Link to the post on the BC Politics Watch Substack
Before a city can rezone your street, it has to hold a public hearing. You walk into the chamber, take the microphone, and tell the people at the dais what you think before they vote. It is the one place in the whole apparatus where an ordinary resident, carrying no consultant and no history of donations, stands level with a developer. If the chamber is usually half-empty, it is not for any lack of caring; it is because the decision has been buried where nobody will find it in time, a single line inside a thousand-page plan, a rezoning folded into a report with a bloodless title, an appendix no resident was ever meant to open. Over the past year, in the capital of British Columbia, under Mayor Marianne Alto and her Gang of Five, that hearing has been taken away three times. None of it happened in open debate or came down to a close vote. It went as lines redrawn on a map, deliberately buried in an appendix hardly anyone would open in time, as a motion moved on a slow summer afternoon, and, this morning, as a staff report that carries no elected name anywhere on it.
Three neighbourhoods, and in each the thing the hearing would have slowed was building the city’s donors and lobbyists wanted moving. What makes it work is the smallness of each step. Nothing arrives as a single outrage you could organize against; it comes in fragments, each too dull to make the news and too technical to fight, drafted by staff who can count on almost no one reading as far as the page that matters. When a resident finally does, and asks how an entire neighbourhood was rezoned without a word to the people who live in it, the councillors who arranged every step of it will look that resident in the eye and say, with feeling, that the province left the city no choice. So do not let the mayor and council fool you. They did this themselves, all of it, and they are gaslighting an entire city into believing the province made them do it. The province did no such thing, and the three cases below show it.
Old Town, This Morning
Begin with the one under way as you read this. At nine o’clock this morning, in Council Chambers at City Hall, council is sitting in Committee of the Whole with Item G.2 before it, “Economic and Employment Land Solutions,” a title that nowhere contains the words Old Town. The report beneath it does.
Understand what Old Town is before you read what is being done to it. Its brick and stone streetscapes run from the 1850s to the 1890s, gold-rush storefronts and Victorian warehouses that make it one of the oldest intact commercial districts in Western Canada, and it stands in the provincial capital, which is to say it belongs to every British Columbian and not to Victoria alone. This is the postcard the city sells the world: the harbour, the old brick, the sense that one corner of the province still wears its own history. Old Town became British Columbia’s first Heritage Conservation Area, and it earned that title through loss. In the late 1980s two of its blocks were pulled down, the 1892 Driard Hotel among them, and rebuilt as hollow facades, a mistake the city swore never to make again. The protections that followed are the reason nothing inside a Victoria heritage conservation area has been demolished since. For sixty years, under councils of every political stripe, one bargain has held on these streets. Builders pay their way, and the public gets to speak. And a streetscape like this cannot be un-lost. Overbuild a heritage block or gut a facade, and no future council can ever vote it back, which is exactly why the hearing matters more here than almost anywhere in the city.
Item G.2 rewrites that sixty-year bargain, and it is the public’s half of it that vanishes. The staff report asks council to waive the hearing on a zoning amendment that raises non-residential density in the Central Business District to five and a half times the lot area with no rezoning required, and to fold industrial, laboratory, and veterinary uses into the core, Old Town included. It asks council to rewrite the heritage-density policy of the Downtown Core Area Plan so that Old Town and the Inner Harbour may carry hotel towers above the limit that has governed them for years. And it asks council to grant new hotels a holiday from municipal property tax of up to ten years, a break the report itself concedes “does shift the tax burden to non-exempt properties,” which in plain speech means onto the small downtown businesses already scraping to hold on.
The Old Town manoeuvre is the subtle one, and the one to watch. The report does not raise the density outright. It rewrites the plan that governs Old Town, and it does so not by an Official Community Plan amendment bylaw, which would drag its own public hearing behind it, but by ordering a planning official to “revise and publish” the plan. A revision published in that manner carries no hearing and no notice. The city means to change the rules for the oldest streets in the province by memo, so that the hotel-density rezonings can follow one at a time, each already treated as consistent with a plan the public was never allowed to argue. Since 2011 that added density had been a price, granted only through a rezoning and a public contribution toward parks, plazas, the Harbour Pathway, and heritage conservation. The proposal converts the price into a policy, and the policy into a memo.
And whose names sit on the document that accomplishes all this? Not one councillor’s. Item G.2 is a staff report, dated July 10, signed by Malcolm Maclean, Senior Planner, Citywide Planning, and Alec Johnston, Acting Director of Planning and Development, and stamped “Report accepted and recommended by the City Manager.” The City Manager is Jocelyn Jenkyns, the most senior unelected official at City Hall, who runs an administration of some eight hundred people and answers to council alone. The sentence “Council waives the requirement for the holding of a public hearing” was written by staff, endorsed by Jenkyns, and laid before council to ratify. No elected official has to author the line that takes your hearing away. They need only raise a hand, and the last one is gone.
The Rule That Opens The Door
How can a council do any of this? All of it rests on one change in provincial law, so give it thirty seconds. A council in British Columbia was once required to hold a hearing before it rezoned your land. Bill 44, the province’s 2023 housing law, ended that requirement wherever a rezoning is consistent with the Official Community Plan, and then went a step further, making a hearing on such a rezoning not merely optional but forbidden. Everything now hinges on a single word: consistent. Once a building is declared to fit the plan, the public’s hearing is not weighed and set aside. It is prohibited outright, and the argument is finished before a resident is permitted to open it.
Which turns the Official Community Plan into the only document that matters, and quietly hands whoever writes it a veto over whether you will ever speak. The people who write it are the council that adopts the plan and the planners who draft it, and the distance between what they decide and what the public is allowed to contest is where this entire story lives.
James Bay
None of it began with Old Town. It began last October, in James Bay.
On October 2, 2025, council adopted a new Official Community Plan. For James Bay it meant six storeys across most of a neighbourhood that is already the densest in the city, by its own residents’ count forty percent denser than any other, and seventy percent renters. Its consultation came to a single two-hour workshop, on a plan that had given earlier neighbourhoods years to be heard.
The one councillor whose job was to carry James Bay’s objection into that chamber, its liaison Matt Dell, was not in it. Nine seats, eight councillors that night, and the empty chair was his. He missed the most consequential land-use vote of the term, the vote that rezoned his own neighbourhood over its protests and, as it would emerge, moved the ground beneath it.
The ground moved on page 194 of Appendix C, a greyscale map buried in a document of roughly eleven hundred pages. There, the lots for a fourteen-storey James Bay tower had been slid across a boundary and into the Downtown Core Area. A parcel inside that boundary counts as consistent with the plan, and a consistent rezoning cannot go to a hearing. So the line did more than permit the tower. It sealed the tower off from public objection before a single resident had learned it existed.
James Bay’s lots were not the only ones to travel. In the seven weeks before the vote, more than a dozen residential blocks in Fernwood, along with parcels in Burnside-Gorge, North Park, Fairfield, and James Bay itself, were lifted from their residential zones and into the expanded downtown zone, each one now placed beyond the reach of a hearing. By March the James Bay lots were listed for sale. And council did not grasp the scale of what it had passed until October 16, a full two weeks after voting it into law, because it had adopted a plan it never finished reading.
Read that once more, slowly. The people who govern this city rezoned whole blocks of it, shut the public out of the decision, and only worked out what they had done a fortnight later. Whether that is carelessness or something colder is a question for them. To the family whose street it was, the distinction is academic, because their hearing was already gone, deleted by a line on a page not one of the people who voted for it had turned to.
The Harbour
Eight months on, the same logic came for the waterfront, and this time the city did not trouble itself to manufacture consistency at all. It simply waived the hearing.
On June 25, 2026, in one afternoon, with no public hearing and no direct notice to residents, council rewrote the zoning along the James Bay industrial waterfront. Ship breaking became permitted as of right. Height limits were lifted. Parking requirements were struck. The Harbour Road design guidelines were cancelled. The consultation that preceded the vote had run almost entirely through the harbour businesses that stood to profit from it.
We reported this in June. What we did not yet possess was the private correspondence of the councillor at the centre of it, and the emails turn a procedural story into a portrait.
In the days before the vote, the James Bay Neighbourhood Association was doing the councillor’s own work for him, reading the dense rezoning report against a deadline it had been given no time to meet. Somewhere in that file, its president came upon a detail on Dell’s own council webpage. The man assigned to speak for James Bay to the harbour authority had, the entire time, been the city’s official representative to that same authority, and had never once said so, through a year of public meetings at which the harbour authority rose and briefed residents with Dell seated among them. So the association wrote and asked him plainly. When were you appointed. Did you ever mean to tell us. And with this rezoning days away, will you press for consultation, or for a delay.
His reply, on June 23, gives him away. “My reading of the report suggests this is most administrative,” he wrote, and would bring “no major changes to the existing marine zoning usage,” and “at this stage I don’t see any cause for delay.” A rezoning that legalized the tearing apart of ships was, in his telling, a tidying of two definitions. Two days later, when a colleague moved to grant councillors a few more minutes to question staff, seventeen in place of ten, Dell voted the minutes down. His single contribution to the afternoon was to congratulate staff on their “comprehensive work,” on a report that Councillor Chris Coleman, in the same meeting, said had scarcely weighed the neighbourhoods it would remake.
Residents fought it regardless, and council flinched, sending the changes back for more work. It was the very outcome James Bay had pleaded for and Dell had dismissed as unnecessary. Three weeks later, it had become his triumph. “I was really happy to move the motion to have that work delayed, which passed 9-0,” he wrote to those same residents, “and I received a lot of thankful emails.” On June 23 there had been no cause for delay. By July 11 the delay was the thing he was proudest of. Nothing had shifted in the interval but the direction the room was leaning, and Dell had leaned with it.
The Excuse
Cornered on any of this, the governing bloc reaches for the same sentence: the province tied our hands. Councillor Jeremy Caradonna put it in writing to a constituent. The province, he wrote, “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.”
It is the kind of statement that is accurate and profoundly misleading at the same time. The provincial rule strips the hearing only after a proposal has been found to align with the plan. Nothing made a fourteen-storey tower on those James Bay lots align with anything until council slid them into the downtown zone. Nothing opens Old Town to hotel towers until council rewrites the heritage plan to permit them. The province did not draw the boundary on page 194, and the province is not the body revising and publishing the Downtown Core Area Plan this morning. The city does that, with its own hands, and then gestures down the highway to account for a silence it built itself.
Readers of our earlier work will recognize the manoeuvre. In Licensed to Kill, the City of Victoria spent years pleading with the province to abolish a property right the city had itself created, licensed, and taxed, and then presented the result as something the province had done to a helpless little city. The sequence here is only tighter. Engineer the outcome at City Hall, and then blame the building at the other end of town.
It Does Not Stay In Victoria
There is a reason to watch this city even if you live nowhere near it. What is tested on Victoria’s residents has a habit of travelling up to the province and back down onto everyone else. The short-term rental crackdown was piloted here, and its architect, former mayor Lisa Helps, walked directly from City Hall into a post advising the Premier on housing, carrying the approach with her. The people who run this city sit unusually close to the people who run the province, and not by rumour. Dell draws a provincial paycheque. Caradonna is a former provincial staffer. Mayor Marianne Alto is a past executive of the BC NDP. Councillor Dave Thompson is married to a sitting provincial cabinet minister. What that proximity means in practice is simple enough: when a council here works out how to rezone a neighbourhood without asking it, the lesson does not stay in the neighbourhood, or in the city.
Who Profits
Ask the question that clears the fog. When a hearing vanishes and a rezoning grows easier, who walks away richer?
The landowner, chiefly. The instant a parcel is placed beyond a hearing, whether by moving it into the core, by waiving the hearing, or by lifting the cap, its development value jumps and it becomes far simpler to build or to sell. The public forfeits its say, and the owner banks the difference. In James Bay, the clearest beneficiary is whoever held the fourteen-storey lots that crossed the line and reached the market by March. On the waterfront, it is the harbour businesses the consultation was routed through. Downtown, the beneficiary is named in the staff report itself.
Item G.2 did not descend from the clouds. The report states, plainly, that its hotel measures were “highlighted in the recent Greater Victoria Hotel Development Report created by a working group convened by Destination Greater Victoria,” presented to council on June 11, and that the city’s own analysis was “informed by the working group.” The density figure, the site sizes, the target of 1,500 new hotel rooms, the tax holiday, every piece of it traces back to a tourism-industry working group. Staff sat on that group, then wrote its wish list into a recommendation council can pass in a single vote.
Destination Greater Victoria is no stranger to these pages. As we set out in Licensed to Kill: The Sequel, the executive running its public affairs is Jeremy Loveday, who sat on this council from 2014 to 2022 and led the drive to shut down short-term rentals, the hotels’ cheaper competitor. He closed one door from inside the chamber, walked around the building, and now lobbies the same council to fling the other one open. This morning that council takes up his lobby’s hotel-density shopping list, beneath a heading that hides Old Town inside it. The working group that produced the list included the BC Hotel Association, developers, and city staff. The people asking to be freed from the public’s hearing, in short, are the people who once sat in the chamber and the people whose money helps decide who sits there now.
The money runs in the other direction as well, and we have traced it before. In her 2022 campaign, Mayor Alto took close to forty percent of her funds from developers, builders, and real estate. Dell took five hundred dollars from developer Ed Geric in 2022, and in April 2026 council handed a stalled Geric condo a $677,500 public payout at full market price. Aryze Developments, whose network bankrolled the pool referendum run by Caradonna’s own campaign manager, has watched project after project sail through. One industry, seated at both ends of the same table, helps write the plan on one side and helps fund the council on the other, while the hearing that used to sit between them is carried out of the room.
The Record They Will Not Keep
There is a last reason all of this is so difficult to see, and it is not an accident. British Columbia maintains a lobbyist registry for the province, and it is the sole reason the provincial half of the short-term rental story could ever be told, because it was written down. That registry does not reach municipal councils. Who lobbies Victoria city council, on whose behalf, and for what end, is recorded nowhere at all. When the question reached the floor on September 11, 2025, council did not create a registry. It voted to study one. In the same meeting, a companion motion that would have required councillors to disclose their donors and step back from related decisions was opposed by Councillors Krista Loughton, Dave Thompson, and Matt Dell. So the capital presides over the province’s densest housing experiment, and the capital is the one city council you are not permitted to watch.
Sources and Notes
This is an opinion and analysis piece. The argument is the publication’s own, drawn from the public records, filings, meeting records, staff reports, and correspondence described below.
The public-hearing rule: the Local Government Act, section 464, as amended by the Housing Statutes (Residential Development) Amendment Act, 2023 (Bill 44), which removed the default requirement for a public hearing on a zoning bylaw amendment consistent with an official community plan and prohibits a hearing on certain consistent residential rezonings.
James Bay and the Official Community Plan: adopted October 2, 2025; the upzoning, density and renter figures, and the single workshop are drawn from the plan, council records, and residents’ submissions. The boundary changes moving parcels into the Downtown Core Area, including the fourteen-storey James Bay site on page 194 of Appendix C, and the parcels in Fernwood, Burnside-Gorge, North Park, Fairfield, and James Bay, are drawn from the adopted plan and its appendices; council’s recognition of the scale of the changes on October 16, 2025, is drawn from council records. Councillor Dell’s absence from the October 2 vote is recorded in the minutes.
The harbour rezoning: the June 25, 2026 industrial waterfront rezoning, the uses it permitted, and the waiver of the public hearing are drawn from the City of Victoria staff report and council records, and were reported in “No Public Hearing, No Public Notice,” BC Politics Watch, June 27, 2026. Councillor Dell’s motion to limit question time, his praise of staff, and Councillor Chris Coleman’s contrary assessment are drawn from the meeting record. Councillor Dell’s quoted statements are drawn from his emails to the James Bay Neighbourhood Association dated June 23 and July 11, 2026, and his non-disclosure of the harbour-authority representative role from that correspondence and his council webpage.
Item G.2: the July 10, 2026 Committee of the Whole report “Economic and Employment Land Solutions,” authored by Senior Planner Malcolm Maclean and Acting Director of Planning and Development Alec Johnston, and marked “Report accepted and recommended by the City Manager,” Jocelyn Jenkyns, City Manager of the City of Victoria. Recommendation 2 (waiver of the public hearing), the 5.5:1 FSR increase in the CBD-1 and CBD-2 zones, the added light-industrial, laboratory, and veterinary uses in the CBD and Old Town District zones, Recommendation 4 (direction to “revise and publish” the Downtown Core Area Plan and the policy changes in Attachment A), the report’s statement that the Old Town changes “do not introduce new as-of-right permissions,” and the up-to-ten-year Revitalization Tax Exemption together with the report’s acknowledgment that it “does shift the tax burden to non-exempt properties,” are all drawn from that report and its Attachment A. The attribution of the hotel measures to the Greater Victoria Hotel Development Report of a working group convened by Destination Greater Victoria, presented June 11, 2026, is drawn from the report’s Background section.
Old Town’s heritage status: Victoria’s Old Town Historic Commercial District is recognized as British Columbia’s first Heritage Conservation Area; the district’s nineteenth-century commercial streetscapes, the demolition and facade reconstruction of blocks including the 1892 Driard Hotel in the late 1980s, and the subsequent record of no demolitions within Victoria’s heritage conservation areas, are drawn from the City of Victoria’s heritage records and the public heritage history of the district. Primary documentation of the Driard episode is held in the city’s heritage-planning records.
The province-blame framing: Councillor Jeremy Caradonna’s written statement to a constituent that provincial changes “prevent us from holding public hearings on development projects that align with the Official Community Plan.”
The capital as laboratory, the beneficiaries, and the lobby: former mayor Lisa Helps’s appointment as a provincial housing adviser; the provincial ties of Councillors Dell, Caradonna, Thompson, and Mayor Alto; Jeremy Loveday’s council tenure (2014–2022), his role leading the short-term rental file, and his current public-affairs role at Destination Greater Victoria; the membership and recommendations of the Greater Victoria Hotel Development working group; Mayor Alto’s 2022 campaign financing; the $500 Geric contribution and the April 2026 $677,500 Housing Reserve Fund grant to a stalled Geric property; and Aryze’s approvals and campaign links, are as documented and sourced in “Licensed to Kill” and “Licensed to Kill: The Sequel,” BC Politics Watch, June 2026, and the Elections BC and council records cited therein.
The lobbyist registry: the Lobbyists Transparency Act’s exemption of municipal councils, and the September 11, 2025 council decision to study rather than create a municipal registry, along with the opposition of Councillors Loughton, Thompson, and Dell to a related donor-disclosure motion, are drawn from the Act and council records and were reported in “Licensed to Kill: The Sequel.”
We do not allege that any councillor, staff member, or lobbyist acted on secret instruction, and we do not assert a document establishing that. We do not claim the boundary changes were drawn at any developer’s direction, and we make no claim that any rezoning described here is illegal; the public-hearing waivers described are permitted under the Local Government Act. Where we characterize the removal of public hearings and judge the conduct of named officials, those are the considered opinions of BC Politics Watch, offered as fair comment on matters of significant public interest ahead of the October 17, 2026 municipal election. Demonstrable factual errors may be sent to contact.bcpoliticswatch@proton.me for correction.