Link to comment on the Times Colonist website
We need to elect councillors who are open-minded, adept in civic and administrative matters and well-acquainted with economics.
A commentary by a resident of James Bay.
Victoria Coun. Dave Thompson’s April 4 letter could be reduced to one simple, obvious sentence: “We can’t please everyone.”
That’s why we need to elect councillors who are open-minded, adept in civic and administrative matters, and well-acquainted with government and market economics.
Only then can we trust them to reach complex decisions based on sound reasoning and fact-based analysis, even though the information before them is often incomplete, conflicting, and time-varying.
This council is sorely lacking.
One councillor said at a recent public meeting: “The fact is, those who advocated for housing won the most votes [in the 2022 civic election]”. So confident and convincing that utterance was, yet in proper context the reasoning behind it was deeply flawed.
First, “housing” means different things to different people. Was he referring to subsidized, market, affordable, or rental housing, single- or multi-family, or some combination of these or other forms? Is any housing “good housing”, anywhere?
Most everyone wants housing of one sort or another built, so obviously candidates who advocated for that won the most votes. I can’t think of any candidate who suggested we should stop building homes for people.
Second, other vital issues were debated at election time, and those might or might not have been correlated to “housing” once all the votes were tallied.
I suspect that endorsements from various industry organizations, trade unions, political parties, and influencers had much more to do with who won the election than did the universally-supported notion of housing.
Elections B.C. records show that one councillor’s donor list includes a veritable “who’s who” of developers and high-ranking provincial NDP influencers of the past and present.
Third, the remark came in the context of a particularly controversial 14-storey market-rate condominium proposal in a transitional area of James Bay, not to housing broadly.
Thus, the councillor conflated the specific with the general, a textbook case of Simpson’s Paradox at work.
In short: just because most people want more housing doesn’t mean that they want this particular housing project. Many professionals succumb to this error; it can lead to misplaced self-confidence, and to disastrous results in practice.
Another councillor mentioned at the same meeting that more than 1,000 neighbours were notified of this controversial proposal, but only about 100 of them provided written feedback.
More than 90% of that feedback was in stark opposition, still the councillor concluded that “The feedback on this is actually quite positive [because] when people don’t provide feedback it means they’re supportive.”
This statement shows a clear bias towards a desired outcome. Using similar reasoning, one might conclude that none of the serving councillors should be in office, because of the 75,000-odd eligible voters, 60,000 couldn’t be bothered to vote for any of the names on the ballot.
Note: Elections B.C. records show that the three councillors referenced in this missive received campaign donations from the proponent of the proposal in question. That leads to further questions regarding what sort of logic is being applied.
Logic and judgment errors like these surface often at council meetings I’ve attended.
The Official Community Plan process has been riddled with them too, but there is too much certainty and conviction at City Hall and in the provincial government to worry about dissenting opinions or facts.
The mayor stated towards the end of that meeting: “I am woefully delighted that the provincial government has eliminated the opportunity for public hearings in anything other than OCP amendments.”
No wonder a sense of doom hangs over Victoria residents as we contemplate the destruction of older buildings and the well-being of their displaced residents.
Meanwhile, yet another squared-out brutalist monolith makes its way to council, often with exaggerated density requests backed by the plaintive but dubious claim that more density is needed to offset the housing crisis.
Victoria is faced with many complex challenges and competing priorities. It will be for years to come.
These politicians are certain they are right and justified, yet their certainty is based on shifting political and economic foundations, and constructed with questionable logic.
Stating the obvious like “we can’t please everyone” is dismissive and belittling to citizens.
We need to elect leaders who can reason much better than this, leaders who are humble enough to listen even to those who didn’t endorse their campaigns.