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The Failures Behind the City’s $175,000 Victoria Curling Club Grant

By Arthur McInnis

May 2, 2026

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On Thursday, April 2, 2026, during a COTW meeting, Council debated a Member Motion brought forward by Councillors Matt Dell and Krista Loughton. The motion read:

“THAT Council authorize a one-time grant of $175,000 to the Victoria Curling Club for the replacement of its ice-making plant, with funds to be drawn from the 2026 Contingency Budget”.

What followed was a debate that perfectly exposed the growing gap between the City’s published grant policies and the ad-hoc, discretionary spending of this Council.  This post sets out the failures behind it.  

Let me begin by saying that the Victoria Curling Club is a genuine community asset. Seventy plus years old, it gets seniors out of the house, runs a youth program, and its aging ice plant had become a legitimate safety and operational problem. Replacing it was necessary. This is not an attack on the Club or the sport.

It is, however, a serious critique of how Victoria City Council manages your tax dollars and bypasses its own rules when it suits them.

Before we even get to the grant, it’s worth understanding what the City already provides the Club. The Curling Club operates on city-owned land under a lease with a rent of one dollar per year; a “peppercorn lease” in legal terms, first agreed in 1950.  This is the kind of consideration used when the intention is to convey property for effectively nothing while maintaining the legal form of a contract. During the debate, Councillor Coleman raised the question of what that arrangement costs taxpayers, suggesting the foregone market rent could be as much as $20,000 per month.

If that figure is in the right range, the City is already subsidising the Club to the tune of roughly $240,000 annually. That context was largely absent from the debate, and it matters. The case for a $175,000 gift looks different when the recipient is already receiving what amounts to a quarter-million dollars a year in indirect public support.

Looked at more closely and it’s even more concerning.

A news article on the Curl BC website dated November 28, 2024, and titled “Victoria Curling Club – Road to Renewal” states:

“With the club’s building resting on City land, the first step to ensuring our future was to renew our lease that had lapsed some 10 years previously.  Following an 18-month negotiation a lease was signed in May of 2023.”

So, to be precise, the lease lapsed approximately a decade before the 2023 renewal, meaning it had lapsed around 2013, and it took 18 months of negotiation to get a new one signed.  Let me state that again.   The Club was operating on City land without a valid lease for roughly ten years. The new lease, signed May 2023, agreed to one and the same $1 per year rent. Why it would have ever taken 18 months to achieve this is result is beyond me.
 

But the $175,000 is not the end of it. The club’s own engineers have assessed the full cost of necessary renovations at $10 million, with critical infrastructure representing half that figure. The ice plant is merely phase one. Next comes the refrigerated floor, leaking for years and requiring either full replacement or a new brine delivery system. After that, an elevator and full accessibility retrofit across a building with four floors and eight staircases.

The Club has disclosed that it applied for over $2.7 million in grants in a single year. The $175,000 from Victoria taxpayers is but one early instalment in what appears will be a sustained, multi-year campaign targeting public funding. 

None of this though means the Club’s needs aren’t real. They are. But Council voted to treat this as a one-off act of community generosity. The Club’s own documents suggest something closer to a long-term funding relationship, one that Council has now formalised without any policy framework to govern it.

Would it not have been helpful if mention had been made of this during their debate?

On Top was Sleight of Hand and Previous Mistreatment of North Park

There was some sleight of hand involved. 

Read the background to the official motion, and you’ll find that this was never just an ice-plant grant. It was an improvised fix for a neighbourhood crisis the City helped create.

By tying the funding to North Park Neighbourhood Association (NPNA) access and explicitly framing the Club as a new home for the NPNA’s displaced food hamper program, the City let slip what this may have really been about – making small amends for the previous mistreatment of North Park. 

Concentration of Social Services and Supportive Housing

For years, North Park has been ground zero for the City’s supportive housing and homelessness response. During the pandemic, the City permitted continuous sheltering in Central Park (the heart of the neighbourhood), which led to significant frustration and loss of green space. The City also placed the “Tiny Town” (later Caledonia Place) supportive housing shipping-container facility in North Park.

Jeremy Caradonna himself acknowledged that North Park has “been expected to shoulder much of the obligations of sheltering and supportive housing for the entire region”.

The Broken Promise of a Community Centre

Despite bearing the brunt of these social services, North Park lacks a dedicated community centre. In a highly controversial move, the City purchased land on the 900-block of Pandora Avenue, the epicentre of the City’s unhoused crisis, with the promise of building a long-awaited community centre there. However, the NPNA strongly pushed back against this, arguing that the location was unsafe and entirely unsuitable for neighbourhood amenities like senior yoga or parent-and-tot groups.

The City effectively sought to mandate a community centre location that the community itself felt would be unusable.

The Loss of Rentable Space

With the impending demolition of United Commons, 932 Balmoral Road, formerly known as the First Metropolitan United Church, and with their other rentable community spaces like the Bosa Room having their availability drastically reduced, North Park would be left with almost nowhere to gather or run its services.  (For more on this see the post below dated March 2, “Faith, Development, and the Tax Roll. What the First Met Redevelopment Reveals About Church-Owned Real Estate”.)

The United Church of Canada, in partnership with Aryze Developments, is razing the existing community structures to make way for a brand new six-storey, mixed-use rental building. The new development will feature 129 rental homes and ground-floor commercial space, along with a “regional arts venue” that is expected to be heavily utilised by groups like the Victoria Symphony.

However, Aryze and the Church made absolutely no commitment to provide affordable, dedicated, or low-barrier space for the local non-profits and community groups like the NPNA that had relied on the old building.

As for the Bosa Room it appears the reduction in access is tied to the building management’s own operational decisions. The Pandora by Bosa building is a luxury, privately owned and operated rental complex. The Bosa Room, located inside the building at 1025 Mason Street was provided as a “community amenity” during the initial rezoning process to win City approval. However, as is common with these types of privately-owned public spaces or community amenity rooms, the developer/property manager maintains ultimate control over the booking schedule, maintenance, and access.

According to the NPNA’s December 2025 meeting minutes, the neighbourhood was informed that their access to the Bosa Room was being unilaterally “reduced from 4-5 days weekly to once monthly”.

Because the City does not own the room and only secured its use via a likely loosely worded amenity agreement years ago, City Hall has very little leverage to force the private building management to give the NPNA its access back.

This loss of access to the Bosa Room, combined with the impending demolition of the United Commons by Aryze Developments, created the perfect storm that would leave North Park without any community space and seemingly forcing the City to use a $175,000 Curling Club grant as a desperate workaround.

Policy Bypassed

It is not as if the City had no framework for making grants in the first place. It maintains a suite of at least five separate, named grant programs, each with its own published policy and guidelines. Thus, if, for example, a neighbourhood association or arts non-profit wants $5,000, it navigates online portals, submits financial statements, undergoes staff technical review, and competes against other applicants for limited funds. The system is designed to be fair and consistent.

None of that happened here. When Council voted to give the Curling Club $175,000, there was no competitive application, staff-led technical review or policy-driven grant stream. There was just a fast-tracked political motion with a cheque and quid pro quo to come.

Contingency Funds Misused

The money didn’t come from the recreation budget. It was pulled directly from the City’s Contingency Fund, a reserve that Susanne Thompson, the Director of Finance and Deputy City Manager, confirmed during debate, was intended for “unforeseen events.”

Well, a 40-year-old ice plant reaching its end of life is not an unforeseen event. It is predictable capital depreciation. Councillor Stephen Hammond identified the real danger and that is using emergency reserves for capital upgrades to private facilities and the precedent it sets. Once the contingency fund becomes a backdoor grant program, budget discipline is gone.  No agreement was reached on whether it was a “slush fund.”

Compromise Ignored

There was a better option on the table. Councillor Marg Gardiner proposed a simple amendment to the motion to convert the word “grant” to “loan”. That way the Club would still get its ice plant in time for the next season, and taxpayers would get their money back. Councillor Hammond noted the logic given the Club lacked collateral for conventional bank financing.  This all made the proposed City loan the obvious municipal tool for exactly this situation.

The majority voted it down.

Governing by Gift, Moral Obligation and the Federal Blame Game

Why? Listen to the reasoning from some who opposed the loan.

Councillor Matt Dell: “I find it just frankly morally wrong that we’re treating this as some sort of like business loan proposition. This is a gift to a community centre.”
 

Councillor Jeremy Caradonna argued the City had a “moral obligation” to fund the Club because of its “unique relationship” with the organisation.

This is where the governance failure becomes impossible to ignore. Moral obligation is not a municipal policy. The City does not exist to distribute six-figure gifts from emergency reserves based on relationships Councillors happen to value. When elected officials allocate public money through subjective sentiment rather than published criteria, it stops resembling governance.

Then, if you really want to know just how uncomfortable this decision was for some members of Council, listen to Councillor Susan Kim. While voting to approve the bailout, she openly lamented that the City was forced into a “clumsy” solution, explicitly blaming Ottawa for the Curling Club’s shortfall:

“I also will pass on my sympathies to the Club that this is a problem ultimately caused by the federal government not coming forward with funding. And I’m deeply frustrated that this Council is being pigeonholed into filling that gap in as clumsy of a way as we’re doing right now. And, you know, I might even consider a motion arising that we yell at the feds about this.”

But here is the reality check, since when is the federal government responsible for replacing the ice plant at a private, municipal curling club? Blaming Ottawa is just a convenient excuse for a Council that finds it hard to say no.

Policy Became Patronage

When a $175,000 taxpayer grant is justified as a “moral obligation,” the City crosses the line from policy into patronage. Without clear, consistent published criteria, how does any other organisation know whether it qualifies? What other worthy organisations are being denied funding simply because they haven’t caught the personal attention of Councillors Dell and Loughton?

Good governance is not about handing out discretionary gifts based on who Council likes best, nor is it about using an infrastructure grant as a fix for the North Park displacement crisis. It is about applying consistent, transparent rules across the board, not a Council that substitutes its own moral compass for fiscal discipline and clear policy.  In the end, “the house,” as it’s known in curling, looks suspiciously like a target to me and one that could end up on certain Councillors’ backs.

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See other articles by Arthur McInnis:

Arthur McInnis – CRD Watch Homepage