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Vancouver Proves Exactly What Happens When A Council Abandons Its Legal Tools

When councils stop using and enforcing their legal tools, public input quietly disappears. Vancouver shows the endgame; Victoria is on the same path unless voters step up. .


By Arthur McInnis
April 22, 2026

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When a Council stops enforcing its rules, it eventually stops asking the public for permission.  Not long ago Vancouver residents woke up to find their public hearings gone, their input erased, and massive rezonings executed behind closed doors. No warning. No recourse. Just towers.

Victoria, meaning the Mayor and the Gang of Five, is following the same game plan. The only difference is timing. We are one election cycle behind Vancouver.

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Vancouver Lost Victoria Is Next

Last month, retired lawyer Mike Mangan delivered a talk called “Voiceless in Mount Pleasant: Towers and the Death of Public Oversight,” part of Local Focus Vancouver’s community planning speaker series. He wasn’t speaking theoretically. He walked out his front door in September 2024 and discovered that an 18-storey tower had been approved for his quiet residential street. It was pursuant to the Broadway Plan. Mike had never hears of the Plan, neither had most of his neighbours. As Carol Volkart reported in Dunbar News on April 16, 2026, Mangan’s account came to wider attention through a post on CRD Watch which is how it reached this series.

It is worth noting. Victoria’s new Official Community Plan also enables 18-storey towers in designated nodes. Residents here should take Mangan’s story seriously.

Vancouver is what the end of resident input looks like in practice. Victoria is on the same path.

Five Changes That Stripped Your Voice

Before returning to the legal tools Council refuses to use, understand what happened here because it happened fast, and most of it happened quietly.

Missing Middle, 2022–2023. Council enabled up to six units on most residential lots and twelve townhouse units on corner lots. As-of-right. No rezoning needed. No public hearing. Most owners and renters in affected blocks are finding out after the fact, if at all.

Bill 44, 2023–2024. The province eliminated public hearings for rezonings consistent with Official Community Plans and for small-scale multi-unit housing (SSMUH) changes. Victoria did not push back. An NDP-aligned Council accepted their provincial medicine. What I would have preferred to see was a judicial review, along the lines of what View Royal is considering.

If you doubt how far the provincial government will go to strip your voice, look at Bill 26, 2023.  When a Kitsilano neighbourhood group took Vancouver to court to challenge a controversial tower rezoning, the government didn’t wait for the judge to rule. It passed the Municipalities Enabling and Validating Act (No. 5) a legislative kill switch designed to retroactively legalise the rezoning and instantly terminate the residents’ lawsuit. The Court of Appeal eventually struck the legislation down as unconstitutional (Kitsilano Coalition for Children & Family Safety Society v. British Columbia (2024) BCCA 423).  The message from the province was unmistakable.  If the rules allow the public to get in the way, the province will simply rewrite the rules. 

Victoria 2050 OCP, October 2025. Council adopted a new long-term land use framework enabling denser forms across village and corridor nodes citywide. The consultation process happened. Rockland and James Bay residents cried foul when they realised the outcome had effectively been pre-determined. What emerged is a document most residents have still not read and one that now legally justifies almost every significant rezoning application Council will receive for the next twenty-five years, to 2050. That is more than enough time for the Mayor’s “transformation” of the City she and her acolytes crave.

It is worth pausing on what Council did here. The province’s Bill 44 mandated up to six units on residential lots. Victoria took that floor and multiplied it by roughly ten, upzoning themselves from six units to six storeys. No other municipality in BC made that leap. Some would call it a bold. Others would call it a deliberate decision to override the public interest that the Local Government Act is meant to protect.

Citywide Zoning Modernisation, October 2025. The OCP was the vision, this was the execution.  Council rolled out new zoning categories across residential areas, villages, town centres, and corridors as part of a single, massive legislative package. Framed as “One City. One Plan”, this move instantly changed the legal building rights across the entire map, undermining the established character of the City’s diverse neighbourhoods with a single vote.

Administrative Default. Once a project aligns with Victoria 2050 and falls within the new zoning envelope, it proceeds administratively. No public Council vote. No hearing. Staff approval only.

Coming: Professional Reliance, Bill M216. This legislation, currently before the legislature, would require local governments to accept technical submissions certified by professionals regulated under the Professional Governance Act, engineers, architects etc rather than conducting independent technical reviews. In practice, it removes one of the last layers of municipal scrutiny remaining. If it passes, the role of City staff in evaluating major development applications shrinks dramatically.

The combined result is that developers know precisely what they can build but residents won’t know what’s coming until the signs go up.

Tools Council Has But Won’t Use or Use Effectively

This is the part that rarely gets discussed. Council behaves as though its role ends at approving applications. It does not. Victoria has meaningful legal leverage over developers at multiple stages. Council simply declines to pull those levers or pulls them so gently they have no effect.

Tool One – Development Permit Conditions (DP conditions). When the City issues a development permit, it can attach conditions: form, massing, setbacks, ground-floor activation, tree retention, affordable unit mix. These are not favours. They are legal requirements that travel with the permit. They could work but Council routinely approves permits with vague or weak conditions. Developers know it. To make matters worse these conditions then often get negotiated away during construction or ignored outright. The City rarely enforces them. Residents may never find out. Strong, specific, enforceable conditions are the difference between a development that serves a neighbourhood and one that extracts value from it. Council writes weak conditions because it has chosen to.

Tool Two – Master Development Agreements (MDAs). When a property is rezoned, particularly when Council grants height or density above the base zone, it can enter into an MDA requiring affordable units, local hiring, construction timelines, public realm contributions, and use restrictions. An MDA is a binding contract. Breach it, and the City can pursue every legal remedy available, from financial damages to court-ordered specific performance. In Vancouver, Mangan noted that developers fund most City Councillors’ campaigns. Victoria’s development industry is smaller, but the funding relationships exist here too, and the agreements tend to be correspondingly softer.

Consider Dockside Green and Harris Green Village with their massive contractual frameworks. But Victoria drafts them without hard enforcement triggers. When the market turns, the developer demands renegotiation. Council caves. Phase one gets built. Then the public amenities promised in phase two or three either never materialise or arrive only after dramatic concessions. Bayview is the clearest example currently on record. The City agreed to an MDA in 2007 but then replaced it in 2025 with Council granting relief to the developer rather than enforcing the original MDA’s terms. That first  agreement was rock solid. The City simply chose not to enforce it. As someone whose métier has been enforcing contracts this is anathema to me. 

Tool Three – Community Amenity Contributions (CACs). The CAC framework allows the City to collect contributions from developers when rezoning delivers additional density value, a share of the land value uplift that the City’s own decision created. These contributions can fund affordable housing, park space, childcare, and community facilities. Victoria’s CAC rates are publicly known. What is less publicly known is how often they are negotiated down, deferred, or absorbed into a project’s pro forma terms without scrutiny. Council created the value. It has the right to capture a fair share of it. Choosing not to is a policy decision that benefits one party only.

Tool Four – Phased Development Agreements (PDAs). Developers crave certainty. For multi-decade projects, they want a guarantee that future Councils will not downzone their land.  Section 516 of the Local Government Act provides the compromise tool. A PDA grants up to ten years of absolute zoning lock-in. In exchange, the City can demand an ironclad delivery schedule for housing and amenities. Victoria though signs these agreements without rigid performance guarantees. The developer gets a decade of zoning certainty. The public bears all delay and non-delivery risks.

What Mangan’s Warning Means for Victoria

Mangan closed his Vancouver talk with a clear instruction: “Your last bit of voice, if you’re concerned about this, is the election in October.”

Victoria’s municipal election is also in October. The candidates who will be on that ballot are already listening in ways they typically stop listening after the vote. That means the public’s window is now.

The question is not whether Victoria should allow more housing. It should. The question is whether the seven legal tools set out across this series will ever be used, used effectively, and with enforcement teeth, to ensure that approved housing gets built at the densities promised, with the affordability and amenity commitments honoured, on a timeline residents can expect. Right now, the answer is no.

This post draws on reporting by Carol Volkart in Dunbar News (April 16, 2026), covering Mike Mangan’s talk “Voiceless in Mount Pleasant: Towers and the Death of Public Oversight,” delivered as part of Local Focus Vancouver’s community planning speakers’ series. The talk came to this author’s attention through a post on CRD Watch.

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See also:

Index of articles regarding Law and Bylaw – CRD Watch Homepage

Even When the Government Cheats, You Can Still Win, by Arthur McInnis – CRD Watch Homepage

Ebycrats by Arthur McInnis – CRD Watch Homepage

Index of articles revealing major lobbying influence on B.C. Provincial Housing Bills and Housing Targets. – CRD Watch Homepage

Index of Articles Related to BC Bill M216 – CRD Watch Homepage