The Vanquishing of the Public Hearing: how a single rezoning exposed the quiet dismantling of the public’s voice in Victoria’s planning process.
By Arthur McInnis
Oct 18, 2025
Victoria’s new Official Community Plan was meant to guide growth. Instead, it has quietly erased one of the last checks on it. On October 16, a 14-storey building once too tall for James Bay resurfaced, this time without a public hearing. The rules changed, the tower stayed the same, and the people lost their turn at the microphone.
Background and Context
The October 16, 2025 meeting of Victoria City Council was ostensibly procedural: it was intended as a short housekeeping item to “update” a rezoning application for 205 Quebec Street, 507 Montreal Street, and 210–224 Kingston Street. In fact, the exchange revealed something larger: how an unpopular development once inconsistent with the City’s planning framework quietly became permissible through the adoption of our new Official Community Plan (OCP).
Under the old OCP, the proposed 14-storey mixed-use tower was far beyond the allowable six-storey form. Council had scheduled a public hearing, as required by law for non-conforming rezonings. Then, Geric Construction, the developer withdrew, presumably choosing to wait until the new OCP, both more generous in height and density, was adopted. Staff allowed the three-month delay without a peep apparently as the developer could not make the original date.
Under the new OCP, the same project no longer required an OCP amendment or a public hearing, because it was now considered “consistent.” Well, not quite, there was that pesky two stories over the limit, but the staff felt it was similar enough.
The Council meeting that followed had a certain bureaucratic choreography. The Mayor and staff repeatedly assured Councillors that no decision was being made on the day. It was only a procedural motion to “update” prior directions. Yet as questions accumulated, it became clear that the effect of this procedural adjustment was to convert a controversial project that once demanded public scrutiny into one that could proceed without it.
Staff Responses and Council Dynamics
The meeting’s tone was deferential, almost ritualistic. Staff planner Rob Bateman and planning manager Lauren Klose offered lengthy, polished but formulaic answers. They framed each decision as an inevitable by-product of process rather than a conscious policy choice. In other words, “don’t blame us, we’re just following the rules here.”
When Councillor Dell asked bluntly (finally echoing the James Bay Neighbourhood Association, on whose board he sits as Council liaison) that staff explain “what motivated the change to the downtown core area boundary,” planner Lauren Klose invoked the familiar refrain of “broad consultation” and “six months of engagement.” But she could not point to any moment when the people of James Bay, the neighbourhood most directly affected, were actually told that the City intended to redraw the map itself, literally shifting part of James Bay into the downtown core.
Under close cross-examination by Councillor Gardner, Klose eventually conceded that the new boundary map, the one that reclassified a stretch of the Inner Harbour and legislative precinct from “James Bay” into “Downtown”, was not publicly released until January 2025, long after the official consultation period had ended.
By that time, the public had already been told the OCP process was complete. In practical terms, this cartographic sleight of hand meant that a map no one had seen in time to object to now governs the area’s future, transforming what was once a residential district into land treated as part of the City’s commercial core.
What had been presented as a routine “10-year OCP update” thus also concealed a fundamental geographic and political redefinition of James Bay, one that erased the historic buffer between the neighbourhood and the high-rise skyline across the harbour.
Staff’s composure masked a telling asymmetry: they were briefed, rehearsed, and cautious; yet Councillors were clearly struggling to piece together how the same project had moved from “too tall” to “acceptable.” When Councillor Hammond asked, “Did anyone bring to our attention that this controversial development would now fall within the new zone, and therefore there would be no public hearing?”, staff admitted that no, they had not. The exchanges carried an undercurrent of unease. It was polite but very revealing.
At several points, the Mayor interjected to protect staff from impossible questions. Hammond’s attempt to probe affordability (“Do we expect any of these units will be affordable?”) was met with the formulaic reply: “Through the Mayor, no affordability is proposed.” When Hammond pressed further about whether buyers would be locals or out-of-province investors, the Mayor cut him off: “I don’t think that’s a question any staff member can answer.”
The effect was cumulative: staff appeared as neutral technicians executing policy, while Councillors seemed powerless to challenge the implications of that policy.
Procedural Integrity and Public Consultation
The discussion laid bare how procedural integrity was sacrificed to expedience.
Under the Local Government Act, rezonings inconsistent with the OCP must undergo a public hearing. Here, because the new OCP erased the inconsistency, staff claimed a hearing was now “prohibited.” The word is striking because it reframes the absence of public input as a legal requirement rather than a choice.
Yet several Councillors questioned whether the public had ever been meaningfully consulted on the boundary changes that made this possible. Councillor Gardner’s cross-examination was surgical: “Was the Downtown Core Area Plan change, the Inner Harbour district change, the legislative precinct change actually discussed with the JBNA CALUC group?” The answer was a simple “No.”
In other words, the very change that eliminated the public’s right to a hearing had itself occurred without the neighbourhood consultation required under long-standing land-use policy. The public process collapsed in on itself: the OCP was amended without local input, and that amendment was then used to justify denying input on the resulting development.
Councillor Gardner captured the circularity perfectly: “I found it very disturbing that there was supposed to be a public hearing in July, and it was cancelled because the proponent didn’t want it. Now there will be none.”
Policy Inconsistencies and Rhetorical Framing
Throughout the meeting, staff relied on a small set of rhetorical devices to manage contradiction.
1. “General consistency.”
When asked how a 14-storey, 48.9-metre tower could fit within a district that envisioned 12 storeys or 36 metres, Bateman replied that staff “believe that is approximately in line” with the OCP. The qualifier “approximately” recurred throughout the discussion, a helpful linguistic bridge between policy limits and political convenience.
2. “Procedural correctness.”
Staff emphasised that “council is not making any final decisions today.” The Mayor repeated this several times, as if the absence of a vote neutralised the significance of the change. But the effect was substantive: Council accepted that a project once subject to a public hearing would now advance without one.
3. “Transparency by record.”
When questioned about communication with the developer, Alec Johnson explained that any written notice alerting applicants to the forthcoming OCP changes was “not placed on the development tracker” and that staff correspondence with applicants was not public. In other words, developers were privately informed of forthcoming regulatory advantages before the public was aware.
4. “Community awareness through availability.”
Johnson insisted that developers were merely “made aware of materials available to the public,” not given special treatment. But in practice, staff’s ongoing dialogue with the applicant ensured the developer could time its withdrawal and re-entry to exploit the new policy window.
The rhetorical strategy is clear: to translate discretionary judgments into procedural inevitabilities, stripping agency from everyone involved: councillors, staff, and residents alike.
Critical Assessment: Supersession as Strategy
The meeting illustrates how OCP supersession, call it the replacement of one policy framework by another, can be wielded not as planning evolution but as a tactical reset.
The developer’s decision to delay the public hearing until the new OCP took effect was rational and strategic. The City’s decision to treat that delay as business-as-usual was more troubling. Staff repeatedly described the application as “in-stream,” suggesting a quasi-legal momentum that excused further scrutiny. When pressed about whether staff could have flagged the implications to Council, Johnson replied, “We proceed with council direction… We did not have direction to provide updates on in-stream applications.”
That logic inverts accountability: Council can only act on information staff provide, yet staff claim they need Council’s direction before providing it. The result is bureaucratic circularity: a process that shields both from responsibility.
Even more revealing was Bateman’s admission that staff had not completed a full review of the application under the new OCP. The proposal was deemed consistent “at the highest level,” but its detailed compatibility with the new design guidelines was untested. The Mayor’s closing motion was to refer the matter back to staff for a full review implicitly acknowledged that the earlier framing of “consistency” had been premature.
The vote itself reflected the Council’s split personality: six in favour of referral (including the Mayor), three opposed (Dell, Caradonna, Thompson). Dell argued that the review was unnecessary and costly, saying, “I think we should just get to a vote… I have hundreds of emails; people have already weighed in.” His comment inadvertently highlighted the irony of the entire process: the one procedural tool left to the public, correspondence, was treated as burdensome rather than integral.
Conclusion: Transparency or Tactical Compliance?
Viewed as a whole, the October 18 meeting reads less like routine civic administration and more like a case study in how process can be used to efface substance.
Four core facts are unambiguous:
- A project inconsistent with the OCP was paused by the developer.
- The City adopted a new OCP expanding the permissible envelope.
- That same project then returned, now exempt from public hearing.
- Staff characterised this not as a discretionary decision but as a statutory requirement.
What emerges, while not misconduct, is a culture of procedural insulation. It is a system in which everyone follows rules so carefully that accountability disappears within them.
The Mayor’s final motion to refer the file for a “complete review under the new OCP” was prudent but belated. The real question is not whether staff should check the box on a design-guideline review, but whether Council and the public were ever given a fair chance to debate the policy change that made such projects permissible in the first place.
In the end, the Council meeting on the 16th tells a familiar civic story: when regulatory frameworks are rewritten to favour density or expediency, the language of process replaces the language of principle. Public hearings are no longer denied; they are simply rendered “prohibited.” Consultation is not omitted; it is redefined as having already occurred.
What the meeting exposed, quietly and unmistakably, is a civic culture that manages controversy rather than confronts it, a City Hall more concerned with optics than accountability. The public’s role has been reduced to paperwork: acknowledged, recorded, and then politely erased. With one year left before the next election, Victorians have a choice. They can accept this erosion of democratic process as the new normal or replace those who made it possible and restore a City Hall that really listens before it decides. Today the return to staff was not about listening. It was about being caught red-handed and Council being left with no alternative.
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