Link to the post on the BC Politics Watch Substack
Editor’s note—published ahead of the city’s own account. On July 23, council directed City of Victoria staff to produce an FAQ and place a letter in the Times Colonist answering the residents it branded a source of “misinformation.” That official version has not yet appeared. We are publishing the record first, drawn only from the public documents and the meeting itself, so you can read it before the city’s version reaches you, and compare the two for yourself.
Old Town is the oldest quarter of Victoria, a protected heritage district of brick warehouses and nineteenth-century storefronts that is one of the reasons people come to the city at all. On Thursday, City Council decided that residents worried about its future were spreading “misinformation,” and voted to spend public money to tell them so.
The document at the centre of it hides all of this behind a bland title: a July 10 planning report called “Economic and Employment Land Solutions.” Inside were proposals to loosen the rules for downtown development. Raise density in the central business district without requiring a rezoning. Offer new hotels a property-tax holiday of up to ten years. And rewrite the Downtown Core Area Plan so that taller, denser hotels could be approved in Old Town, above the limit that has long protected its scale. Residents read it and mobilized. Many wrote in. Critics were in the gallery.
Council’s response, on July 23, went past advancing the plan. It set the Old Town rewrite aside for a later process, then turned on the people who had raised the alarm. Council directed city staff to produce a public rebuttal to those residents, to push it out through the city’s social media and a letter to the editor of the Times Colonist, and, in the words of the motion as first written, to correct their “misinformation.” On the same file, council voted 4-5 to waive the public hearing, the one forum where those residents could have answered on the record.
A city closing the channels its critics use to speak, while spending public money to become the only voice they hear is the story here, and it is bigger than a zoning number.
This is a direction council passed, not something the city has yet carried out. The FAQ and the letter may not have appeared by the time you read this. What follows is drawn from the meeting record and the motion sheet shown on the council chamber screen.
BC Politics Watch is independent. We take direction from no candidate, party, or campaign. The findings below are drawn from the public record of a public meeting.
What The Motion Said
The instruction came from Councillor Dave Thompson. His motion, item 7 on the council motion sheet, was edited live on the shared screen. As first written, it read:
“Direct staff to communicate via an FAQ via multiple channels, e.g. city website, e-newsletter, HAC, a letter to editor of Times Colonist, and social media accounts, the fact that no height or density changes are proposed to the old town district zone, and more generally correcting common misconceptions and misinformation in emails received by or forwarded to staff.”
Read what that authorizes. City staff, on the public payroll, would write a letter to the editor of the daily paper and post to the city’s social media accounts, to correct “misconceptions and misinformation.” Not a response to a single false statement. A standing instruction to place the city’s version of a contested decision in the press.
Then the record shows the wording change. Councillor Stephen Hammond objected to branding residents’ concerns as misinformation:
“I did not find any misinformation. I found people had a very negative reaction… because they were concerned about what was going on in Old Town.”
Hammond moved to strike the word. Council backed him, 8-1. The lone vote to keep officially labelling the public’s speech “misinformation” was Thompson’s, who argued the label should survive in some form: “if we can’t use words like misconception or misinformation, let’s call it something else.”
On the screen, the motion was sanded down. The named channels, including “a letter to editor of Times Colonist,” were generalized to “the City’s usual media channels.” The “misconceptions and misinformation” clause was struck through. The plan survived intact. Only the language that exposed it was removed.
What Was Said In The Room
Thompson was direct about who he blamed. Not the sixteen-page staff report released days before the vote. The public:
“I don’t think that it was confusing actually in the staff report. I think what was confusing is that people were receiving a ton of information from a variety of sources other than the staff report…people were misled by that information.”
“There is a ton of misinformation on social media right now.”
Even Councillor Marg Gardiner, no ally of the online critics, put the confusion on the city, not the residents: “I and a lot of other people, very learned people, misunderstood what was there because of the information gap in that paper.”
Councillor Susan Kim asked the city’s Director of Communications and Engagement, Sheldon Johnson, what channels the rebuttal would use, and what it would cost. His answer:
“Cost would be minimal to nothing… we have many social media channels—like Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram… As well as… our website and our media relationships that we have as well, and make sure that we point out people to… the source of truth.”
Start with the two things Johnson said in the same breath. The cost: “minimal to nothing.” The reason: the city already owns the platforms, and it counts the press among its “media relationships,” a channel it can point people through, toward “the source of truth.” That is the phrase a public official used, on the record, to describe the city’s own account of a contested political decision, to be pushed across social media and handed to the local press before council had finished voting.
Kim asked whether it might inflame tensions. Johnson: “no, I don’t perceive that as a risk.” He conceded it broke practice: “it’s not typical for us to do things like that before the ratify… a step out of what would be a normal process.” Council took the step.
Councillor Jeremy Caradonna, explaining why he would deny the public a hearing, said:
“…through the number seven that was added in, in which an FAQ will go out, and through this conversation that I assume will be reported on by the media today and tomorrow.”
A councillor voted down the hearing and reassured himself the public would get the city’s version anyway, through the FAQ and through the press, which he assumed would carry it. The motion had just named the Times Colonist. He was not worried the paper would test the city’s account. He was counting on it to print it.
There is an old word for a state apparatus that manufactures an official line and pushes it out through every channel it controls. The Soviets called it agitprop, short for agitation and propaganda. Victoria is not the Soviet Union. But a government directing its own employees to write an FAQ, post it across the city’s accounts, and place a letter in the local paper is doing, in miniature, what agitprop was built to do, produce the approved version and carry it to the public through the machinery of the state.
What The City Turned Off A Year Ago
This is not the first time the city narrowed the public’s voice. Records of a recorded professional talk this year show that on August 2, 2024, Victoria switched off comments on its Facebook, X, and Instagram accounts. Every post. Where paid posts would not allow it, staff would “proactively go in and delete” comments.
Johnson’s stated reasoning: the accounts are “operational, not political,” so if a resident “just wants to complain about a council decision… that’s not the channel.” Most people who commented, he said, “didn’t actually have real questions… they just wanted that platform to air whatever.”
The city has 66,000 followers on X alone. That comment section was one of the few public places a resident could see that a neighbour three streets over shared their worry and say so where others could read it. The city closed it.
Then came July. Residents raised the Old Town alarm anyway; on the platforms the city had muted and in posts they signed with their own names. The city’s answer was not to switch the comments back on. It was to write its own version of events, push it out across those same accounts and into the Times Colonist, and brand what residents were saying “misinformation.” First the city took away the public’s microphone. Then it kept the loudspeaker for itself.
The Hearing They Waived
On the same file, council voted 4-5 against a public hearing. It was legal and discretionary. It was also a choice. Councillors Caradonna, Dell, Kim, Loughton, and Thompson removed the one formal moment where residents are answered on the record. Councillor Chris Coleman named the alternative: “this could be achieved if we just got rid of number two and didn’t waive the requirement for a public hearing.”
Consider how the time was spent. By Councillor Dell’s own math, members had “ten minutes” each, “ninety minutes total,” before council voted to extend it to fifteen, none of it counting the staff presentation. By our count, roughly forty minutes went to the communications motion alone. The argument over how to tell the public it was wrong. Council spent that time drafting a rebuttal to residents while voting down the venue built to let those residents speak. As Coleman put it, waiving the hearing loses “the opportunity for the public to weigh in.”
Comments off. Hearing waived. Public money set to fund the official version. Three moves, one direction: fewer places the public can speak, one louder place the city speaks back.
Section 2(b) of the Charter protects freedom of expression, including freedom of the press. It binds municipalities. Nothing in it stops a government from correcting a factual error. But closing the public’s comments, then funding a “source of truth” and feeding it to the press, is not correcting the record. It is trying to own it.
Staff Are Meant To Be Neutral
Public servants in British Columbia are meant to be impartial. A city communications department exists to tell residents when a road closes and how to comment on a plan. It does not exist to referee a live political dispute on the government’s side, to label residents’ concerns “misinformation,” or to place the city’s rebuttal in the newspaper. When council directed staff to do that, it pointed a neutral public function at the government’s own critics. The staff did not invent the assignment. Council handed it to them. The failure was the elected officials’.
The calendar sharpens it. This is an election year; council seats go before voters on October 17. The formal election-advertising rules under BC’s Local Elections Campaign Financing Act apply only in the final 28 days before the vote, so a July motion breaks no law. But those rules exist to protect a principle that holds all year. That principle is public money and public platforms should not be used to tilt political outcomes or shield officeholders from criticism. A taxpayer-funded rebuttal, aimed at the officeholders’ critics, sits against that principle whether or not the clock has started.
The Critic Is A Candidate
One of the leading critics of the Old Town changes is Arthur McInnis. He is a former construction and projects lawyer. Land use and the rules that govern a downtown rezoning are precisely adjacent to his expertise. The “misinformation” the city set out to correct came, in part, from a qualified critic.
His pre-meeting post, signed in his own name and headed “No Ceiling. No Hearing. No Appeal.,” is the critique the motion was very likely written to answer. McInnis too is a declared candidate for Victoria City Council in the October 17 election. He did not post from behind an anonymous account. He put his name to it, and on the day of the vote he sat in the City Hall gallery from 9 a.m. Council did not reach the item until the afternoon. He waited the day to hear his city decide.
He was not the only qualified person in that gallery, and not one of them was heard. A Committee of the Whole takes no public submissions on a report like this. The venue built for residents to speak on the record, the public hearing, was the one council waived. The room held the expertise to test the staff report, and the procedure to keep it silent.
The councillor who moved the rebuttal, Dave Thompson, is seeking re-election this fall, in the same race McInnis is running in. He is, in plain terms, a competitor of the candidate whose public arguments he moved to have city staff counter with public money.
Strip away the procedural language and what remains is plain. A council spent public money to counter the arguments of a declared candidate running against its own members, then shut the venues where he could answer. By any fair reading, that is the use of public resources to discredit a political opponent. The record is not ambiguous: the motion, the waived hearing, the candidate left silent in the gallery. The question council has not answered is why a councillor running for re-election moved and voted to spend public money against a rival at all, instead of declaring the conflict and stepping aside.
By His Own Standard
There is one more document, and it is Thompson’s own. On June 3, seven weeks before the vote, he published an op-ed in the Vancouver Sun, “We are living through a crisis in the quality of public information.” He warned voters about misinformation ahead of the October 17 election and told them what to do: “Check the source. Look for original documents, city staff reports, council minutes.” He warned of the “liar’s dividend,” the way bad actors “dismiss genuine information as fake.”
McInnis did exactly what Thompson prescribed. He checked the staff’s statements against the original documents, the staff report, the zoning bylaw, the Downtown Core Area Plan, the Official Community Plan, one by one. His conclusion was careful. By the councillor’s own published standard, the critic did the work right. The motion moved to call it misinformation.
The Tool Itself
Freedom of Information is the instrument citizens use to check any government. In the same season Councillor Thompson moved to have his city brand critics “misinformation,” the provincial minister responsible for FOI was narrowing it.
That minister, Diana Gibson, the NDP Minister of Citizens’ Services, is Thompson’s spouse and his former co-founder of the consulting firm the two built before politics. On May 28, 2026, Gibson carried Bill 9, the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Amendment Act, to passage. It did not pass quietly. The bill drew a filibuster that kept MLAs in the legislature until nearly four in the morning; the house rose at 3:54 a.m. The B.C. Conservatives moved to delay it six months for public consultation, and lost. It cleared its final reading on the session’s last day only on the Speaker’s tie-breaking vote, after the House divided evenly. The bill expands officials’ authority to refuse records requests they say would be too difficult to fulfil or would interfere with government operations, and softens the duty to respond “without delay” to “without unreasonable delay.” Critics from CBC to The Narwhal to Democracy Watch, and a detailed Sitka Media column by Dr. Yerzhan Dosmukhamedov, make the same case. It hands officials more room to delay and refuse, and shifts the burden onto the citizen.
We draw no conclusion about coordination between two people who are married. We note the record. At the province, a bill critics say weakens the right to know, carried by the responsible minister. At the city, her spouse moving to spend public money branding critics “misinformation.” Both narrow the same thing and that is the public’s ability to find out what its government is doing, and to say so.
Why It Reaches Past Victoria
Municipal politics is where this machinery is tested first. It is the level with the fewest reporters, the smallest audience, the least scrutiny. What a council does on a Thursday in July is the rehearsal.
It is also why trust in the press is draining. When residents watch a government spend public money to become “the source of truth,” and watch outlets carry that version unexamined, they stop believing any of it. The concern is not one side’s. On July 23, the same day as the Victoria vote, a Toronto Sun column by Brian Lilley warned that a federal plan to give the CBC a role in “combating misinformation” would turn a broadcaster into “an information gatekeeper for the governing party.” From a different corner, Democracy Watch and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association warn of the same thing: “combating misinformation” can become a tool for officials to manage what the public is allowed to hear. When institutions across the spectrum reach for the same phrase to decide what counts as truth, the people tuning out are not paranoid. They are paying attention.
There is an irony buried in the word the city reached for. “Disinformation” came into English from the Russian dezinformatsiya, a term of Soviet statecraft. The language of “combating misinformation” carries an authoritarian pedigree, and it is worth remembering who first found it useful for a government to decide, on the public’s behalf, which information counts as false.
The direction now goes to bylaw drafting and back to council for readings. The questions that remain are simple. Will the FAQ and the letter to the editor be published, and at what cost to taxpayers. Whether a councillor running for re- election should be spending public money to answer a rival. And whether a city that closed its comments, waived its hearing, and moved to buy the last word still means it when it calls itself accountable.
Victoria votes October 17. That is the one comment the city cannot delete, and the one hearing it cannot waive.
The city has the media relationships. The city can point people toward “the source of truth.” The man who did the sourcing, and told it honestly when a lie would have served him better, is the one they called misinformation.
BC Politics Watch. We hold documentation for every factual claim in this piece and will provide it on request. Where we offer opinion, we label it as opinion; where we rely on others’ reporting, we name the outlet.