Link to the post on the BC Politics Watch Substack
Some wrongs leave no fingerprints. Everyone followed a rule. Each rule pointed to another rule. And at the end of it, a few hundred ordinary people lost something the city had sold them, licensed them for, and taxed them on for years. Ask who did it and you get a shrug, because in the way these things are set up, no one did and everyone did.
This is the story of how the City of Victoria created the right to run a short-term rental, licensed it, taxed it, and then spent years begging the province to take it away. It is the story of who got rich, who got ruined, and why, when it was done, the only people celebrating were hotel owners.
The Right The City Sold, Then Strangled
Forget everything you have been told about greedy Airbnb investors. The city’s own history does not start there. It starts with Victoria deciding, on purpose and for money, that short-term rentals were allowed.
For years, the city’s rules listed “transient accommodation” as a permitted use, and the city’s own paperwork said plainly what that meant: hotels, motels, vacation rentals, and bed and breakfasts. So people followed the rules. They bought condos in buildings where it was legal. They got business licences. They paid the fees, the higher fees for non-principal residences, every single year. The city printed the licences and cashed the cheques. The whole thing existed because Victoria built it and was happy to be paid for it. Right up until the day the city decided it was an embarrassment.
The unwinding started on September 21, 2017. City Council narrowed the meaning of “transient accommodation” until, in its own words, it covered hotels and motels only. The 2018 zoning changes then stripped the use out of more than a hundred zones. The owners already operating were left with something the law calls legal non-conforming status. That is not a loophole. It is a basic, long-standing protection that lets a legal use carry on after the rules change, so that nobody is wiped out overnight for a choice they made in good faith under the old rules. It is the law keeping its word. And keeping its word is exactly what the city spent the next several years asking the province to stop doing.
The Motion, Signed And Filed
You do not have to guess who wanted these rights gone. They put it in writing and signed their names.
On December 1, 2022, Councillors Dave Thompson and Krista Loughton brought a motion to council, tucked inside a tidy package of housing measures where most people would never spot it. Recommendation five asks council to:
“advocate, along with other municipalities and the UBCM, to the provincial government to introduce an amendment to the Local Government Act that would phase out the grandfathering of year-round short-term rentals in existing units and buildings.”
Look at the words they chose. Not regulate. Not tax. Not cap. Phase out. A moment later, in Caradonna’s own words, out of existence. The city was asking the province to reach in and cancel a right the city itself had handed out, for one reason only: it had changed its mind about keeping its promise. Two councillors signed it. Council passed it. So the next time someone tells you the wicked province forced Bill 35 on a helpless little city, remember this. Victoria did not have it done to it. Victoria City Council asked, in writing, with signatures at the bottom of the page.
“Regulate Them Out Of Existence”
And they said it out loud. Councillor Jeremy Caradonna, the loudest voice on council about this, said it more bluntly than his colleagues usually dare. Talking about the roughly thousand grandfathered units, he made clear the city did not want them to exist, and then:
“We have told the Province very clearly that we want them either to regulate these legacy STRs out of existence or give us the ability to do so.”
“Out of existence” is not the language of regulation. It is the language of demolition. And the city was aiming it at people’s livelihoods.
By the summer of 2023, even that much politeness was gone. Council passed tougher bylaws. Staff confirmed what everyone already knew. Only the province could deliver the final blow. So councillors told the province to either hand over the power or pay the bill itself. Caradonna had settled on his own word for short-term rentals: “quasi-hoteling.” When owners pointed out that a tourist town might actually need the beds, he brushed them off in the Times Colonist: “This is not about tourism. This is about investors who are upset about potentially losing money.” And in 2024, when council had the chance to ask the province for just a short delay, a little breathing room before the May 1 deadline, he voted against even that. His position never moved an inch. The licensed operator should not exist, and the sooner gone, the better.
The Two Councillors Who Saw It Coming
Not everyone went along quietly. The two who did not are the conscience of this story, because their warnings are right there in the record, and they were ignored anyway.
When council moved to deny short-term rental owners even a public hearing, the simple courtesy of letting people speak before their licences were cancelled, Councillors Marg Gardiner and Stephen Hammond objected. And it was Hammond, sitting on the very council doing this, who said the line that should follow every member who voted for it into the next election:
“We are not innocent in this.”
He was right. When the province finally acted, it said it had taken its direction from cities like Victoria. So the city was never the helpless victim it later pretended to be. It pushed for this, it won, and then some of its own members tried to wash their hands of the result. Hammond would not let them. Gardiner kept asking the one question nobody would answer: why had a council so eager to ruin a few hundred people never bothered to study what that ruin would cost them? They were outvoted, the way the dissenters on this council usually were. The bloc had the numbers, and on this file the numbers were the whole argument. Even Mayor Marianne Alto, who back in 2017 had been the lone voice warning against using too “broad” and “heavy” a brush, lost when she tried in 2024 to delay the rollout. Her own council voted her down. The machine she had helped start no longer had any use for her caution.
The Province Obliged, And Waved The Hotels Through
The province delivered. Bill 35, the Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act, became law on October 26, 2023. What it did is not a matter of opinion. Here is the law firm Civic Legal LLP, explaining it plainly:
“Under Section 36 of the Act, the exception in the Local Government Act and Vancouver Charter will no longer apply to Short-Term Rentals. Consequently, Short-Term Rental Operators who have relied upon lawful non-conforming use to operate Short-Term Rentals in communities prior to the adoption of regulations or bylaws prohibiting such activities will no longer be able to do so.”
In plain English, one change in the law, and the single protection keeping licensed Victoria owners in business was switched off. Victoria was named right in the law. On May 1, 2024, the grandfathered owner was finished.
Now look at what the same law did for hotels. It did nothing. It left them alone. Sections 3 and 4 exempt hotels and motels completely, and the rules went further still, lifting the principal-residence requirement entirely off strata-titled hotels that keep a front desk and offer housekeeping. The province even bragged about it, saying the law “benefits tourism by exempting strata hotels, timeshares, and ski resorts.”
So read the law for what it really is. A family with one licensed condo, renting it out while they travel: banned. A corporation with a tower and a front desk were exempt, and encouraged. The law did not end the business of renting strangers a bed for the night in Victoria. It ended it for ordinary people and protected it for hotels. There is nothing accidental about a line drawn that neatly. It was a choice, and the city’s fingerprints are all over the request that led to it.
Who Paid For the Proof
Every crackdown needs a number, and this one had a famous one. Short-term rentals, the public was told, were pulling more than 16,000 homes off BC’s long-term market. The figure came from a study out of McGill University by Professor David Wachsmuth, and it did its job. It became the backbone of the whole case for restriction, and it turned up in the province’s own briefing.
What did not make the press releases sits on page 26 of that report, in plain print, under the heading “Authorship and Funding”:
“This research was commissioned and funded by the British Columbia Hotel Association.”
So the hotel industry paid for the study that was used to justify the law that lets hotels off the hook. When a member of the public asked for more, through a formal records request, McGill’s own Secretary-General confirmed in writing, on November 3, 2023, that the report was done by Wachsmuth as freelance work, not as a McGill publication, with the funding kept off the university’s books. The evidence that condemned the short-term rental was paid for by its biggest competitor. And in all the months of selling this law to the public, nobody with a microphone felt the need to say so.
The Victory Lap
You do not have to guess how the hotel industry felt about its purchase. It said so out loud, to a room full of its own people, just days after the bill passed. At the Western Canadian Lodging Conference in Vancouver in early November 2023, Ingrid Jarrett, head of the BC Hotel Association, the very group that paid for the McGill study, told the room:
“This was a huge win. We spent a lot [on] research and then education, so Bill 35 is super-good news for all of us.”
The whole thing is in that one sentence. The win. The research they bought to win it. The campaign they ran to sell it. And the law as their reward. Adrienne Foster, a vice-president at the Hotel Association of Canada, told the same crowd the rules were a win they were “incredibly proud of,” now “the gold standard.” A law sold to the public as mercy for renters was treated by the people it actually helped as a trophy. Of the two sides in this fight, only one booked a ballroom and clapped.
The Premier Says It Out Loud
If you still doubt who this law was really for, listen to the Premier. In April 2024, at a Homes for People event, David Eby was talking up the government’s housing record. And he credited the short-term rental law with something most people would not expect from a housing policy: building hotels. He pointed to a “massive upswing in new hotel construction” in key tourist areas, naming a pipeline of roughly 1,400 new hotel rooms in Vancouver alone, with thousands more across the province expected by 2026.
Notice what that means. The province’s own leader, selling the law, did not mainly talk about renters finding homes. He talked about hotels going up. The argument for Bill 35 was that it would return short-term rentals to the long-term housing market. But here was the Premier, a year later, pointing proudly at the cranes building hotels. He said the quiet part into a microphone, at his own event, and almost nobody noticed.
The Other Door, Held Open
While the small operator was being shown the door, a very different welcome was being set up for someone else.
The condo owners had no lobby, no consultant, and no report. All they had was themselves and one request for a hearing that the city council turned down. The hotel industry came far better equipped. It has Destination Greater Victoria, a tourism group with more than 900 members, and inside it a special Greater Victoria Hotel Development Working Group. On June 12, 2026, that group came to council with a clear shopping list. It wanted faster permits, more sites to build on, city staff trained in hotel development, and new ways to turn offices and old buildings into hotels. The goal was 2,000 new hotel rooms over ten years. Council did not push back. Staff said they were already working the recommendations in, with the acting development director calling it “an opportunity, a point in time, and we want to be able to move quickly and capitalize on that.”
None of this was scribbled on a napkin. The working group produced a polished final report, written by the consulting firm Cascadia Partners and presented to council on June 9, 2026. Its members tell you everything: senior City of Victoria staff, the BC Hotel Association, lenders, developers, and the Songhees Development Corporation. Its goal, in its own words, was to “capitalize on a rare window of opportunity for hotel development.” And why is the window open? The report is honest about it: partly because of “other building typologies being less profitable,” which is a polite way of saying that now that condos do not make as much money, hotels look good again. The report asks the city for special zoning to “unlock hotel development sites,” for more density, for easier parking, and for faster approvals. Then it thanks city staff for their “great leadership and collaboration as part of the Working Group.”
Put the two side by side and the city’s priorities stop being a guess. The hotel industry got a consulting firm, a glossy report, the hotel association at the table, and city staff thanked by name and already doing the work. The licensed condo owner got a bylaw, a deadline, and a locked door. One kind of bed-for-the-night was treated as an opportunity. The other, the short-term rental, was treated as a problem to be cleared away.
The Man Who Closed One Door And Opened The Other
And the man who carried the hotel industry’s message to council was a familiar face. Today, Jeremy Loveday is an executive at Destination Greater Victoria, running public affairs for the tourism and hotel lobby. But from 2014 to 2022, he sat on Victoria city council. And he was not just any vote on short-term rentals. In the Times Colonist’s own words, he was the council lead on the file. He drove the 2018 bylaw. He championed the $500-a-day fines. He pushed the crackdown harder than anyone, and told reporters he only wished it would move faster.
So follow the path, because nobody on the current council will trace it for you. The same man who led Victoria’s war on short-term rentals now leads the hotel lobby asking that same council to build 2,000 hotel rooms. Think about what that means. As a councillor, he worked to shut down short-term rentals, the family renting out a condo, the owner with one licensed suite. Then he left council, took a job with the hotel industry, and came back to the same chamber to push hotels instead. He spent his time in office killing off the cheaper, smaller competitor. Now he is paid to promote the expensive one. He closed the short-term rental door from the inside. Then he walked around to the other side and opened the hotel door.
One Councillor’s Pattern
Which brings us back to Jeremy Caradonna, because if this council has one man who sums it up, it is him. His record is worth reading closely, and worth reading next to how the same man treats big developers.
Caradonna runs on the city’s housing numbers as a point of pride, advertising on his own election campaign site that more than 9,000 homes were approved on his watch. And look who keeps getting the green light.
Aryze Developments, a Victoria firm, has had project after project approved during his term, with Caradonna backing them from his seat. He spoke warmly for United Commons, Aryze’s 129-unit project at Quadra and Balmoral, a partnership between Aryze and the United Church of Canada to redevelop the First Metropolitan Church site. He was part of the Foul Bay Road file, where an affordable-housing promise on an Aryze townhouse project was later quietly cancelled on a council vote.
That is a broken promise to the public. An affordability covenant secured as part of the approval, then discharged without public debate or explanation. The developer got the project approved. The public got nothing it was promised.
The small short-term rental operator gets “regulated out of existence.” The developer gets a motion, and a broken promise on affordability swept away.
Something unusual stood out on Caradonna’s re-election campaign. The official financial agent for Caradonna’s 2026 re-election, listed on his own website, is Todd Lyons.
The Crystal Pool And The Same Neighbourhood
Now look at where the city decided to build its new $169 million Crystal Pool. The referendum held on February 8, 2025 asked voters to approve borrowing and to choose a site. They chose Central Park North, at Quadra and Princess. Caradonna backed the Yes campaign publicly, delivering lawn signs for the registered third-party sponsor, Let’s Get Crystal Clear.
The Elections BC filings for that campaign tell the rest of the story. The Authorized Principal Official of Let’s Get Crystal Clear was Todd Lyons, the same person who serves as Caradonna’s financial agent and campaign manager. Approximately 85 per cent of the campaign’s funding came from the leadership and network of Aryze Developments.
Look at a map. Aryze’s United Commons project, the 129-unit rental building at 934 Balmoral and 1701 Quadra that Caradonna championed through council, sits blocks from the new Crystal Pool site on the same street. A $169 million public recreation facility does not hurt the value of a major residential development in the same neighbourhood. Aryze funded the campaign to build it. Caradonna’s own campaign operative ran that campaign. And Caradonna voted to approve Aryze’s project.
These are not casual friendships. Todd Lyons is Caradonna’s financial agent, filed with Elections BC and printed on his campaign materials. He ran the developer-backed referendum campaign. He works at Cascadia Partners, the consulting firm that prepared the hotel development report for a working group that included Aryze. The developer, the operative, and the councillor appear side by side in the public record, and not once.
The Mayor And The Developers
And it does not stop with Caradonna. It runs all the way to the top. In her 2022 mayoral campaign, Marianne Alto raised $68,340. Of that, $20,948, nearly 40 cents of every dollar, came from property developers, builders, and real estate professionals. The mayor of this city took close to half her war chest from the single industry she is elected to regulate.
These were not token gestures. In September and October of 2022, in the final stretch of the race, a cluster of developers each wrote cheques at or near the legal maximum of $1,250, several within the same four-week window. The donors read like a roll call of the people who build in this city: Donald Milliken of Milliken Developments, Dalbir Dosanjh of SIR Homes, Mandeep Khara of the Monark Group, Mandeep Mangat, Jaswinder Parhar, Ankush Chaudry, Martin Keith Lindner and Tammy Lindhal of Formwell Homes, Michael Miller of Abstract Developments, Chris Reiter of Focus Equities, Gary Pooni of the Pooni Group, Ian Maxwell of the Ralmax Group, Robert and Karen Jawl of Jawl Properties, Edward Geric of Mike Geric Construction, and more.
There is nothing illegal in any of it. Every dollar was legal and disclosed. That is exactly the point. The industry did not have to break a single rule to put nearly 40 per cent of the mayor’s campaign in its pocket. It just wrote the cheques, in the open, and waited.
So when the same mayor turns up earlier in this story as the lone voice who once warned against moving too fast on short-term rentals, hold both facts at once. The council’s so-called moderate is in developer money up to her neck. The tilt is not one rogue councillor. It is the whole table, mayor included.
The Sustainability He Preaches, The Concrete He Pours
There is a contradiction in Caradonna’s record that should follow him to every door he knocks on this campaign. And the beauty of it is that it needs no enemy to make the case, just his own resume.
Caradonna is an environmental historian. He runs as a climate champion. So let us hold his beliefs up against his votes. The greenest building on earth is the one that already exists. New construction, and concrete most of all, produces huge amounts of carbon before anyone even moves in. A short-term rental, whatever else you think of it, uses a building that is already standing. No demolition. No new concrete. No new carbon. By the basic math of his own field, reusing what already exists is the low-carbon choice, and tearing down to build new is the high-carbon one.
And yet the self-described climate expert moved to wipe out the low-carbon option, while voting again and again for the towers, including new builds by the same developer whose network funded his big campaign. He uses the “reuse what exists” argument when it helps him kill short-term rentals, then forgets it the moment a developer’s crane shows up. He cannot have it both ways. Either reusing buildings is the priority, in which case his 9,000 new approvals deserve the same hard look he gave a few hundred condo owners. Or it is not, in which case his big green argument for killing short-term rentals falls apart. A man who built his whole public image on the climate owes Victoria a straight answer for why, when it comes to where people sleep, he keeps choosing the high-carbon path. He has not given one. And we doubt he will be asked for one from any podium but this one.
What Victoria, Of All Places, Threw Away
We are not saying every town in BC should handle short-term rentals the way Victoria should. A resort town buried in vacation rentals, where workers drive an hour to find a place to sleep, has a different problem than ours. And one rule forced on everyone from Victoria or Vancouver is part of how this went wrong in the first place. Different places have different needs, and local councils should be trusted to read them. That is the whole point of having local councils.
But Victoria, of all places, is the city that most needed the cheaper, flexible beds, and it is the one that burned it down. This is the capital. The legislature is here. That means a steady stream of staff, contractors, witnesses, researchers, and political workers coming through for a session, a committee, or a month-long contract, people for whom a nightly hotel rate makes no sense. It means athletes and the events that bring them. Conferences. Festivals. Family in town for a graduation, a funeral, or a long hospital stay. A healthy visitor city needs places to stay at every price, because not everyone arriving in Victoria is on an expense account, and not everyone is here for three nights. Ask what a family moving here for work is supposed to do for the six weeks before their lease starts, or where a nurse on a one-month contract is supposed to sleep. The answer used to be a furnished apartment rented by the week. The law erased that and offered a tourist-priced hotel room instead.
Here is the part that should make council squirm. The room shortage they now call a crisis is one they helped create. The hotel working group came to council complaining that Greater Victoria has lost more than 1,000 hotel rooms in a decade. And they were honest about why. The older hotels were torn down or bought by the province during the pandemic and turned into supportive housing, with the short-term rental ban making it worse. In other words, they were describing a supply of rooms that government itself spent years tearing down. Starting in 2020, the province and BC Housing took four Victoria hotels and motels out of the visitor market and turned them into emergency housing, buying Paul’s Motor Inn and the Comfort Inn outright and leasing the Travelodge and the Howard Johnson on Gorge Road. Mayor Lisa Helps welcomed the purchases, calling the province a “strong partner.” Those rooms never came back. What came instead was trouble. By the city’s own police numbers, 60 per cent of high-priority police calls in one six-month stretch were centred on these buildings and the camps around them. There were seized guns, a major drug bust, repeated fires, and nearby businesses paying for private security to clear needles from their doorsteps. You can argue the housing policy on its own merits, and the vulnerable people put in those rooms were failed just as badly as the neighbourhoods around them. But the basic math is not up for debate. The same people who pulled hundreds of rooms out of the city’s supply in the name of housing then pulled the short-term rentals out too, and now send a hotel lobby to council begging for 2,000 new rooms to replace what they took. They cleared out the cheaper bed, noticed the city was short of beds, and decided to fix it by paying for the most expensive kind.
And the timing makes it worse. This piece comes out at the peak of summer, the weeks the whole city depends on, when the hotels fill up, the prices climb, and the warning about a room shortage stops being a slide in a presentation and becomes the view out your window. This was exactly the moment those licensed, lived-in, rent-by-the-week homes would have paid off, for the visitor who cannot find a room or afford the one that is left, and for the city and residents who would have shared in the money and the taxes. None of that means a free-for-all, and nobody serious is asking for one. The problem was never the family with one suite. It was the absentee investor running ten ghost units like a hotel, and a city can license, cap, tax, and shut that operator down, as Victoria once knew how to do. Victoria had that tool. It used a wrecking ball instead. And now, in the middle of the season that pays its bills, it gets to sit in the quiet it made.
Think about what this summer was supposed to be. The FIFA World Cup runs from June 11 to July 19, with Vancouver hosting seven matches just across the water. The province is working to send the overflow our way, funding events in dozens of communities and selling ferry and seaplane day trips to draw visitors all over BC. Hundreds of thousands of out-of-province fans are in the region, and through the broadcasts, hundreds of millions of people around the world get a look at this coast. A capital city should be packed this summer, in the best way, its harbour and gardens and walkable streets full of visitors spending money in local shops. This was the year for everyone to win.
Instead, the council that found the nerve to wipe out a whole class of accommodation suddenly pleaded poverty over the hanging flower baskets, the very symbol of the self-described Garden City. In November 2025 it voted to cut them roughly in half, from about 1,200 to 600, to save a little on taxes. In the end the baskets were rescued not by the city but by Butchart Gardens, the downtown business group, and the tourism bureau passing the hat for the $130,000 the city would not spend. A council tells you a lot about its priorities by what it chooses to tear down and what it leaves to charity, in the very year the world comes to look.
Victoria could have shown the rest of the country how a capital balances real housing pressure against the real, year-round need for places to stay at every price. Instead it showed the opposite.
Why This Matters Past The City Limits
If you do not live in Victoria, you might fairly ask why any of this matters to you. Here is why. What was built here is a blueprint, and blueprints get reused.
Nothing about how this happened was unique to one council or one bylaw. A city asked the province to cancel a property right the city itself had handed out. The province said yes, with a law that hit ordinary people and let the big players off. The evidence used to sell it was paid for by the industry that gained the most. The losers were scattered, unorganized, and easy to find, because they had followed the rules and registered. The winners showed up with consultants, reports, and a former councillor to speak for them. None of that machinery is special to short-term rentals, or to Victoria. It is a method. And a method that works once tends to get used again.
The same trick can be turned on any group that trusted a permission the government later found inconvenient. Next time, the paid-for study and the carve-out for the powerful will be sitting right there, ready to go. Bill 35 already covers dozens of BC communities, and the idea behind it, that the province will step in and cancel protections a city no longer wants to honour, is now on the shelf, waiting for whoever reaches for it next. Even if you have never set foot in a Victoria condo, you have a stake in whether your own council can lobby away rights it gave you, whether the study behind your local bylaw was quietly funded by the people it happens to help, and whether the quiet, rule-following citizen is always the one left holding the bill. Victoria is just where the machine was built and tested first. The rest of the province should learn how it works, because it will work the same way anywhere.
And there is a reason Victoria keeps being the place these things start. What gets tried here has a way of moving up. Consider Lisa Helps, the mayor who presided over much of this story. It was on her watch that the province bought up the motels and turned them into supportive housing, and on her watch that the city began its crackdown on short-term rentals. She did not run again in
- And in January 2023, Premier David Eby appointed her his special adviser on housing, working directly with the Housing Minister to help shape provincial housing policy and the BC Builds program. So the approach that was tested in Victoria now has a voice at the provincial table. Whatever you make of her record as mayor, and there is plenty in this story to weigh, the pattern is the point. What Victoria does to its own residents today has a way of becoming what the province does to everyone tomorrow. That is exactly why the rest of British Columbia should be watching what happens in this city, and not looking away because it is small.
Always The Crane, Never The Building You Already Have
Step back from the details and one habit runs through every part of this story. Faced with a choice between using a building that already exists and putting up a new one, the people in charge choose the new one, every single time.
Look at the choices, side by side. The short-term rental used a home that was already standing, and they wiped it out. The motels housed people in rooms that already existed, and the province bought them and emptied them of visitors. Then look at what these same people are for. Caradonna runs on 9,000 new homes approved. Eby brags about a wave of new hotel construction. The hotel lobby wants 2,000 new hotel rooms. The province launches BC Builds to put up new buildings, with Victoria’s former mayor advising on it. New, new, new, new. The answer is always a crane.
There is nothing wrong with building homes. A growing city needs them. But notice what keeps losing in every one of these decisions: the building that already exists. The lived-in unit. The small operator. The cheaper room. Each time there was a choice between protecting what stood and pouring a new foundation, the people in power chose the foundation, and the people who got hurt were the ones already housed in what was there.
If you want to watch the whole pattern happen inside a single project, look at the corner of Broad and Johnson. There, a developer is building the Hyatt Centric, a hotel that has been under construction since 2023. In the fall of 2024, with construction costs up 51 per cent, the company went back to the City asking to grow the building from six storeys to eight and from 135 rooms to
- And listen to part of the pitch. The developer’s own president told Citified that because of the AirBnB restrictions, “many of the new hotel rooms will provide a living room and additional space as a direct response to the changes in the AirBnB policies to attract a variety of visitors to downtown Victoria, including families.” Sit with that for a second. A developer is proposing to build family-friendly, living-room-equipped, short-stay rooms, the exact product the city just outlawed in ordinary condos, except now inside a hotel tower that needs two extra floors and a council approval to pencil out. The short-term rental was banned in the building that already stood. The same thing, rebranded as a hotel room, gets a rezoning. The family visiting Victoria still needs somewhere to stay. The city just made sure the only legal version of it comes with a crane attached.
A few blocks north, the circle closes completely. On Douglas Street, the same developer broke ground in October 2025 on three concrete towers, 16, 21 and 22 storeys, more than 500 rental homes. They are rising on the site of the old City Centre Hotel, one of the hotels the province bought during the pandemic and filled with people experiencing homelessness. And directly across the street stands Paul’s Motor Inn, for decades an affordable, family-friendly motel, until the province bought and converted that one too. So on one downtown corner you can see the whole machine at once: two hotels emptied of visitors and pulled out of the market by government, and going up in their place, more than 500 units of brand-new concrete, built through the province’s BC Builds program, the very program Victoria’s former mayor was hired to advise on. The current mayor came out to celebrate the groundbreaking. The room the road-tripping family used to rent at Paul’s is gone for good. The new towers across the street will rent at market rates. Everyone got their cranes. Nobody got the cheap room back.
And here is the part the climate champions on this council never mention, because it ruins the story they tell about themselves. We saw it earlier with Caradonna and the short-term rental. Reusing a building that already stands is the low-carbon choice, and tearing down to build new is the high-carbon one. Now apply that to everything on the list. The motels, the towers, the 9,000 approvals, the 2,000 hotel rooms, BC Builds, the hotel that wants two more floors. A council and a province that brand themselves as climate leaders have built their entire housing approach around the single most carbon-heavy instinct there is. Knock it down, pour more concrete, build it new. They wrapped the most wasteful possible choice in the language of progress, and almost nobody called it what it is.
The Question On The Ballot
No single document in this story is a scandal on its own. That is what makes it work, and what makes it rotten. Every donation was legal. Every vote was recorded. Every role was disclosed on the right form. And each set of rules, read on its own, hides all the others. The picture only appears when you lay them on one table together. The motion and the exemption, the paid-for study and the victory speech, the working group and the revolving door, the developer’s money and the councillor’s campaign, the climate talk and the concrete.
The picture is this. A law sold to the public as protection for renters was, at the very same time, the biggest gift the hotel industry has had in a generation. The people who paid for that gift, the licensed, law-abiding, fully-taxed small operators who did everything the city asked and got wiped out precisely because they had registered and could be found, were told it was all about fairness. The organized interests, the ones with consultants and reports and a former councillor to speak for them, were shown to their seats and thanked for their leadership.
This October, the same people who signed the motion, refused the hearing, and voted down the delay will run for re-election and ask Victoria for four more years.
Before the city answers, it might ask them one question: which room do you think you were supposed to save?
Sources and notes
This is an opinion and analysis piece. The argument is the publication’s own, drawn from the public records, filings, reporting, and statements below.
Zoning history: City of Victoria materials on transient accommodation and the September 21, 2017 change (archived city web pages); 2018 zoning amendments removing transient use from affected zones; Local Government Act non-conforming-use provisions (RSBC 2015).
December 2022 motion: City of Victoria Council Member Motion, “Near-term Measures to Encourage More Housing and Affordability,” from Councillors Thompson and Loughton, December 1, 2022, Committee of the Whole, recommendation 5.
Caradonna’s statements: “Regulate these legacy STRs out of existence” and “quasi-hoteling,” Caradonna public commentary and council statements, 2023. “This is not about tourism. This is about investors who are upset about potentially losing money,” Times Colonist. The 2024 vote against asking the province to delay implementation, Times Colonist and Capital Daily.
Hammond and Gardiner: “We are not innocent in this,” Councillor Stephen Hammond, council debate on the short-term rental measures, local coverage; the province’s statement that it took direction from municipalities. Gardiner’s objections that council had not studied the impacts, same coverage. Alto’s 2017 “broad” and “heavy brush” dissent and her 2024 motion to delay, council records and Times Colonist.
Bill 35: Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act (2023), royal assent October 26, 2023. Section 36 (override of non-conforming-use protection), sections 3-4 (hotel/motel exemption), principal-residence requirement applying to Victoria, as summarized by Civic Legal LLP, “Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act: A Summary of Bill 35” (October 2023), and the Act itself. Strata-hotel exemption, BC regulations under the Act.
Licensed-owner numbers: roughly 650 licensed short-term rentals before the provincial rules and roughly 384 after, City of Victoria data via David Langlois.
The funded research: “This research was commissioned and funded by the British Columbia Hotel Association,” UPGo/McGill report (Wachsmuth), Authorship and Funding page. McGill access-to-documents response confirming the report was produced as freelance consulting work outside the university’s records, letter from McGill’s Secretary-General, November 3, 2023.
The hotel industry’s statements: Ingrid Jarrett (“This was a huge win. We spent a lot [on] research and then education…”) and Adrienne Foster (“incredibly proud,” “gold standard”), Western Canadian Lodging Conference, Vancouver, early November 2023, reported across the Glacier Media chain (Times Colonist, Castanet, and others).
The hotel development working group: Greater Victoria Hotel Development Working Group, “Process, Final Report, and Recommendations,” prepared by Cascadia Partners, presented to council June 9, 2026; Destination Greater Victoria presentation to council June 12, 2026, Times Colonist (Andrew Duffy). Membership, the 2,000-room goal, the “other building typologies being less profitable” framing, the recommendations to the City, and the thanks to City staff are drawn from that report and presentation.
Jeremy Loveday: council tenure 2014-2022 and role as council lead on the short-term rental file, CBC and Times Colonist, 2018-2021. Current role at Destination Greater Victoria, DGV executive-team page and Times Colonist.
Caradonna’s development record: “More than 9,000 homes” approval claim, Caradonna 2026 campaign site (electjeremy.ca). Aryze projects, United Commons (Quadra/Balmoral) and Foul Bay Road, and Caradonna’s supportive participation, City of Victoria council records and local coverage; the Foul Bay affordability-covenant discharge on a council vote.
Lyons and Crystal Pool: Todd Lyons as Election Act financial agent for Caradonna’s 2026 campaign, electjeremy.ca. Todd Lyons as Authorized Principal Official of Let’s Get Crystal Clear, the registered third-party sponsor for the Crystal Pool referendum Yes campaign; that campaign’s funding (about 85 per cent from the Aryze leadership and network), and the roughly $169 million borrowing authorization, Elections BC LECFA filings and City of Victoria referendum records. The Aryze/United Church development at 934 Balmoral and 1701 Quadra (First Metropolitan Church site, 129 secured rental homes) approved by council May 2026, City of Victoria council records and Times Colonist.
Eby: David Eby’s “massive upswing in new hotel construction” remarks at a Homes for People event, April 18, 2024, and the roughly 1,400-room Vancouver pipeline and roughly 30,000-rooms-by-2026 figures, video of the event and BC government communications.
The motel and hotel conversions: the province and BC Housing purchased Paul’s Motor Inn (75 rooms, about $15 million) and the Comfort Inn (65 rooms, about $18.5 million) in 2020, and leased the Gorge Road Travelodge and Howard Johnson, converting them to supportive housing; Mayor Lisa Helps publicly welcomed the purchases, Times Colonist, CBC, CTV, CHEK, BC Housing, and provincial news releases, 2020. Documented disorder around the sites, including a seized AR-15-style firearm and ammunition at the Comfort Inn, a trafficking-quantity drug seizure, repeated fires, a high-risk tactical arrest at Paul’s, and businesses hiring private security, Business in Vancouver, Times Colonist, Capital Daily, and CHEK, 2020-2021. The statistic that roughly 60 per cent of high-priority police calls in a June-November stretch centred on these facilities and nearby encampments, Times Colonist, January 2021.
Room-loss figures and hotel market: Greater Victoria’s loss of more than 1,200 hotel rooms over a decade to redevelopment and provincial supportive-housing purchases, with short-term-rental restrictions adding to the shortage, and the region’s stated need for roughly 1,500 new rooms, Times Colonist (Andrew Duffy), 2026, quoting Destination Greater Victoria CEO Paul Nursey.
The World Cup: FIFA World Cup 2026 dates (June 11 to July 19), Vancouver hosting seven matches at BC Place, expected hundreds of thousands of out-of-province visitors and global broadcast reach, the province’s $1.7 million for events in 32 communities, and Destination BC’s “Same Day Game Day” program, FIFA, Destination Vancouver, Destination BC, and Daily Hive, 2026.
The flower baskets: Victoria council’s November 7, 2025 vote to reduce the hanging-basket program from roughly 1,200 to 600 baskets, the $130,000 reduction, Councillor Marg Gardiner’s motions to restore it, and the fundraiser backed by Butchart Gardens ($25,000), the Downtown Victoria Business Association ($10,000), Destination Greater Victoria ($10,000), and CHEK ($10,000), Times Colonist, CHEK, and Victoria News, 2025-2026.
Lisa Helps’s provincial appointment: Premier David Eby appointed former Victoria mayor Lisa Helps as his special adviser on housing solutions in January 2023, to work with Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon on the BC Builds program, BC government news release (2023PREM0008), Times Colonist, CHEK, Castanet, and Canadian Press, January 2023. Her appointment concerns the BC Builds construction program.
Mayor Alto’s campaign financing: in her 2022 mayoral campaign, Marianne Alto raised $68,340, of which $20,948 (nearly 40 per cent) came from donors identified as property developers, builders, and real estate professionals, including multiple maximum $1,250 contributions clustered in the final weeks of the campaign, Elections BC campaign-financing filings for the 2022 Victoria general local election. Named development and real estate donors include Donald Milliken (Milliken Developments), Dalbir Dosanjh (SIR Homes), Mandeep Khara (Monark Group), Mandeep Mangat, Jaswinder Parhar, Ankush Chaudry, Martin Keith Lindner and Tammy Lindhal (Formwell Homes), Michael Miller (Abstract Developments), Chris Reiter (Focus Equities), Gary Pooni (Pooni Group), Ian Maxwell (Ralmax Group), Robert and Karen Jawl (Jawl Properties), Edward Geric (Mike Geric Construction), and others associated with the development and real estate sector. All contributions were legal and disclosed.
The Douglas and Caledonia development: Chard Development and BC Housing broke ground in October 2025 on three concrete towers (16, 21, and 22 storeys, 505 rental homes) at 1961 Douglas Street and 710 Caledonia Avenue, on the former Capital City Centre Hotel site, a hotel the province had used during the pandemic to house people experiencing homelessness; the former Paul’s Motor Inn, also acquired and converted by the province, stands directly across the street. The 133-unit below-market tower is supported by $73 million in BC Housing construction financing and an $8 million BC Builds grant. Mayor Marianne Alto spoke at the groundbreaking: Times Colonist, CHEK, Daily Hive, Victoria News, Citified.ca, and BC government news release (2025HMA0102), October 2025.
The Hyatt Centric hotel: Chard Development’s Hyatt Centric Victoria Hotel at 1314-1324 Broad Street, under construction since 2023, sought a council amendment in September 2024 to grow from six storeys and 135 rooms to eight storeys and 166 rooms, citing a 51 per cent rise in construction costs (from $394 to $595 per square foot). President and CEO Byron Chard told Citified that “many of the new hotel rooms will provide a living room and additional space as a direct response to the changes in the AirBnB policies to attract a variety of visitors to downtown Victoria, including families”: Citified.ca (Mike Kozakowski), September 24, 2024.
We do not allege that any councillor acted on secret instruction from the hotel industry, and we do not assert a document establishing that. The argument rests on the public record above. The conclusions drawn from it are the opinion of BC Politics Watch.