Mariann Burka blames, in part, the truncated community input ahead of the draft official community plan. As a result, individual neighbourhoods weren’t adequately consulted, she said while protesting outside Victoria City Hall on Thursday.
In particular, her neighbourhood will be hurt, after having a scant two-hour session to provide input early in the official community plan (OCP) review, said Burka, spokesperson for the James Bay Coalition.
“I know there’s going to be a public hearing, but it’s very clear to us that council’s mind is made up. They’re not going to listen to what we have to say.”
The neighbourhood organization created a petition online and organized the protest that garnered the support of dozens of residents and the Victoria Tenants Union on April 17. They selected a day when council members would be meeting and a time they would be on lunch break.
Calling the current draft of the OCP developer-friendly and tenant-hostile, the Victoria Tenants Union supported the protest to send a message that densification alone will not help tenants.
Members of the James Bay Coalition, Victoria Tenants Union and others rally at Victoria City Hall on Thursday to protest the draft Official Community Plan they say is developer-friendly and tenant-hostile. pic.twitter.com/miXSI1Rw8i
— Victoria News (@VictoriaNews) April 17, 2025
“There’s a housing crisis and density really is a fake solution,” union representative Quinn Jones said. “Our government is saying we need to increase density, but they’re relying on corporate real estate developers to do it. So, increasing density and increasing the supply of housing doesn’t do anything to solve the crisis if all that new housing is unaffordable to working-class people.
“Municipal council is really just doing the bidding of the corporate real estate developers when they should be representing the needs of us working people, and elderly.”
Growth incites other problems not addressed, according to Burka, with her neighbourhood’s many heritage buildings and trees not sufficiently protected.
“A lot of our neighbourhoods are heritage character. Also, we’re losing our existing trees and green space. With this level of height and density, there has to be a lot of trees destroyed to maximize the size of the buildings,” she said.
The goal of the protest is to have council revisit the OCP, a long-term plan to guide growth and change in the city.
“If the current plan proceeds as is with the density we already have and to add on top of it this additional density, we think city council is going to try to change James Bay into an extension of downtown,” Burka said. “That’s what we think will be the result.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by former Victoria councillor Pamela Madoff.
“The official community plan is a document that will form the basis of the city for the next 10 years. And from the outset, it was very clear to me that there was a particular agenda attached to the development of the OCP on the part of council. And seeing the document, and I do have all 400 pages of it, it focuses almost entirely on growth,” she said.
Previous iterations of the plan better addressed issues such as heritage “woven into the plan itself,” Madoff added, noting heritage is not one of the five core goals in the current draft.
“It's not identified in terms of its environmental importance, in terms of the environmental benefits of reusing existing buildings, and it's not identified as a huge economic generator in terms of tourism. So, to me, that is just one glaring omission in the plan – but overarching all of that was the decision to have a one-size-fits-all approach for the entire city. So each neighbourhood obviously is going to have to take on more density, but surely each one should do it in a different way.”
