Comment: Victoria council lacks transparency about zoning |
A commentary by a resident of Victoria.
Victoria city council members seemed quite surprised on Oct. 16, 2025, to discover that the new Official Community Plan (OCP), which they had approved 14 days earlier, contained multiple and significant changes in zoning boundaries that they hadn’t noticed.
This revelation came through a letter from the James Bay Neighbourhood Association regarding a development proposal that was on council’s agenda that morning. The proposal site had been quietly transferred from the general residential zone (DPA-1) to the newly expanded downtown zone (DPA-2) merely seven weeks before the deciding vote.
Previous staff reports stated that this highly controversial 14-storey proposal was “inappropriate for the current and future site context,” “not integrated with the surrounding context,” “not sensitive to the physical setting,” and so forth.
After OCP ratification, however, this 14-storey proposal, which had not changed, was suddenly deemed consistent with the OCP, even though the new OCP only “envisions … up to 12 storeys” for the site. Moreover, being OCP-consistent, “a public hearing would now be prohibited” under nascent provincial legislation.
More than a dozen residential blocks in Burnside-Gorge,........