Letter by Julian Ruszel in regard to the City of Victoria’s public hearing on the Official Community Plan update and on powerful lobbying influence on it.
Julian Ruszel
Sept 11, 2025
The following letter was submitted to be included in the correspondence for the City of Victoria’s public hearing on the Official Community Plan update, to be held Thursday, Sept 11, 2025:
“Like many Victoria residents, I strongly oppose the City’s proposed Official Community Plan (OCP) update. The perception among many residents that development industry interests have had a disproportionate and undemocratic influence in shaping the OCP and guiding the City’s housing and development policies in general is apparently well-founded and needs to be formally reviewed and addressed before the OCP update can be accepted.
As Councillor Gardiner recently commented (as reported in the Times Colonist), “there is just not enough of the public’s voice” in the OCP. This raises serious questions about whose voices are actually represented in the document and how certain stakeholders came to be over-represented in it. Victoria’s residents need not be left wondering, though: City Council itself inadvertently provided relevant clarification during last week’s Meeting of the Whole surrounding a motion to terminate the City’s membership with the Urban Development Institute (UDI) – B.C.’s most powerful housing and development industry lobby.
Strikingly, our City Council’s primary concern during that discussion was about the perception of the UDI’s influence on the City, not its actual influence. The Mayor and Councillors indicated they would be comfortable going ahead with the motion provided it wouldn’t change the City’s access to UDI’s “educational events and panel discussions” or “research… reports and all of the forecasts on housing and economic trends,” and that it wouldn’t impede the “conversations that staff have with UDI around policy initiatives.” Mayor Alto herself asked staff to clarify whether the change in membership would impact their ability to work with the UDI and access “their research and resources.”
Victoria’s Mayor and City Councillors do not seem to be aware that the various relationships and resources they described may all include or constitute forms of lobbying. Their conversation apparently reveals the various ways the development industry has been shaping housing policy in Victoria, and why those policies so consistently result in favourable outcomes for wealthy developers while increasing costs and decreasing convenience for local residents and small businesses.
Modern lobbies aren’t limited to traditional, direct forms of lobbying – they employ every resource at their disposal to influence policy outcomes, including: evidence-based communications strategies meant to sway the public and public servants alike towards supporting industry goals; the funding and provision of ostensibly objective “research and resources” that support their goals while omitting or downplaying contradictory facts and views; and an army of industry-linked think tanks, experts, and deferential corporate media voices who act as liaisons and communications agents with the public and government employees. They may even direct local university “real estate clubs” and employ students as informal, undisclosed lobbyists who attend public hearings to help sway public support in favour of controversial housing and development projects and policies.
Victoria’s Mayor and City Councillors carried out their discussion apparently unaware of some of the troubling questions it raises:
What is the implication for plans like the OCP and for local democracy more broadly when local residents clearly do not enjoy nearly the same level of access as profit-minded industry interests to the City’s policy-making machinery or are able to employ such organized, multi-pronged communications strategies to advocate for themselves and their community?
Do Victoria’s Mayor, City Councillors, and city staff honestly believe industry-sponsored experts and information accessed through their relationship with the UDI – including those drawn on for the OCP update – consistently provide unbiased, objective information, including relevant information that contradicts industry goals?
For example, does the OCP update meaningfully include the Union of BC Municipalities’ previous data and reports detailing how “supply” alone does not create meaningful affordability – an independent, evidence-based view that calls into question aggressive, mainly market-rate densification policies and is proving to be correct? Or does it reflect the UDI’s simplistic and clearly false “supply = affordability” narrative? If it primarily reflects the latter, Victoria’s residents deserve to know in no uncertain terms why that is the case.
The City Council’s own discussion reveals a potentially serious problem related to various industry-sponsored relationships and resources operating within Victoria City Hall – a problem that clearly runs much deeper than mere public perception or an easily retracted membership with the UDI. This revelation implies serious implications for the way City Hall is currently carrying out housing and development policies, including the Official Community Plan update in question.
For the sake of local municipal democratic integrity and ensuring the needs of local residents and small businesses are being prioritized above the wishes of highly organized, largely non-local profit-driven industry interests, until relevant potential conflicts of interest and instances of undue industry influence that may have shaped the OCP are addressed with a fully transparent, formal review, the current OCP update should be put on hold.
Sincerely,
Julian Ruszel
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Post-submission note: Sasha included a highly relevant piece of information in the letter he sent to Councillor Thompson (published on CRD Watch today, Sept. 11, 2025), from the UDI’s constitution. The UDI outlines as a goal in its constitution:
- “to promote co-operation and efficient relationships between all persons, firms, corporations, regulatory and government bodies and other agencies involved in and associated with land assembly and development”
This further highlights how the various relationships and resources referred so nonchalantly by the Mayor and City Council not only likely constitute forms of lobbying, but also clarifies that many (if not all) of these relationships may have been directly facilitated by the UDI itself.
Also of specific relevance to the OCP update, and which I omitted from my submission for brevity’s sake, the UDI has officially registered as a lobbying activity, “Advocating for coordination with regional and local governments’ long range planning processes.”
It’s very clear from the various resources and discussions Sasha has been hard at work uncovering and publishing that Victoria’s City Councillors’ consistent downplaying of development industry lobbying influence is ignorance at best, but given their publicly stated knowledge of all the relationships and resources made available to the City through the UDI, more likely a very unfortunate and undemocratic case of public gaslighting.
See also:
“We need to take the approach of all areas potentially supporting up to six storeys to ensure we have a pivotal opportunity to arrive at where we will inevitably need to get by 2050” – Quote from Sept 19, 2024 UDI Workshop on City of Victoria Official Community Plan (OCP) update. – CRD Watch Homepage
City Councillors Hammond and Gardiner put forward Motion to “Terminate Victoria’s membership in the Urban Development Institute” “effective immediately”. – CRD Watch Homepage
CRD Watch Homepage 
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