Link to the post on the BC Politics Watch Substack
At 8:20 on the morning of February 7, 2024, Councillor Matt Dell emailed two senior City of Victoria planners about a contested development at 1734 Hollywood Crescent, in the Gonzales neighbourhood. The address is not a vacant lot. It is one of the neighbourhood’s landmarks, a beautiful historic heritage house with a rare and distinctive stone garage, and the owners want to demolish it. That is what residents had been writing to Dell about for weeks: they were asking the councillor who campaigns on listening to help save a landmark from the wrecking ball. Here is what he asked the city’s planners for, word for word:
“I’d like to send a large message to everyone today, just to let them know that I’m responsive to their concerns. Do you have any brief suggested messaging for this particular project?”
Read it again. He did not ask staff how to address the residents’ concerns. He asked staff to help him write a message whose stated purpose was to let residents know he is responsive. Not to be responsive. To be seen to be. He signed off asking for “a few project specifics that are public,” because, in his words, “I think the residents do want some details to chew on.”
That email sits inside an 863-page freedom-of-information release. Nowhere in those 863 pages does the promised mass message to residents actually appear. What appears instead is a portrait, in Dell’s own hand, of how Victoria’s hardest-working public image really works.
The watchdog who watches you
Nine days before that email, Dell had reassured a Gonzales resident worried about the same project. “I’ll be monitoring it closely to ensure it’s something that fits the guidelines, as you have outlined,” he wrote. The resident had every reason to think the neighbourhood had a set of eyes at City Hall.
They did. The eyes were pointed the other way. On April 8, 2024, Dell wrote to the City Manager’s office asking for an update on the file and volunteered this: “I won’t share anything with the neighbours, or the folks petitioning against it.” The close monitoring he had promised residents was, in his own words to staff, a one-way valve.
By May 27 he was introducing residents to the developer’s consultant directly, vouching for the man, “I’ve known Joe for a number of years… a key local advocate for supporting seniors housing, affordable housing, and things like that,” and stating his goal plainly: “My hope is we can find some resolution on this project before it arrives at council.” The residents’ petition asked for one thing, that council enforce the rules council itself had passed weeks earlier. Dell’s documented hope was that council never see the file at all.
A fellow councillor said the quiet part in writing the same week. To staff, Jeremy Caradonna described the residents’ letters as “a fairly intense campaign… replete with a petition and many angry emails,” and stated a structural preference: “we should be keeping non-expert elected officials out of these decisions as much as possible.” To the residents themselves, months earlier, he had played a different character, calling the delegation rules a mystery, “a line that I am still trying to understand.” In public he claimed to be baffled by the process; in private he knew exactly what he wanted from it.
The two faces, for two years
If Hollywood Crescent were a single file, it would be a single file. It is not. Every time Dell’s audience changes, his position changes with it.
To voters in 2022, through his Times Colonist candidate profile: “The most important thing the council can do is listen to residents and work to address their concerns.” By his third year in office he was telling the council chamber the opposite, that too much public input was a hazard rather than a duty. The councillor elected on listening had come to treat listening as the problem.
The Official Community Plan shows both faces too. In public, Dell sold it as consultation-driven city building. Writing to Homes for Living, the development lobby whose endorsement he is chasing for 2026, he described the real payoff: council picked the “boldest” option so that “developers will no longer need to worry about the rezoning process.” In the same reply he waved off residents’ worries about trees and affordability as “misleading arguments” from the “comfortably housed.” That is what your emails become when he is writing to the people he credits with winning him the last election.
The votes against you
Dell’s dismissiveness is not confined to private email. It runs through his voting record, on the very machinery that lets ordinary people reach their own council. In August 2023 Dell backed a change that stripped residents out of the city’s Code of Conduct complaint process, leaving only councillors, staff, and committee members able to file a complaint about a councillor’s conduct. The mayor herself called it narrowing “far too dramatically.” Two years later he voted against standing up a public engagement program on the draft city budget, arguing that open input just lets people “stack the deck,” and calling skewed consultation “one of the reasons we have a housing crisis.” Both votes run the same direction, away from the public and toward a council that hears less.
Then there is how the public’s money moves. In April 2026, asked to turn a $175,000 grant to the privately owned and operated Victoria Curling Club, drawn from an emergency contingency fund and handed out outside every published grant program the city runs, into a repayable loan, Dell refused. “I find it just frankly morally wrong that we’re treating this as some sort of like business loan proposition,” he said. “This is a gift.” For a resident petitioning about the development next door, the rules are ironclad. For the right recipient, they are a gift.
Who does Matt Dell work for?
There is a reason the private Dell keeps siding with the province’s building agenda over his own neighbourhood, and it is not a secret. He tells you himself, on his re-election brochure, under the heading “Matt has deep roots in Victoria”: he “works in policy and legislation with the BC Government.” The BC Government Directory lists him, this month, as Director, Legislation in the Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills. He is a serving provincial employee. He is also a Victoria city councillor, and has been since 2022, voting on the housing, zoning, and density files where the province has spent four years overriding cities like his own.
Two oaths, two employers, two cheques. One of the cheques is public, and anyone can look it up: a Victoria councillor made $47,496 when Dell took office, a number the city’s bylaw lifts with inflation to somewhere near $58,000 today. What the provincial job pays, these figures can not be found. At least not from a recent search. A Director of Legislation earns well into six figures, and the province names every public servant paid $75,000 or more in its annual Public Accounts, so a full director’s salary sits on the public record. What Dell has never reconciled is how much of that director’s job he still does, and how it fits inside the thirty-hour council weeks he has described. Between the two cheques, his public income plausibly clears two hundred thousand dollars a year, drawn at once from the two governments he is supposed to hold apart.
He has been vocal about the smaller cheque. In his first term he and Caradonna moved to have council work declared full-time and councillor pay lifted to half the mayor’s salary, and it carried five to three. “It cannot simultaneously be a full-time job with part-time pay and benefits, which is what it currently is,” he told the chamber. Set that beside the man who said it: at that moment he was drawing a second salary from the province to direct its legislation. Take him at his word that council is full-time work, and the province was paying him for a director’s job in hours a full-time councillor could not have had to spare. Take the provincial cheque as honest work, and council was never the full-time job his motion claimed. He cannot have it both ways, though both cheques cleared.
The duty he is under
British Columbia does not leave this to good intentions. Its Standards of Conduct require a public servant to put the government’s interests ahead of his own, to protect confidential information, and, in the document’s own words, to prevent conflicts of interest “or the perception of conflicts of interest” from arising, disclosing any conflict that is real, perceived, or even possible to a manager or an ethics advisor.
Everything turns on that one word, perception. Nobody has to prove a public servant did something wrong; it is enough that an ordinary person, looking at the setup, could reasonably wonder whose side he was on.
Dell’s four years do not survive that test. In late 2023 his employer, the provincial government, passed Bill 44, the housing law that forces cities to allow more density on residential land, orders them to rewrite their community plans to match, and, once a plan is updated, bars them from holding a public hearing on any rezoning that fits it. It handed Victoria its housing targets and made clear that any council dragging its feet would be overruled. Then the same man, sitting as a councillor, voted the Missing Middle rules, the Official Community Plan, and the rezonings through, giving the province exactly what it asked for. Every time he votes yes on more density, you cannot tell whether that is Matt Dell the councillor making up his own mind or Matt Dell the provincial employee following his employer’s rulebook. Either way, residents concerns never seem to be heard. A conflict of interest is not the same thing as a bribe. It just means the public can no longer be sure a vote was cast for them and not for someone else, and Dell has carried that doubt into every housing vote he has made.
The province’s own rules say public servants who run for office must keep their political activity clearly separate from the job. Down the harbour, in the federal public service, the rules bite far harder: an employee cannot even become a candidate without written permission from the Public Service Commission, which can order leave without pay for the entire length of a municipal term. A federal counterpart in Dell’s position could be made to give up the government salary for as long as he sat on council. British Columbia asks only that its people keep the two roles “clearly separated,” takes their word for it, and lets the second cheque keep arriving.
Bayview is where that conflict stops being theoretical. A twenty-acre project in Vic West, nine new towers of ten to thirty-two storeys, it drew hundreds of residents to the public hearing, most of them opposed. Council approved it 7 to 2, with Dell in the majority, speaking of how solemn the decision was. To vote against a project that size was to vote against his employer’s signature agenda; to vote for it was to advance that agenda.
None of which means Dell fails to grasp what a conflict of interest is. He invokes it, precisely, when it serves him. On December 7, 2023, he recused himself from a vote on the city’s taxed boulevard program because it touched his own property, stepping out and slipping back in the sixty seconds it took the item to pass. The system worked exactly as designed, and Dell worked it.
The more revealing recusal came two years later. On December 11, 2025, when council moved to write to a provincial legislative committee about a bill, Dell stepped aside again, and the reason recorded in the minutes was “a perceived perception of bias.” Bias from what? From the plain fact that he works for the provincial government, and here was council presuming to lobby that government. On that file, Dell decided his provincial employment created enough of a perception problem that the right thing to do was leave the room. He was right.
His housing record is where that same principle quietly disappears. The provincial employment has not changed, and the perception of bias hangs just as heavily over every vote he has cast to enact his employer’s housing law: Bill 44, the Official Community Plan, the rezonings, the Missing Middle rules. If a letter to a provincial committee was too close for comfort, voting his provincial employer’s entire building agenda through a city council is closer still. Yet on those votes, the ones that remake whole neighbourhoods, he has never stepped aside, never disclosed, never so much as paused. He recuses himself for a boulevard outside his house and for a piece of correspondence. He stays firmly in his seat for the agenda that pays him.
Complaints, and no answers
Freedom-of-information records indicate that complaints about Dell’s dual role have been made to the BC Ombudsperson. Whatever has come of them is not public. The questions at their centre, whether the conflicts were disclosed, whether the arrangement squares with the Standards of Conduct, whether his votes on his employer’s housing files were shaped by his provincial job, remain unanswered, and Dell has gone on voting, writing, and now campaigning as though they were never raised.
James Bay pays the bill
The two faces are not a Hollywood Crescent problem. They are a James Bay problem also, and the neighbourhood has now paid for them twice.
Dell wears a second pair of hats there too. He is council’s liaison to James Bay, the man meant to carry its concerns into City Hall, and at the same time the city’s appointed representative on the board of the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority, which runs the working waterfront at the neighbourhood’s edge. On June 25, 2026, that arrangement came due. In a single afternoon, with no public hearing and no direct notice to residents, council rewrote the zoning across the industrial waterfront, permitting heavy uses including ship breaking as of right, lifting height limits, striking parking requirements, and cancelling the Harbour Road design guidelines. The consultation beforehand ran almost entirely through the harbour businesses that stood to gain. A James Bay resident who had presented for the neighbourhood during the residential phase of the same planning process says the industrial rezoning never came up in those talks, and that he learned of it only when the June 25 agenda went online, the way any stranger would. The liaison who should have warned him held both relevant seats and used neither. When Councillor Marg Gardiner asked for seventeen minutes of questions instead of ten, Dell voted her down. His one contribution to the afternoon was to praise staff for their “comprehensive work” on a complex file, a curious thing to say about a mere five-page report that Councillor Chris Coleman, in the same meeting, said had missed the mark for barely weighing the neighbourhoods it would reshape. City staff were at it again, and Dell, the councillor did not hold them accountable in any way. The opposite.
The waterfront was the second turn of the handle. The first came the previous October. When council adopted the new Official Community Plan on October 2, 2025, it upzoned most of James Bay to six storeys, over a neighbourhood already, by residents’ own count, forty percent denser than any other in the city, seventy percent renters, and given a single two-hour workshop where earlier plans gave neighbourhoods years. The councillor whose one job was to carry that objection into the chamber was not in the chamber. The nine-member council was down to eight that night, and the empty chair was Dell’s. James Bay’s own liaison missed the most consequential land-use vote of the term, the one that rezoned his neighbourhood over its objections and, as it turned out, moved the boundaries beneath it.
Because buried in the plan was a detail almost no one caught. On a greyscale map on page 194 of Appendix C, inside a document of roughly eleven hundred pages, the lots for a fourteen-storey James Bay tower had been nudged across a line into the Downtown Core Area. Everything turns on that line. Once a parcel sits inside the Downtown Core boundary, a tower on it counts as consistent with the Official Community Plan, and under Bill 44 a rezoning consistent with the plan cannot go to a public hearing. The height never had to be argued in the open, because moving the map closed the hearing before the argument could start. By March 2026 the lots were on the market. And James Bay’s were not the only ones to move: more than a dozen residential blocks in Fernwood, plus parcels in Burnside-Gorge, North Park, Fairfield, and James Bay, were lifted from their residential zones into the expanded downtown zone in the seven weeks before the vote, each now sealed off from a hearing. Council did not grasp the scale of it until October 16, fourteen days after voting the plan into law. They had adopted a document they never finished reading.
Pressed by residents, the bloc has an answer ready: the province tied their hands. Caradonna put it in writing to a constituent. The province, he replied, “has made changes to the Local Government Act that prevent us from holding public hearings on development projects that align with the Official Community Plan, so there are fewer public hearings than before.” Gaslighting par excellence. True as far as it goes, and it flips cause and effect. That rule strips the hearing only after a proposal is found to align with the plan, and nothing made a fourteen-storey tower on those lots align with anything until council moved them into the downtown zone. The province did not draw the boundary on page 194. Council drew it, and only then reached for the province to explain the silence. In Dell’s case the excuse fails twice, because he cannot even claim he stood in the chamber and lost the argument for James Bay. On the night the map moved, he was not there.
The rescue that was choreography
Then came the sequel, and it is the most telling part. The density did not land quietly. Residents packed the hearings, buried council in email, and organized against being asked, in the mayor’s own words, to carry too much. Faced with that anger, the people who delivered the plan produced a gesture. In November 2025, weeks after the plan passed, Mayor Alto moved to explore designating James Bay a heritage conservation area, and Dell seconded her. The timing is the whole story. The plan that upzoned the neighbourhood and, by residents’ account, protected none of its heritage had passed in October; the motion to go looking for heritage protection appeared in November, after the backlash, from two of the people who delivered the loss. It designated nothing. It asked staff to study the question and report back, the same instrument Dell reached for on his “cooling bylaw,” which was itself only a request for a staff report sold as a concrete step. He was careful, too, to reassure the development side that a heritage designation need not slow a single tower. A neighbourhood loses its protection in one motion and is offered a study of maybe getting some back in the next, on the promise that the study will change nothing. What the residents had asked for was a shield; what the motion handed them was choreography.
The record he runs on
The rest of his advertised achievements open the same gap the moment you check them. He says FernFest is back; the minutes show council redirected $20,000 from an existing grant pool after the organizers missed the proper deadline, approved only after an amendment to trim it died on a tie, with a developer, Aryze, quietly adding $10,000 that appears nowhere in his telling. He takes credit for the Christ Church Cathedral rezoning “so the church can build affordable housing”; what council actually passed, 6 to 2, was a rezoning with no development permit, no construction, and no enforceable affordability requirement on the up-to-eighteen-storey, three-hundred-unit density it enables.
Nowhere is the gap wider than at Hermann’s Jazz Club, and nowhere is Dell more exposed by his own words. His election brochure lists “Hermann’s Jazz” among the things he has delivered. What he delivered was a land purchase the public overpaid for. In March 2024 the city bought the building for $3.95 million, roughly $691,000 over its assessed value, paid not from any arts budget but from the Land Sale Reserve, a fund restricted to acquiring land; by 2026 the property was assessed at $1.58 million, less than half what the public was charged. While the mayor spoke of saving live music, Dell described the deal as a developer would, calling its “potential for arts, city revenue and eventual land assembly” “huge.” Land assembly is not a jazz term. Two years later the operator collapsed, and it was the public, 2,903 donors giving $455,820, who cleared the debts and reopened the doors, getting no ownership and not even a tax receipt. The city kept the land, the residents kept the bill, and Dell now runs for re-election on having saved the place.
The donor, and the vote
On October 1, 2022, in the final days of the campaign that first elected him, Dell took five hundred dollars from Ed Geric, president of Mike Geric Construction, one of the larger multifamily developers in Victoria. Geric wrote the identical cheque to Alto, Caradonna, Thompson, and Loughton. For a developer, five hundred dollars is small money that buys something larger: proximity. And proximity to this council has paid Geric’s firm back more than once. On April 16, 2026, council granted $677,500 from the Housing Reserve Fund to help a non-profit buy 611 Speed Avenue, a stalled Geric condominium, at full market price with no discount for the taxpayer, after Geric lost nearly a third of his presale buyers in the same downturn now driving the province-wide condo bailout. Victoria paid market price to finish a sale the market would not, and filed it under affordable housing.
The public can see the donation. Whatever passed between developer and councillor afterward stays hidden, because Victoria, like every municipality in the province, keeps no lobbyist registry, and a councillor who wanted a conversation kept off the record would only have to move it off his victoria.ca inbox. When Gardiner and Hammond moved this March to stop the city paying dues to the developers’ own lobby, the Urban Development Institute, the motion carried eight to one. The lone vote to keep writing that cheque was Dell’s. He has said his council is “in the pocket of trying to build more housing.” In the pocket. His phrase.
Ask me anything
Dell’s re-election signs carry two slogans: “Ask Me Anything” and “Leadership That Listens.” Hold them against the record. James Bay asked to be told before its waterfront was rezoned, and was not. Residents packed the hearings to ask not to be planned around, and were. The public asked to keep the right to file a conduct complaint against a councillor, and Dell voted to take it away. A councillor asked for a few more minutes to question the harbour bylaw, and Dell voted her down. For four years the asking was never the problem. The answering was. And now we know, from his own inbox, what the answering is for: to send “a large message to everyone today, just to let them know that I’m responsive to their concerns.” Not to be responsive. To be seen to be.
The birthday ask
Today is Matt Dell’s birthday, and yesterday he marked it by posting to all of British Columbia on Twitter (X), asking people to help pay for his re-election. Think about what that request really is. A director inside the BC NDP government, drawing a provincial salary funded by the whole province, is now asking that same province to buy him four more years on Victoria council. The outside job and the outside money were the problem all along, and his answer is to go looking for more of both. A seat on this council is not a provincial appointment. It answers to the people who live here and to nobody else, not a party, not a premier’s office, not a donor a province away who will never have to live under the vote he helped pay for. For four years Dell’s loyalty has pointed everywhere except at the residents who elected him. Matt Dell keeps one face for the public and one for the record. The record is the honest one.
Note: The Hollywood Crescent emails quoted here are drawn from City of Victoria freedom-of-information release VIC-2024-094; other quotes are drawn from council meeting records and video, an authorized campaign questionnaire reply, and published reporting. Freedom-of-information records indicate that complaints about Councillor Matt Dell’s conduct have been made to the office of the BC Ombudsperson; those complaints have not been adjudicated. Where we characterize the distance between what Dell says in public and what he writes in private, and where we judge his performance in office, those are the considered opinions of BC Politics Watch, offered as fair comment on a matter of significant public interest, the October 17, 2026 municipal election, in which he is a candidate. No allegation of criminal conduct is made or implied. Demonstrable factual errors may be sent to contact.bcpoliticswatch@proton.me for correction.