public decision-makers must act on relevant and properly informed evidence.

Victoria failed each of these obligations at Bayview. The city solicitor was absent in person from the hearing. The senior planner provided incorrect legal advice. The numbers in the application were inaccurate. A fraud action against one of the developer’s principals went uninvestigated. And a Council that had been told, repeatedly, that there were questions to be asked about this developer, voted 7 to 2 to proceed without asking them.

The question is not whether the Bayview development should or should not have proceeded. The question is whether Victoria residents can trust that when Council grants a developer extraordinary value, a doubling of density, a city-wide OCP amendment, a contract worth up to $2 billion, it has done the elementary work of checking who it is dealing with.

At Bayview, it did not. Demanding due diligence before Council amends a major development agreement is not a radical position. It is what any competent contracting party does. It should be the minimum standard for a City Council spending public assets worth billions.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor, former construction lawyer, and candidate for City of Victoria Council in 2026. His platform calls for the use of seven legal tools to ensure enforceable public benefits from development approvals. It also calls for independent public integrity reviews of major rezonings where credible evidence suggests that approvals were based on materially incomplete or misleading data regarding public benefits, heritage preservation, or unmitigated community impacts.

British Columbia has a Conflict of Interest Commissioner. Victoria has a Code of Conduct Bylaw. And the Community Charter provides disqualification rules for Councillors in conflict. On paper, the accountability architecture looks complete.

In practice, these three instruments combine to make it nearly impossible to hold a Victoria City Councillor accountable for a conflict of interest. Not difficult. Nearly impossible. Each layer that appears to provide oversight turns out, on examination, to exclude the very situation you thought it covered.

Understanding how this works, and why, matters for anyone who wonders why obvious conflicts keep going unaddressed.

Lock One - The Provincial Commissioner Doesn’t Cover Councillors

British Columbia’s Office of the Conflict of Interest Commissioner exists to “promote public confidence in elected public officials as they conduct public business.” Its mandate sounds broad. It isn’t.

The Commissioner’s jurisdiction covers Members of the Legislative Assembly. Municipal Councillors are not MLAs. They are not covered. A Councillor who votes on a matter in which they have a direct financial interest is not subject to the Commissioner’s oversight, regardless of how obvious the conflict.

This is not an obscure technicality. It is a structural gap that leaves the entire municipal tier of government outside the province’s primary conflict accountability mechanism.

Lock Two - The Code of Conduct Explicitly Excludes Conflicts

If the provincial Commissioner doesn’t cover Councillors, surely the City’s own Code of Conduct Bylaw does?

It does not. Section 3(3) of Victoria’s Code of Conduct Bylaw 23-058 states that the Bylaw does not apply to conduct that may subject a member to disqualification under the Community Charter, including sections 101 to 108.1, 120(1.1), and 125(5). Sections 101 to 108.1 of the Community Charter are the conflict-of-interest provisions.

Read that again: the Code of Conduct Bylaw explicitly carves out conflicts of interest from its own scope. A resident alleging a statutory conflict of interest cannot rely on the city’s Code of Conduct process because the bylaw expressly excludes matters governed by the Community Charter conflict-of-interest provisions. Whether intentional or not, the practical effect of this drafting choice is significant. Residents are directed away from the City’s internal complaint mechanism and toward the far more formal and costly court-based enforcement regime established under the Community Charter. In practical terms, this means that one of the issues residents are most likely to associate with ethical governance, conflicts of interest, is excluded from the complaint system the City itself created.

Lock Three - Many Councillors Don’t Know What a Conflict Is

Even where accountability mechanisms exist, the Community Charter does permit disqualification for conflicts, they require someone to recognise, name, and pursue the complaint. The third lock is that several Victoria Councillors have demonstrated they don’t understand what a conflict of interest is.

In June 2024, Councillor Hammond raised concerns about the composition of a task force investigating the Councillors’ 25% pay increase. The BCGEU, a union that had publicly endorsed five of the Councillors who voted themselves the raise, was represented on the task force. Hammond flagged this as a potential conflict. His concern was textbook: people under investigation should not have supporters reviewing the investigation.

One Councillor’s response: “I understand that there’s a very superficial appearance of a conflict, but once you kind of dig into it, I don’t see that there is.”

The word “superficial” is doing significant work here. In law, a perceived conflict, a reasonable apprehension of bias, is a conflict. It does not matter how deeply you dig, or how sincerely you believe your judgment is unimpaired. The standard is objective: would a reasonable person, knowing the facts, conclude there is a conflict? The Councillor’s response also inadvertently acknowledged the existence of an appearance of conflict while dismissing it. That acknowledgment is itself legally significant. But without a functioning complaint mechanism, the acknowledgment goes nowhere.

A Fourth Structural Problem is Pre-Judgment

The triple lock operates as a set of negative constraints, mechanisms that cannot be triggered even when a conflict is visible. But the Bayview file revealed a fourth structural problem: when a decision-maker actively predetermines an outcome, none of the three accountability mechanisms can address it either.

At a Committee of the Whole meeting on May 4, 2023, the Mayor 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. By October 2023, she 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 was scheduled for January 2024, three months after this statement. At that hearing, the Mayor was required to act as a neutral adjudicator: to hear evidence, receive submissions, and make a decision with an open mind. The legal standard is well-established: justice must not only be done but must manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done.

A Mayor who has described the outcome as “inevitable” three months before the hearing has not demonstrated an open mind. A formal complaint alleging pre-judgment and conflict of interest arising from the Mayor’s $1,200 donation from Ken Mariash in 2018 was filed with the City Clerk on January 4, 2024. The Mayor did not recuse herself. The Code of Conduct Bylaw’s conflict of interest carve-out means the complaint could not proceed under that mechanism. The provincial Commissioner does not cover mayors. And the Community Charter’s disqualification process requires a court application to enforce.

All three locks held. The fourth structural problem fell into the same gap.

Why This Matters Beyond Victoria

The triple lock is not unique to Victoria. Any BC municipality can draft a Code of Conduct Bylaw with the same Community Charter carve-out. Any municipal council sits outside the provincial Commissioner’s jurisdiction. And Councillors across the province sit on boards, receive donations, hold provincial government employment, and vote on matters touching all of those interests, with limited scrutiny.

The structural solution is not complicated: an independent Integrity Commissioner with jurisdiction over municipal councillors, a complaint process open to the public, and a Code of Conduct that does not immunise the most serious category of misconduct from review. Vancouver has an Integrity Commissioner. Victoria does not.

Until that changes, the triple lock remains intact, and residents who believe they have witnessed a conflict of interest have almost nowhere to go.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor, former construction lawyer, and candidate for City of Victoria Council in 2026. His platform includes establishing an independent Integrity Commissioner for the City of Victoria.

Politicians think they hold all the cards. They will even assume that if citizens challenge a bad rezoning, the government can just rewrite the law to make it legal. They are wrong. Vancouver proved it.

The Lesson of Bill 26

Victoria residents need to pay heed. Our Mayor and Council operate with the exact same arrogance as Vancouver. They view public input as an obstacle. They think the courts cannot touch them. If you doubt how far governments will go to strip your voice and yet you can still beat them look at what happened in Vancouver.

The Arbutus Project and the Citizens’ Lawsuit

In July 2022, Vancouver City Council approved a highly controversial 13-storey tower at 7th and Arbutus. A neighbourhood group, the Kitsilano Coalition, opposed the flawed process. They filed a petition in the BC Supreme Court seeking judicial review to quash the rezoning. They played strictly by the rules. The litigation though threatened to expose the city's procedural failures and tie the project up for years. Vancouver needed a bailout.

Bill 26 Erasing the Rules

The BC NDP government stepped in to save them. In April 2023, before a judge could even hear the case, the province dropped a legislative hammer. They passed Bill 26, the Municipalities Enabling and Validating Act (No. 5) SBC 2024, c.19. The Act retroactively legalised the city’s actions. Through Bill 26, the province declared the Arbutus rezoning valid. Full stop.

The government designed the Bill to instantly render the Kitsilano Coalition's lawsuit moot. The logic was breathtaking. If the rules allow the public to expose a flawed process in court, the government will simply erase the rules.

The BC Supreme Court Ruling

In Kitsilano Coalition for Children & Family Safety Society v. British Columbia (Attorney General), 2023 BCSC 1999 the BC Supreme Court ruled that the Act was constitutionally valid because it merely changed the substantive law retroactively, rather than impermissibly interfering with the court's adjudicative function. The judge relied heavily on Barbour v. UBC (2010) BCCA 63 finding that the legislature had the power to retroactively validate municipal decisions, and in doing so did not inherently violate section 96 of the Constitution Act, 1867. The BC Court of Appeal was about to disagree.

The BC Court of Appeal Overruling

In the Reasons for Judgment of the Honourable Madam Justice Newbury in Kitsilano Coalition for Children & Family Safety Society v. British Columbia (Attorney General), (2024) BCCA 423, Bill 26 did not just change the law; it pre-determined the outcome of a specific dispute, thereby stripping the court of its constitutionally protected "core jurisdiction" to conduct judicial reviews of executive action under section 96. In short, while the legislature can change the rules of zoning, it cannot pass a bespoke law that acts as a "shadow court" to dictate the outcome of a pending judicial review. The nerve of the Provincial government.

Collapse of the Project was the Aftermath

Without the Act protecting it, Vancouver formally abandoned the Arbutus project in May 2025.

The provincial government learned a brutal lesson. BC Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon publicly vented his frustration. But the deterrent worked perfectly. The province has not dared to try this again since the ruling. The precedent holds. The government backed down.

The Lesson for Victoria's 2026 Election

This is not just a Vancouver story. Victoria is run by a Mayor and a Gang of Five who share the exact same mindset.

Look at their record. They rammed through the 2050 Official Community Plan. They executed the October 2025 citywide rezoning. They handed massive rezoning powers to staff through administrative defaults. They stripped the public of its voice. And they assume Victoria residents will simply take it.

The Kitsilano Coalition case proves that extreme government overreach has a breaking point. These citizens beat overreach by Vancouver and the province in the courts. Next October, voters can beat overreach by the current Council majority at the ballot box.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and construction law specialist campaigning for City Council in 2026. He has written on housing policy, civic land strategy, and the operational realities facing renters in high-cost cities like Victoria.

There is a simple test for whether a City Council is doing its job. Check to see if the roads are maintained, facilities are functional, and sidewalks are safe. Victoria's current Council has been extraordinarily busy advancing social frameworks, but significantly less busy fixing pipes and keeping downtown streets secure.

City Hall as Policy Lab

The current Council frequently confuses governing a city with engineering a society by prioritising ideological goals over traditional civic management. This approach reframes municipal governance as an activist project, deliberately advancing an intentionally transformed city with a mandate from just 36 percent of eligible voters.

Price of Mandate Creep

This shift toward social policy carries severe financial consequences for Victoria ratepayers who are forced to fund these initiatives. The 2026 budget proposes raiding $4 million from the Financial Stability Reserve and $2.35 million from the Housing Reserve to fund social hubs, driving a proposed 10.44 percent property tax increase inclusive of the police budget.

Cost of Deferred Maintenance

The Crystal Pool and Fitness Centre perfectly illustrates what happens when essential civic maintenance is sidelined for decades. Built in 1971, the facility has limped along while capital was diverted elsewhere, leaving the city with a $209.2 million replacement project that has barely cleared the design phase.

Subsidising Provincial Responsibilities

Since 2023, Victoria has spent roughly $25 million managing homelessness and encampment damage on Pandora Avenue. This does not include all the indirect costs from first responder call outs to emergency room time. By using municipal property taxes to cover these provincial shortfalls, the city actively allows senior governments to avoid accountability for their legal obligations.

Pushback for Core Services

Independent Councillors Marg Gardiner and Stephen Hammond have consistently challenged this fiscal and jurisdictional drift at the Council table. They argue that the Council's fundamental job is to ensure the city is run well through core municipal services, rather than adopting unfunded community safety plans.

The 2026 Election Choice

The upcoming October 17, 2026, municipal election should serve as a referendum on safety, affordability, and infrastructure. Voters should demand candidates who prioritise these areas and steward the City as a civil engineer would and not a social engineer.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and construction law specialist campaigning for City Council in 2026. His work has focused on ensuring that public benefit promises in major developments remain legally enforceable after approval. He has been an adjunct professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology for ten years.

In October 2026, voters in Victoria and Saanich will be asked whether the two municipalities should merge into one. It will feel like a significant moment in the region’s civic history. What deserves equal attention, however, is how the question arrived on the ballot and whether the process has matched the scale of the governance challenges it seeks to address. This is not an argument against amalgamation. It is an argument that the path leading to the referendum has been narrower and less comprehensive than the issue itself requires. Voters should have a clear understanding of what problem amalgamation is intended to solve, and whether the current proposal addresses that problem adequately.

From regional conversation to bilateral process

The origins of the current referendum can be traced to 2014, when voters across eight Capital Region municipalities supported studying amalgamation. Approximately three-quarters of participating voters supported exploring structural reform at a regional scale. At that time, the possibility of a broader rethinking of governance across Greater Victoria appeared realistic. The provincial government instead funded a review focused on shared services rather than amalgamation itself. While service integration can yield efficiencies, it does not address underlying structural fragmentation. Without provincial funding for a broader study, momentum for a regional process dissipated.

Victoria and Saanich later chose to fund a Citizens’ Assembly independently, each contributing approximately $250,000. Their decision kept the discussion alive, but it also narrowed the scope of reform from a regional question involving multiple municipalities to a bilateral conversation between two. This narrowing did not necessarily reflect a considered conclusion that two municipalities represent the optimal scale of reform. Rather, it reflected the practical reality that two Councils were prepared to proceed when others were not. The result is that a region-wide governance issue is now being considered through a two-municipality lens.

When process becomes outcome

The Victoria–Saanich Citizens’ Assembly devoted significant time and effort to studying amalgamation, hearing evidence, and deliberating. Citizen assemblies are widely regarded as valuable democratic tools because they allow residents to examine complex policy questions carefully and independently of electoral pressures.

However, several Councillors from both municipalities have noted publicly that the Assembly’s work did not include detailed financial modelling, labour harmonisation analysis, or full assessment of how differing approaches to capital financing might be reconciled. These are complex matters that typically influence the long-term fiscal impacts of municipal restructuring.

A referendum result in favour of amalgamation would not itself create a merged municipality. Instead, it would authorise future Councils to design the structure of amalgamation over several years. The first election for a unified municipality would likely not occur until near the end of the decade. In practical terms, voters are being asked to approve a direction of travel rather than a fully developed plan. That does not invalidate the process, but it does mean the referendum should be understood as an initial step rather than a final decision.

Does a two-city merger solve a regional problem?

Greater Victoria functions economically and socially as a single urban area, yet it is governed by thirteen municipalities. Multiple zoning bylaws, planning processes, and service arrangements operate across a relatively small geographic region. Police services alone are delivered by several separate forces operating within close proximity.

Fragmentation of this kind can create coordination challenges in housing, transportation, infrastructure planning, and service delivery. These challenges are real, and they help explain why amalgamation periodically returns to the public agenda.

At the same time, a merger between Victoria and Saanich would address only part of the region’s governance structure. Eleven municipalities would remain separate. The Capital Regional District would continue to coordinate major shared services such as water, wastewater, and parks through a board that is indirectly elected via Municipal Councils. For some observers, this raises the question whether bilateral amalgamation is best understood as a first step toward broader reform or as a partial measure that leaves underlying structural issues largely intact.

Leadership, opportunity, and limits

The mayors most closely associated with advancing the current process, Lisa Helps during the 2018 decision to establish the Citizens’ Assembly, and the Mayor of Victoria in bringing forward the 2026 referendum motion, have provided continuity of political support for examining amalgamation. Their willingness to place the question before voters has ensured that the governance discussion continues rather than fades.

At the same time, the bilateral scope of the process reflects practical limits on what municipal leaders can accomplish without provincial participation or broader regional consensus. Structural reform involving multiple municipalities is inherently complex and politically challenging. It is therefore not surprising that reform efforts often proceed incrementally. The current referendum can be understood as one such incremental step, rather than a comprehensive resolution of regional governance questions.

Voting with clarity

When voters consider the referendum question in October 2026, they will encounter a clear yes-or-no choice. What the ballot cannot convey is the longer institutional history that produced the question, the uncertainties that remain regarding implementation, or the broader regional context in which amalgamation is being proposed. Amalgamation may ultimately prove beneficial. It may produce efficiencies, reduce duplication, or improve coordination across municipal boundaries. It may also have costs or complexities that cannot yet be fully quantified. What matters most is that voters understand the nature of the decision being made. A vote in favour of amalgamation is not an endorsement of a detailed final structure, but an agreement to continue developing one. A vote against amalgamation is not necessarily a vote for the status quo, but a signal that further analysis or broader regional engagement may be desirable before structural change proceeds. Public policy decisions of this magnitude benefit from careful consideration. Regardless of how one ultimately votes, the goal should be an informed choice grounded in a clear understanding of both the potential benefits and the limitations of the current proposal.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and construction law specialist campaigning for City Council in 2026. He has also written on regional governance, democratic accountability, and the importance of ensuring that major structural reforms are supported by transparent analysis and informed public consent.

As Victoria heads toward its next municipal election, one issue will quietly sit beneath almost every doorstep conversation, neighbourhood meeting, and campaign flyer what City Hall did with our neighbourhoods and who was responsible. Not slogans, not personalities, but a single, consequential planning decision embedded in the new Official Community Plan. Long after campaign signs come down, the effects of that decision will shape streets, homes, heritage, and daily life for decades. That is why this debate is ground zero. And that is why I am returning to it now.

If you live in James Bay, Fernwood, Fairfield, Oaklands, Vic West, or Hillside–Quadra, you have probably heard the line by now. It shows up at open houses, in staff reports, and increasingly in Councillors’ talking points whenever residents question the scale of redevelopment now planned for their streets.

“The Province made us do it.”

I am returning to this issue deliberately and unapologetically because that claim has hardened into an excuse. And in an election year, excuses are the enemy of accountability.

Bill 44 Lit the Match. City Hall Poured the Gasoline

Yes, British Columbia passed Bill 44. Yes, it was a major intervention in municipal land-use powers. And yes, it was aimed at cities that had refused for decades to allow even modest forms of new housing. But Victoria was not dragged into this reform. Victoria was already moving, and led in fact, through its own Missing Middle Housing Initiative.

Bill 44 has a name. It is Small-Scale Multi-Unit Housing, or SSMUH. That is the legal heart of the statute. Bill 44 mandates that lots once restricted to a single detached house must allow multiple units as-of-right for duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and in some cases up to six units, often through secondary or garden suites.

Crucially, Bill 44 is unit-based, not height-based. It does not require mid-rise buildings, four to six-storey redevelopment, or wholesale vertical rezoning of neighbourhoods. The Province was explicit. SSMUH was meant to deliver more homes, not bigger buildings. Everything beyond that, especially height, was left to municipal choice.

Four to Six Units Was the Law. Four to Six Storeys Was the Choice

Units describe how many homes are built. Storeys describe how cities are remade.

Four to six units means ground-oriented housing that can fit within an existing block without fundamentally altering its scale. Four to six storeys changes everything. It triggers lot assembly, demolition of multiple houses, commercial redevelopment, long construction timelines, shadowing, traffic, and pressure on streets that were never designed for it. Those who voted for this should bear the stigma as the damage mounts for years to come.

This is not hypothetical. Residents along Cook Street, parts of Shelbourne and Hillside, and increasingly in Fernwood and Vic West are already seeing what this scale of change looks like on the ground. And it was not required by Bill 44.

Missing Middle Was the Bait. The OCP Was the Switch

That distinction matters because Victoria had already told residents a different story. The Missing Middle Housing Initiative was framed as gentle density incremental change that respected neighbourhood context while adding much-needed homes. Many people disagreed with it, others accepted it reluctantly, but it was at least an honest conversation about trade-offs.

The New OCP Dishonestly Changes the Deal

By embedding mid-rise permissions across broad residential areas, City Hall shifted from incremental infill to systemic redevelopment without asking voters whether they had consented. What had been sold as missing middle housing became, in practice, a wholesale upzoning of neighbourhoods.

And now, when residents push back, they are told the Province left no choice.

That is false.

When Accountability Gets Rezoned Out of Existence

Bill 44 does not mandate mid-rise heights. It does not require blanket four to six-storey permissions. It does not demand that cities abandon neighbourhood-scale planning or sequencing. Those decisions were made locally, by Council, through the OCP. They were discretionary. They were political.

Victoria is increasingly governed through what might be called apparatus logic. It is a belief that legitimacy flows from process rather than choice, from consultation rather than consent, from frameworks rather than political contest. In this model, conflict is managed, not resolved. Dissent is facilitated, not answered. Outcomes are framed as the natural result of technical planning exercises rather than discretionary political decisions.

That governing style explains why the OCP treats neighbourhoods less as places to be stewarded and more as variables in a system to be optimised.

And it counts in an election year.

Voters deserve to know which decisions were unavoidable and which were choices. When everything controversial is blamed on the Province and nothing is owned at City Hall, democratic accountability collapses. You cannot evaluate judgment, priorities, or competence if Councillors dishonestly portray their hands as having been tied when they were not.

This Is Not a Housing Crisis Story - It is a Governance Failure

The consequences of this approach are already becoming visible. There is also a harder truth City Hall rarely acknowledges and that is height permissions change what survives. Once four to six-storey redevelopment becomes economically viable, existing houses, including heritage and character homes, become obstacles, not assets. So, look out James Bay. No sleight of hand “Heritage Designation” by the Mayor can compete with mid-rise land values. The result is incremental loss, block by block, under the banner of housing need. How dare the city consider this heritage policy. The policy part will be outstripped by simple economics. There will be no contest.

All of this is unfolding without binding infrastructure plans to match the scale of change being authorised. Victoria already knows its constraints. Sewer and stormwater capacity, school space, park access, narrow streets, and overstretched public amenities. Yet the OCP assumes density first and solutions later. Residents are asked to trust that infrastructure and services will catch up someday. No one should call this responsible city planning, it is more akin to an administration acting with zero accountability.

This is not an argument against housing. Victoria needs more homes, especially homes people can afford. Cities that refuse to grow responsibly deserve provincial intervention.

But supporting housing does not require pretending that every local decision was forced on us by Bill 44. And it does not require surrendering planning discipline or democratic accountability. City Hall chose to do that.

As voters, we should insist that those choices be defended honestly or corrected rather than hidden behind a provincial shield. Because it won’t be the Legislature living with the consequences of these decisions.

It will be Victoria’s neighbourhoods.

And that is why this issue will sit at the centre of the coming election whether City Hall wants it to or not, continues to try and hide it or not. Everyone should continue to return to this vast act of betrayal of Victoria. For those who voted in favour: the Mayor and Gang of Five, it should be forever disqualifying. For those who opposed: Hammond, Gardiner and Coleman, they stood with Victoria.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and former construction lawyer running for Victoria City Council. He is campaigning on the idea that good cities are built through trust, competence, and respect for the communities that already exist.

Three hundred and fifty people stood outside the Cowichan Valley Regional District offices in Duncan on March 31. The CVRD's response was a press release issued the same day promising "community engagement."

I've seen this movie before. And now I want to explain, as clearly as I can, why it's playing in Cowichan and not (yet) in Greater Victoria because the structural reasons tell you something important about local government that most people never know.

I came across this story through Community Opposition Against Policy or COAP Inc overreach, a group tracking the CVRD's draft Comprehensive Zoning Bylaw (CZB) from the start. Their Substack published a paragraph-by-paragraph breakdown of the March 31 news release the day it dropped. It is worth reading at coap.ca. What follows draws on their analysis, with governance and legal context added.

CVRD v CRD

Let me set the table first by asking what Is the CVRD and is It the same as the CRD? The answer is ‘No’. These are two separate regional districts, and the distinction matters.

The CRD, Capital Regional District, governs Greater Victoria. That’s thirteen municipalities from Victoria to Langford, plus three small electoral areas (Juan de Fuca, Salt Spring Island, and the Southern Gulf Islands).

The CVRD, on the other hand, Cowichan Valley Regional District, sits north of the Malahat comprising four municipalities (Duncan, North Cowichan, Ladysmith, Lake Cowichan) and nine rural electoral areas stretching across the valley.

Separate jurisdictions yes but identical governance architecture. The CVRD and CRD operate under the same Local Government Act. Both have boards composed of appointed municipal directors and elected area directors, with no one directly elected to the regional board itself. One upshot of this is that both delegate enormous operational authority to professional staff. What happens in one is a structural preview of what is possible in the other.

Why Did This Happen in the CVRD and Not the CRD?

This question matters, and the answer is not flattering to either district.

The roots go back to 2018, when the CVRD published Cowichan 2050, a Regional Collaboration Framework developed in response to population growth, rising housing costs, a post-forestry economic shift, and climate change. It established the guiding aspirations and growth management vision for the region. What it also did, though few rural residents appreciated it at the time, was set a policy destination that would take eight years to reach their front door.

The sequence since then has been methodical. In 2021, seven separate Electoral Area OCPs were consolidated into one. In 2025, that OCP was updated and adopted over significant opposition. It locked in an 80% growth containment target and a permission-based land-use framework that underpins the current bylaw. In March 2026, the draft CZB landed. Millions of dollars in public funds later, with a significant portion paid to consultants, the implementation stage had arrived

Rural residents in Cowichan are now discovering in 2026 what was decided in 2018. That is not an accident. It is how the playbook works. You build the policy architecture over years, at a high level of abstraction, a "collaboration framework," a "growth strategy," a "modernised OCP", that doesn't trigger the visceral opposition that comes when people realise their chickens, their RV, their dock, and their fence now require a permit from a regional authority that has never governed them at that level before.

The CVRD moved in this direction because the administrative problem was genuine. There are nine electoral areas with separate zoning regimes, inconsistencies, and no unified framework.

What the board underestimated, or chose to discount, was that consolidation is not neutral. Standardising seven local frameworks into one means the local character of each would dissolve into the regional average. Remind anyone of the Mayor’s famous “One City, One Plan”?

Differences are real and significant. Take Cowichan Bay, it’s rural, coastal and agricultural. Saltair, in contrast, is suburban and seafront; Youbou, is a remote lakeside forestry community. Each currently has its own zoning bylaw reflecting their distinct character. Under the draft CZB though they would all operate from the same base rules.

The CRD has not pursued equivalent harmonisation, and the structural reasons suggest it won't. The CRD has only three electoral areas (Juan de Fuca, Salt Spring Island, and the Southern Gulf Islands) all geographically and politically distinct, all with active civic communities practiced at pushing back. The administrative case for harmonising three areas is far weaker than harmonising nine. More importantly, the CRD's political centre of gravity is its thirteen urban municipalities, whose dominant concerns include transit, housing, policing, and regional services, not rural zoning rationalisation. The politics just do not work in the same way.

The CVRD proceeded because it could. The CRD hasn't tried maybe because it knows better.

Municipalities Were Deliberately Left Out and That Is a Problem

Here is the governance fault line that COAP has identified, and that deserves to be named plainly.

Regional district zoning authority in BC extends only to unincorporated land electoral areas. Incorporated municipalities control their own zoning. The CVRD's draft CZB applies exclusively to the nine electoral areas. Duncan, North Cowichan, Ladysmith, and Lake Cowichan are exempt. Their residents face no equivalent standardisation. Their traditional land uses are not being reclassified. Their property owners are not staring down $50,000-a-day fines for permitted activities that would become unpermitted overnight.

And yet those same municipalities sit on the CVRD board. Their appointed directors voted to adopt the 2025 OCP over an opposing signature campaign and a public hearing described as a "one-sided display of opposition." They will vote on the draft CZB. They are shaping a regulatory regime that falls entirely on rural residents outside their own jurisdictions, with no consequences for their own constituents.

This is not a quirk. It is a structural feature of how regional district governance works in BC and it is one of the least examined accountability gaps in local government.

Municipal directors carry votes on regional policy that their own voters never feel. The people bearing the regulatory costs have electoral area directors who are numerically outvoted. The result is a board that can proceed over rural opposition because the political weight of that opposition isn't distributed across the full board.

Why this Playbook Works

There is a legal mechanism that makes this difficult to challenge. Under the Local Government Act, as amended by provincial housing legislation, if a proposed zoningbylaw is consistent with the existing Official Community Plan; local government cannot be required to hold a formal public hearing.

The playbook runs as follows. Adopt an OCP first. The OCP document sets the policy destination. Hold "engagement" on the OCP that looks consultative but locks in the substantive direction. In the CVRD that is growth containment, climate frameworks and permission-based land use. When opposition emerges at the OCP stage, override it as the CVRD board did in November 2025. Then draft a zoning bylaw as an implementing instrument, consistent with the OCP recently adopted. Because the bylaw is consistent with the OCP, no formal hearing is required. Substitute open houses and surveys for statutory process. When the backlash comes as we just saw in Duncan, issue a press release promising to listen, extend the timeline, let the heat dissipate over summer, and then proceed.

This is not cynicism unique to the CVRD board. It is what the legislative framework permits. And BC regional and municipal governments across the province have learned, through professional networks and shared consultants and UBCM conferences, that this sequence works. You engage early enough to claim legitimacy. You lock in the direction at the OCP level. You implement through a bylaw the public has no formal right to challenge. You manage the backlash through PR.

It is now working in Cowichan exactly as designed.

The April 15 Test

A staff report went to the Electoral Area Services Committee on April 15 whether to recommend an extended engagement timeline. COAP is right to flag this as the pressure point.

Before the date there was only one thing above all to watch for. That is whether the April 15 report offered a formal public hearing on the bylaw, one where submissions go on the official record and directors must respond, or whether the schedule for open houses that generate no legal obligations whatsoever is just extended. The April 15 meeting ultimately produced something more significant than a simple extension of the engagement timeline. The Electoral Area Services Committee recommended pausing work on the Comprehensive Zoning Bylaw project entirely until after the October 2026 local elections and the development of a new Board strategic plan. That recommendation was then adopted unanimously by the CVRD Board on April 22.

In practical terms, this means the immediate pressure to move the draft bylaw forward through the summer and into fall adoption had been removed, at least for now. The open houses that had been scheduled were postponed, and the project itself has effectively been frozen pending a future Board.

What did not happen, however, is equally important. The process was not converted into the kind of formal statutory public hearing framework that critics had been demanding. The issue instead became politically large enough that the Board stepped back from the process altogether. The pause reflects the scale of public backlash and the growing recognition that the draft Comprehensive Zoning Bylaw had lost public confidence across multiple electoral areas.

COAP was therefore correct that April 15 represented the pressure point. But rather than simply extending engagement to dissipate opposition over the summer, the reaction appears to have forced the Board into a broader strategic retreat. The underlying questions about density, rural character, governance, procedural legitimacy, and the relationship between the OCP and the proposed zoning framework have not been resolved. They have instead been deferred into the post-election political landscape

On Solidarity

The CRD has not run this playbook, and the structural reasons suggest it won't. But the legislative tools that made it possible in Cowichan are available in the CRD and to every regional district and municipality in BC. This alone is reason enough to understand how it works.

COAP is doing serious civic work under real pressure. Their Substack is at coap.ca. The pattern they've documented is not just a Cowichan story. It's the same governance logic at a different address. Rural communities fighting for accountability deserve urban allies, regardless of whether the identical threat lands on their/our doorstep.

Greater Victoria has its own watchdog infrastructure, doing comparable work in different registers. CRD Watch, run by Sasha Izard (crdwatch.ca) operates as an independent analytical watchdog for Southern Vancouver Island, using FOI requests to document development industry influence and expose lobby groups that present themselves as community voices.

Grumpy Taxpayer$ of Greater Victoria (grumpytaxpayers.com) has been scrutinising municipal budgets, capital projects, and CRD governance dysfunction for years, reaching 2,500 subscribers monthly and maintaining a regular presence in the Times Colonist and on CFAX. Both are worth following. Neither has quite the combustibility of what is happening in Cowichan right now, but they are calling out the same underlying system.

In the end regional solidarity is not sentiment. It's how citizens remind governments that engagement theatre has costs. Rural Cowichan residents are sending that message now while Victoria residents will have their chance in October 2026.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and former construction lawyer campaigning as a Councillor for Victoria City Hall in 2026. He believes meaningful public engagement requires more than managed consultation processes, and supports governance reforms that restore genuine accountability, transparent decision-making, and meaningful public participation to local government.

In June 2024, Victoria Council’s Code of Conduct was tested for the first time. A complaint had been filed, by the Mayor, on behalf of an anonymous complainant, about Councillor Susan Kim’s public communications on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A Victoria lawyer, Marisa Cruickshank, was engaged to investigate. She produced a 23-page report.

Her conclusion: the Councillor was unaware that her communications fell within the scope of the Code. No sanction was recommended. The Council voted not to sanction her. Instead, the entire Council agreed to undergo Code of Conduct training.

Councillor Marg Gardiner’s response, quoted in the Times Colonist: “Seems that anything goes.”

She was identifying something structural, not just reacting to a particular outcome.

The Closed Loop

Victoria’s Code of Conduct Bylaw establishes a process for investigating complaints about Councillors’ conduct. The process is ostensibly independent. The problem is who is allowed to trigger it.

Under section 13 of Code of Conduct Bylaw 23-058, only a “member, committee member, or employee” may submit a complaint to the City Clerk. The Bylaw defines these categories precisely: “member” means a member of Council including the Mayor; “committee member” means a person appointed by Council to a committee, sub-committee, task force, commission, board, or other Council-established body under Part 5, Division 4 of the Community Charter or the Local Government Act; and “employee” means an employee of the city. The general public, the people the Council is elected to represent, may not file complaints.

This is not an accident. The Council drafted this Code. It chose these categories. It created an accountability mechanism that places the decision to initiate accountability proceedings in the hands of the people being held accountable, the people those people appointed, and the people those people employ.

Gardiner herself acknowledged the problem: “Our Code of Conduct badly needs to be reviewed,” she said, calling for changes “to remove the secrecy surrounding how information is sought and processed and to ensure that future complaints against city councillors receive a fair hearing.”

What Happens When You Try to Use It

I attempted to file a complaint about Councillors’ conduct following the Bayview vote. Unable to file directly, I approached a member of the Heritage Advisory Panel, one of the bodies whose members are eligible to file, to ask if they would be willing to proceed.

Their reply: “I am deeply concerned about the ethical implications of your actions, specifically your search for volunteers on boards lobbying for votes or signatures. Please do not continue.”

My response was that the Council itself had created this constraint. By limiting complaints to board-appointed members, the Council had made it structurally necessary for any concerned citizen to approach those members as the only available channel. The Council then designed it so those members would be reluctant to file, because they serve at the Council’s pleasure.

The circularity is not incidental. It is the mechanism.

Vancouver Has an Answer

The contrast with Vancouver is instructive. Vancouver’s Code of Conduct allows anyone to file a complaint with the city’s Integrity Commissioner, a full-time position. The Commissioner has standing, jurisdiction, and independence. The complainant does not need to be a board member, an employee, or a councillor.

In Victoria, when the complaint arose against one Councillor, the Council had no Integrity Commissioner. It had no established process for independent investigation. It engaged Cruickshank on an ad hoc basis for one complaint, the first complaint to go forward in the Code’s existence, and accepted the result without sanction.

When the outcome is “anything goes,” the mechanism that produced it should be examined rather than normalised.

The Principle

A Code of Conduct that the public cannot trigger is not an accountability instrument. It is a reputational document, something that can be pointed to when questions are raised, without ever being invoked when it matters.

Good governance requires that the people most affected by a council’s decisions, residents, voters, citizens, have a direct route to raise concerns about conduct. That route does not require them to find a sympathetic board member. It does not require them to persuade a Councillor to file against a colleague. It requires a publicly accessible process, administered by an independent official with genuine authority.

Victoria’s Code, as currently written, provides none of that. It provides the appearance of accountability while ensuring that accountability is available only to insiders.

This episode was the Code’s first test. The result was that a complaint filed by the Mayor on behalf of an anonymous complainant, investigated by an ad hoc appointee, produced no sanction and prompted training for everyone. The Council has not revised the Code since.

Until it does, the answer to “who holds councillors accountable?” in Victoria remains: mostly, no one.

Arthur McInnis is a candidate for Victoria City Council, a law professor and former construction lawyer. His platform includes establishing a full-time independent Integrity Commissioner for Victoria, open to complaints from any resident.

Victoria’s new Official Community Plan, Victoria 2050, passed on October 2, 2025, after a long public hearing process. Residents were promised a document that would guide growth, shape neighbourhood change, and lock in the city’s planning framework for decades to come. Less than a year later, a troubling pattern at City Hall demands an obvious question: if we immediately start bending the rules, what exactly did adopting the OCP settle?

Since adoption, Council has held only three formal public hearings. Meanwhile, a steady stream of Development Permit with Variances and Development Variance Permit applications continues flowing through the system. Identifiable variance requests dominated the agenda in January, February, March, April, and May of 2026 alone. Technically, developers are not requesting "variances to the OCP." Here’s what they are substantively.

Development Permit with Variances

This is a combined approval process used where a project already requires a Development Permit and the applicant also seeks exceptions from specific zoning or development regulations. This has become extremely common because large portions of the city are governed through Development Permit Areas (DPAs) under the OCP. These applications typically involve requests to vary matters such as setbacks, parking requirements, landscaping, height transitions, loading areas, signage, site coverage, or aspects of design guidelines. Rather than processing the variances separately, the City considers them together as part of a broader discretionary development approval. Victoria’s own fee schedules and application materials expressly refer to “Development Permit with Variance” applications.

Development Variance Permit

By contrast, a Development Variance Permit is a separate statutory instrument under the Local Government Act used where no Development Permit is otherwise required but the applicant still wants relief from zoning or other regulatory requirements. In that situation, the variance itself becomes the primary approval being sought. Victoria maintains a distinct Development Variance Permit application process and separate fee category for these permits. In practical terms, a Development Variance Permit is used when a property owner seeks exceptions from the rules without triggering the broader development permit review framework.

What this increasingly means in practice is that many variances in Victoria are no longer appearing as isolated exceptions to the rules but instead are being folded into larger discretionary planning and design-review processes. As Development Permit Areas have expanded under the new OCP framework, more of the substantive negotiation over scale, form, setbacks, parking, signage, and neighbourhood impact now occurs within Development Permit with Variances applications. Critics argue this has contributed to a planning culture that operates less through fixed rules and more through negotiated discretion between applicants, staff, and Council.

What residents are watching unfold is a two-tiered planning system. The broad growth framework is set, and under provincial legislation, public hearings for rezonings that align with the OCP are frequently waived. Consequently, the real negotiations over scale, appearance, and neighbourhood impact have migrated into the quieter and far less visible realm of variances and development permits.

Telus

The approval of massive signage variances for the new Telus Ocean building perfectly illustrates this shift and which was a Development Permit with Variances.

The proposed and now approved street-level signage consists of suspended signs, window fascia signage, and a standalone building directory sign, all generally intended to remain within the standard signage limits permitted based on the building’s street frontage. However, one sign identified in the application materials as TS-3 requires multiple variances because of its scale. On the Humboldt Street frontage, the proposal, now approved, sought permission to increase the maximum permitted fascia sign area from 4.5 m² to 45.06 m², allow fascia signage above the lowest sill line of the second storey, and expand the total cumulative signage allowance from 14.4 m² to 59.46 m².

For the Douglas Street frontage, the application similarly requests an increase in the maximum fascia sign area from 4.5 m² to 45.06 m², permission for fascia signage above the lowest sill line of the second storey, and an increase in the cumulative signage allowance from 20.0 m² to 65.06 m². The proposal also seeks to enlarge the maximum permitted vertical dimension of the suspended sign from 300 mm to 720 mm, while increasing the allowable display area of that suspended sign from 0.55 m² to 1.656 m².

The variance unquestionably represents a significant increase in nighttime visual illumination and skyline commercial lighting in downtown Victoria. The issue is less about environmental light pollution in the strict scientific sense and more about the cumulative impact of illuminated corporate branding on the city’s visual character, harbour views, and nighttime skyline. Victoria’s own Downtown Core Area Plan reportedly states that signage should avoid creating visual clutter, should not detract from building design, and generally discourages upper-storey signage. The fact that the Mayor focused specifically on ensuring the sign would not dominate views from the Inner Harbour above the Empress implicitly acknowledges that its visibility and illumination were major concerns. The larger issue is precedent. One illuminated corporate logo may seem manageable in isolation, but once such variances become normalized, other major towers will inevitably seek similar treatment, gradually transforming Victoria’s comparatively restrained skyline into a corridor of illuminated corporate branding.

The Mayor did not defend the city's visual standards. Instead, the Times Colonist reported her saying she was "pleased that Telus agreed" to lower the Douglas Street sign so it would not obstruct harbour views above the Empress.

That wording matters.

It implies the city did not enforce a strict civic boundary, but rather that Telus voluntarily accommodated the city within a negotiation where the corporation ultimately held the leverage. The city relegated itself to managing the scale of the exception rather than defending the baseline rule.

This is increasingly how Victoria’s planning framework operates. The formal rules remain on paper, but major applicants negotiate sweeping exceptions justified through economic development, housing targets, employment benefits, or design refinements. Staff frame these departures as “reasonable,” while Council debates only the scale of the exception, rarely whether the underlying rule still carries meaningful force.

A variance system only works when the baseline rules retain actual weight. Once exceptions become routine, the real planning framework is no longer the publicly adopted bylaws or policy documents. It becomes the discretionary culture of City Hall: what staff are willing to recommend, what Council is willing to approve, and what major applicants expect they can obtain. That is the real story unfolding behind Victoria 2050. The debate over development has not disappeared. It has simply moved downstream into quieter processes with fewer watching eyes, fewer formal public rights, and rules that increasingly appear negotiable.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and former construction lawyer running for Victoria City Council. He is campaigning on the idea that good cities are built through trust, competence, and respect for the communities that already exist.

When you marked your ballot in Victoria’s 2022 municipal election, you voted for a name. Behind most of those names was an organizational network you probably never heard of endorsing candidates, ranking them publicly, running third-party advertising, and mobilizing voters on their behalf. Understanding that network is the beginning of informed voting.

Here is the map.

The Victoria Labour Council

The most consistent endorsing body in Victoria municipal politics. Active in both 2018 and 2022. The VLC screens candidates for alignment with union priorities of wages, working conditions, public services, affordable housing as a rights-based issue and endorses those who pass muster.

In 2018: endorsed Marianne Alto, Ben Isitt, Jeremy Loveday, and challengers Grace Lore, Laurel Collins, Sarah Potts, and Sharmarke Dubow.

In 2022: endorsed Alto for Mayor; the Gang of Five and Ben Isitt for Council.

The Labour Council’s endorsees form the progressive backbone of the current Council majority. Candidates who win Labour backing are supposed to emphasise tenant protections and below-market affordability alongside housing supply.

Together Victoria

A grassroots progressive electoral organisation formed after 2014, run entirely by volunteers with a board elected annually. Their model: pool resources, run a small coordinated slate, win.

In 2018: ran three candidates, Lore, Collins, Potts and elected all three.

In 2022: sat out. Did not attach its name to a slate. The progressive vote was absorbed into the Homes for Living and Labour Council axis. Together Victoria’s membership had swollen to over 800 during its 2020 nomination process but chose not to deploy that organisation in the election.

Worth noting: in 2018, the Victoria Tenant Action Group (VTAG), a non-profit tenant advocacy body registered as a third-party election sponsor, was accused by a former board member of coordinating canvassing with Together Victoria, potentially violating Elections BC rules on third-party advertising. An internal investigation found “possible deliberate coordination” but no bad faith. Capital Daily broke the story.

Whether Together Victoria re-activates for 2026 is one of the most significant unknowns in this election cycle.

Homes for Living

Homes for Living was incorporated on August 28, 2022, just seven weeks before election day, registered with Elections BC as a third-party advertising sponsor. It ranked candidates in Victoria, Saanich, and Oak Bay based on housing survey responses, platform analysis, and voting records. The candidates it ranked highest largely won, achieving majorities on all three municipal councils.

Residents for a Better Victoria

A centrist reform group whose stated priorities were housing, governance, and public safety explicitly positioning itself against the direction of the outgoing Helps Council. In 2022 it endorsed Chris Coleman, Stephen Hammond, Marg Gardiner, former NDP MLA Steve Orcherton, and several others.

Coleman, Hammond, and Gardiner were elected. They are the only three Councillors who voted against Victoria’s new Official Community Plan in October 2025. Not one crossover vote in either direction between the two blocs.

Greater Victoria Acting Together (GVAT)

Non-partisan. Does not endorse candidates. Instead takes strong issue positions and conducts candidate surveys, functioning as a civic litmus test for progressive candidates without formal electoral machinery.

Affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation, an 80-year-old community organising tradition. Issues include housing as a human right, community crisis response, secondary suites, transit access, and old-growth forestry. Institutional base is faith communities, neighbourhood associations, and social service organizations.

In 2022, GVAT ran a “Homes for All Assembly” during the election period, centring housing as a human rights issue rather than a market supply question, a meaningful distinction from Homes for Living’s framing that often goes unnoticed.

Viva Victoria

Founded by a former Victoria People’s Party of Canada candidate. Launched at a People’s Party of Canada event addressed by Maxime Bernier. Claimed to be non-partisan. Ran seven candidates for Council and six for School District 61 in 2022. Platform language included “ideological indoctrination”, standard far-right code for LGBTQ+ inclusion in schools. Flagged by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network.

No candidates elected.

What This Means for 2026

Municipal elections in Victoria are not contests between independent individuals. They are, in significant part, contests between organisational agendas, labour-progressive, YIMBY supply-focused, centrist reform, and at the fringe, far-right.

When you evaluate a candidate in 2026, ask who is behind them: who endorsed them, who ranked them, who ran third-party advertising on their behalf, and whose agenda they carried into Council once elected. The voting record since 2022 on Missing Middle, the OCP, the Code of Conduct, and public safety maps precisely onto these organizational lines.

The organisational map tells you more than the campaign brochure ever will.

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.

The Mayor 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. The Mayor 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 the Mayor’s clean residency principle. The hyper-local accountability she is promising depends on boundaries that do not yet exist and may not, when drawn, deliver the geographic clarity the argument assumes.

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. The Mayor'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? The Mayor has no clean answer to that question, because there is not one.

The Mayor’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 though, the Mayor has decided to move Victoria.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and former construction lawyer campaigning as a Councillor for Victoria City Hall in 2026. He believes democratic credibility depends on applying the same standards to ourselves that we demand of others, and supports governance reforms grounded in consistency, transparency, and genuine local accountability.

Not long ago Hungarian voters delivered a record turnout to elect Péter Magyar, ending Viktor Orbán’s 16-year grip on power. Magyar’s first announced act as Prime Minister-elect was to travel to Warsaw (not Brussels, not Washington) to meet with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. The destination was deliberate. Tusk had done what Magyar now faces: dismantling entrenched, illiberal legal structures from the inside, without simply reversing every law and calling it democracy restored.

Victoria is obviously not a sovereign nation navigating constitutional crises. But the core question of how you address long-term political entrenchment, resonates closer to home than it might appear.

Over the last 12 years, under the successive administrations of Mayor Lisa Helps (2014–2022) and Mayor Marianne Alto (2022–present), Victoria City Hall has undergone a quiet but significant shift in how policy is formed and executed. Much of this was driven by genuine ambition on housing, climate, and active transportation. But critics have increasingly pointed to a functional erosion of participatory legitimacy, a growing gap between the formal processes of public engagement and their actual influence on decisions.

The parallels with Central Europe are instructive, though they are not symmetrical. In all three cases of Poland, Hungary, and Victoria, the debate centres on structural and procedural tools used by a long-tenured executive bloc to entrench policy and reduce independent scrutiny. But the mechanisms differ in important ways, and so does what “repair” would mean.

Centralisation of Decision-Making

In both Poland and Hungary, power was centralised not through dramatic coups but through the patient accumulation of procedural advantage stacking appointments, shortening consultation windows, rewarding institutional loyalty. The result was executive programs that survived electoral cycles because they had been woven into the machinery of the state itself.

The Victoria parallel is real, if far less acute. The transition from Helps to Alto has been marked by striking policy continuity a durability that reflects a consistent Mayor-Council bloc pushing long-term visions even in the face of organised public opposition. The difference is that in Victoria this consolidation operates through democratic structures, not around them. That matters enormously for how any corrective response should be framed. The problem here is not illegitimacy, but a question of whether majoritarian Council governance adequately preserves minority voices and genuine deliberation.

Devaluation of Public Consultation

A hallmark of rule-of-law degradation in Central Europe was the use of accelerated legislative processes that satisfied the formal requirements of consultation while evacuating their substance. In Hungary, constitutional amendments were rammed through on timelines that made meaningful opposition impossible. The letter of the law was observed; the spirit was not.

Victoria’s version of this is more banal but structurally similar. There is a widespread and persistent perception, shared across residents and community groups with quite different politics, that major land-use decisions and rezonings are substantially settled before public hearings occur. While statutory requirements are met; the question is whether they constitute genuine opportunities for community influence, or procedural checkboxes that give decisions a democratic patina they have not fully earned. This is harder to prove than Hungarian-style constitutional shortcuts, and harder to fix, because the remedy is cultural as much as structural.

Advisory Independence and Where the Parallel Gets Complicated

Central European debates often centred on the capture of formerly independent institutions, courts, broadcasters, election commissions, gradually restructured to align with governing ideology. Here the Victoria comparison is at its weakest, and it’s worth saying so plainly.

Victoria does not control courts or state media. Its design panels, heritage panels, and planning committees are advisory bodies with limited formal power in any scenario. The question is a narrower one and that is whether these bodies, under strong policy directives from the current era, still exercise genuinely independent scrutiny, or whether they have drifted into a facilitative posture. That is a legitimate concern, but it is a different order of problem from institutional capture in the Central European sense. Conflating them weakens rather than strengthens the case for local democratic reform.

Locking In Policy Across Future Councils

This is where the structural parallel with Hungary is strongest, and where the local example is most concrete. In Hungary, constitutional amendments were used to permanently embed Fidesz policy choices making them legally complex to reverse and requiring supermajorities to undo. Magyar’s Warsaw trip was, in part, about learning from Tusk how to navigate exactly this problem; namely, how do you reform a system when your predecessor has pre-committed future governments through the architecture of the law itself?

Victoria’s version operates through Official Community Plan amendments and zoning consistency provisions, but the strategic logic is similar. Victoria’s current Council uses higher-level policy frameworks to constrain the deliberative space available to future Councils.

The Community Safety and Wellbeing Plan, adopted by Council in July 2025, is the sharpest recent example. Mayor Alto explicitly described the 79-page plan as a “system change” that would require all municipal policy, bylaws, public works, parks and land use to be reviewed through its framework going forward. Council immediately locked in $10.35 million to initiate its rollout. Whatever one thinks of the plan’s substance, the mechanism is designed to bind successor Councils financially and ideologically before they take office. That is not governance; it is pre-commitment. And it is precisely the kind of structural move that Tusk had to carefully unpick in Poland not by simply reversing it, but by rebuilding the institutional legitimacy that had been hollowed out underneath it.

The Turnout Question

Hungary’s record turnout was the product of years of sustained civic organisation, not a spontaneous reaction to a bad government. People showed up in numbers not seen since the fall of communism because they had been persuaded, slowly and painstakingly, that it mattered.

Victoria’s last municipal election drew 37.98% of eligible voters. That figure sits against a backdrop where Canadian federal elections reach roughly 65% and provincial races 55–60%, a pattern in which participation drops exactly as government gets closer to daily life. Municipal decisions about zoning, infrastructure, and land use do not expire at the end of a Council term. They shape streets and neighbourhoods for decades.

Mayor Alto has been at City Hall since 2010, 16 years in elected office. Longevity is not a problem; experience is valuable and continuity has real costs when disrupted carelessly. But longevity demands scrutiny, and scrutiny requires participation. The next election is an opportunity to assess whether the current direction reflects what the city wants but only if more than a third of it shows up to say so.

Arthur McInnis is a law professor and construction law specialist campaigning for City Council in 2026. He has also written on democratic accountability, public participation, and the risks of allowing long-term policy frameworks to entrench political agendas beyond meaningful public scrutiny.