Link to the post on the BC Politics Watch Substack
Dear City of Victoria,
We have received an email from Councillor Jeremy Caradonna attributing this publication to a local resident. The attribution is false. The individual named is neither the author of this publication nor behind any of its accounts, and if Councillor Caradonna has repeated the claim to others, he has misinformed them about a private person.
Separately, a staff member in Mayor Alto’s office, posting under her own name, recommended that residents be “wary of this publication,” described its posts as “racist and homophobic,” and told readers to “wonder about their motives.” This was not a passing remark in a small room. It was posted to James Bay Local, a community Facebook group of roughly 18,000 members, and we have preserved it.
Consider the standard at work here. In 2024, a Victoria firefighter wrote to the Premier under his own name, raising public safety concerns about a facility being opened in his neighbourhood, and was suspended without pay for it. The Premier himself said that “no one should face consequences for writing to me.” Mayor Alto did not defend a city worker’s right to speak. She said she had nothing to do with the decision and criticized the Premier for commenting on what she called “an operational personnel matter.”
Today a member of the mayor’s own office uses a public forum to warn residents away from a publication that questions City Hall, and the question asks itself: is this, too, an operational personnel matter? Will the standard applied to a firefighter who raised safety concerns be applied to a member of the Mayor’s staff who discourages residents from reading City Hall’s political critics? Or does the standard only run one way, against the people who question it?
City Hall cannot claim that personal social media activity is beyond its concern, because it was Mayor Alto herself who advanced a code of conduct investigation into Councillor Susan Kim after Kim signed, in her own name, an open letter describing accounts of sexual violence against women in the October 7 Hamas attack as unverified. The investigator found a breach, concluding that Kim had not made sufficiently clear when she was speaking as a councillor and when she was speaking as a private citizen. The precedent is the mayor’s own. We ask only that it be applied as readily to her office as it was to a council colleague.
Freedom of expression and freedom of the press are protected under section 2(b) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and that protection exists precisely for this: citizens scrutinizing the governments they pay for. It covers reporting, commentary, and satire alike. Satire is centuries older than this country, and it has survived because it does a job nothing else does. It lets the governed laugh at the governing, and power has never answered it with anything but force or better behaviour. It covers anonymous writing too, a tradition as old as political journalism itself. A free press does not require City Hall’s approval of its tone, its anonymity, or its conclusions. Officials are entitled to respond to what we publish. They are not entitled to use public office to mislabel criticism as hate, or to pin our work on residents it does not belong to.
We write this in a world where journalists are jailed and killed for criticizing the political class. In Canada that criticism is a protected right, and those who seek public office accept scrutiny of their votes, their spending, their salaries, and their conduct as part of the job. That is the bargain of holding public power in a democracy, which is why the direction at City Hall alarms us: more business conducted in closed meetings, information that grows harder and slower to obtain, a councillor speculating about the identity of his critics, and a staffer in the mayor’s office discouraging residents from reading them. Democracies do not need their critics to be quiet. They need their governments to answer them.
Parliament has an official Opposition whose entire job is to challenge the government every day it sits. Victoria council has no such institution, and the local press has shown little appetite for the job; too much of what passes for coverage of City Hall is a light rewrite of the City’s own press releases, when the public deserves someone reading the filings and asking the follow-up questions. The scrutiny that remains increasingly falls to residents. We are part of that. Meanwhile, the councillor who sent us a false attribution about this publication spent this spring calling for “reasonable, rational, and enforceable regulations” on AI-generated content at every level of government, warning that false information online threatens democracy itself. Whatever the merits of that proposal, a councillor worried about false information online could start with the false claim he put in writing himself.
For readers new to this publication, our record is consistent. We questioned the rezoning of the harbour, passed in a single afternoon; the redrawing of James Bay’s boundaries in the new Official Community Plan, adopted over what many residents call no meaningful consultation; and the siting of the Dowler Place facility, which neighbours, including the firefighter later suspended, say happened without them. We questioned the Crystal Pool referendum, where Councillors Jeremy Caradonna and Matt Dell campaigned for the Yes side and voters approved $169 million in borrowing toward a $209 million project without knowing that roughly 85 percent of the Yes campaign’s significant contributions came from the leadership network of Aryze Developments, whose project pipeline sits in the pool’s neighbourhood, or that the campaign’s authorized principal official is now Councillor Caradonna’s 2026 financial agent. All of it was legal, and none of it was visible in any single filing. Victorians deserve to know how decisions about their money are made.
The same principle applies to the harbour. When the City declared it would not “stand in the way” of major harbour-front land transfers, and when we called for transparency around the publicly owned lands adjacent to the Legislature, we argued that decisions of that magnitude deserve greater public involvement: published terms, published timelines, and a genuine chance for residents to be heard. The harbour is the entryway to this city, and it does not belong to the City alone or even to the province alone; it is public land and water, held for all Canadians, and decisions about its future should be made in the open, not announced after the fact. For making that argument, an MLA publicly called this publication racist. We would make the identical argument if those lands were going to a property developer, a university, or any other party, and our record shows we have. The question has never been who receives public land. It is whether the public is consulted before decisions of that scale are made in their name. We support reconciliation, and we do not accept that transparency and reconciliation are opposites. No one gets a pass from public process, and asking that the process be followed is not an act of hostility toward anyone.
Our scrutiny has not stopped at elected officials, because senior unelected staff spend public money and exercise public power too; it follows the power, not the title. We have argued for the closure of a supervised drug consumption site, a policy position that many residents share and many others dispute, and the disagreement is legitimate in both directions. Calling a policy argument hateful does not answer it. As for our motives, nobody has to wonder about those. They are printed in every piece we publish.
We put three questions to the City directly. Was the social media activity described above conducted on City equipment or on City time? Are any City resources or staff hours being used to disparage residents of Victoria or this publication? What is the City’s policy on personal political activity conducted through City resources?
Through all of this, notice what has been missing: any dispute of the facts we have published. Not one figure, date, or document has been challenged. The response instead has been to guess at who writes this publication, and to guess wrongly. Going after presumed authors rather than published facts is not a rebuttal. It concedes that the facts stand. Criticizing land use decisions, public spending, and the treatment of city workers is not racism or homophobia. It is civic accountability.
If anyone at City Hall believes something we have published is false, say what, and show why. Our correction policy is simple and has always been open to everyone: write to us and show us the error. Until then, we ask Councillor Caradonna to retract his attribution and correct the record with anyone he may have told, we ask the member of the mayor’s staff to take her post down, and we ask anyone else who has pinned this publication on a private resident to do the same. Documentation of every instance is on file.
We finish where we began. Victoria is the capital of British Columbia, and its council should be the gold standard for open local government in this province. Right now it is behaving like something democracy is not. We write this on a day when yet another council matter sits behind closed doors, off camera. Turn the cameras on. Closed meetings are meant to be the law’s narrow exception, not a habit, and a government paid with public money that grows comfortable deciding public business out of public view is shielding itself from the very scrutiny it signed up for. Everyone knows what closed doors and silenced critics are the marks of. No Canadian wants their capital city to resemble that. Do better. Victoria deserves it.
We will keep publishing.
BC Politics Watch