Whose City? In Victoria, Mayor Race Shaped by Bike Lanes, Housing, Wealth Divide

Having served one term as Victoria’s mayor, Lisa Helps is seeking re-election saying she’s done exactly what she said she would.

“The way that I’ve governed the city for the last four years is the way I promised to do it when I ran, which is not left or right, [but] utterly pragmatic, thoughtful and making decisions based on the information in front of me at the time, not based on any kind of political ideology of any sort,” she said.

Her critics and main opponents disagree, describing a mayor who has found it easier to apologize for decisions after the fact than to make them carefully in the first place.

Helps won office in 2014 with an 89-vote defeat of a two-term mayor with strong NDP connections. Her win was heralded as one of several across the country showing a “generational change” in leadership.

While there’s been the occasional controversy, starting with Helps’s post-election choice not to swear allegiance to the Queen and more recently on a decision to remove a statue of Canada’s first prime minister John A. Macdonald from city hall, there’s much in the record that she’s happy to highlight.

“We began the term with a lot of challenges in front of us, including an unfinished bridge, unstarted sewage treatment project, downtown [commercial] vacancy rate of over 10 per cent, no new rental housing construction in the city for 30 years, [and a] transportation system built for the 20th century,” she said.

Four years later the city has not only solved those challenges, Helps said, but has also made progress on several other fronts. The city secured $90 million for new affordable housing in the region, created a climate leadership plan and developed master plans for arts and culture and for parks and open spaces.

“We’ve done a heck of a lot in these past four years, both cleaning up from the past and positioning the city well for the future,” she said.

Mad as Hell

This time around, Helps is one of 10 people running for the job. Another 29 are running for eight council positions.

The most prominent of Helps’s opponents is Stephen Hammond, a business consultant and founder of the group Mad as Hell that formed in response to a tent city that grew on Victoria’s courthouse lawn and that was disbanded two years ago.

He’s running with a New Council slate that includes four candidates for councillor. Their website identifies the city’s new bike lanes as the number one issue that people are angry about and promises to “stop the war on cars” and return common sense to transportation planning.

Hammond said he’s a cyclist himself, but doesn’t think enough thought was given to which streets would be used or to the effects on local businesses. And the added cycling infrastructure is out of step with a city where the average age is already relatively old and getting older, he said.

Nor does he like how the cost for the bike lanes rose. It’s a part of a pattern that’s seen taxes rising while money is wasted on severance payments and pet projects, he said.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of fiscal responsibility going on,” Hammond added, though he welcomed a recent move to seek an audit of the Johnson Street bridge replacement.

There needs to be more genuine consultation before decisions are made, he said, rather than the current feeling that people have to constantly fight the mayor and council if they want to see common sense decisions made.

“There are a lot of people who want change,” he said. “I think I can do better, and I think I can do better for the citizens of Victoria.”

Bike lanes and affordability

Helps said the number one issue she hears about is affordability and that bike lanes are in fact one part of the solution.

Citing a figure from the Canadian Automobile Association for how much it costs to own and operate a car, she said, “If we can create cities where people don’t need to own a car, it means they’ve got $10,000 more in their pockets per year that they can spend on housing, or child care, or food, or ballet lessons. I am a big picture systems thinker, and I look at how all of these things are integrated together.”

By 2022, when the network is completed, everyone in the city will be within a two-minute ride of a safe cycling route, she said, noting that it’s seniors and people with children who seem most grateful for the separated lanes that have been created in the last four years.

Another candidate, government relations consultant Michael Geoghegan, is focusing on affordable housing and the need for more development. He opposes Helps’s proposal to reduce default speed limits to 30 kilometres an hour from 50 on neighbourhood streets. He has an endorsement on his website from Langford’s can-do, pro-development Mayor Stewart Young.

“I see us headed toward a very bleak future where Victoria is going to be a city of the very rich and the very poor, and all the working class and middle class people are driven out of it,” Geoghegan said.

The city needs to get faster at approving housing developments and to reduce red tape that adds significantly to the cost of construction, he said. There’s also a need for more low-income and co-op housing, as well as more housing for students at the University of Victoria and Camosun College, which would free up other rentals in the city.

While the latter ideas would require the involvement of senior levels of government, as would addressing homelessness more generally, Geoghegan noted, “I make my living getting stuff out of the provincial and federal governments.”

He said he worries about businesses closing downtown and cited Chapters moving out to a mall and the closure of a 100-year-old bakery on Johnson Street. Bike lanes have led to reduced visits to downtown and increased congestion, he said.

Geoghegan is also pledging to make recreation centre admissions free for people under 18 years old, a policy he says would make life more affordable, offer health benefits and reduce crimes of boredom in the city.

“If people want to see a city that functions better and functions better for the majority of our residents, I’m the natural choice,” he said. “I’m the positive, pragmatic, common sense alternative.”

‘Pulling all the levers’ on housing

Other critics of Helps are outside the race. A long story in Victoria’s Focus magazine looked at her record on the Macdonald statue, the police board and the bridge and grudgingly concluded, “Her enthusiasm for participating in government, and her definite position on contentious issues, has driven her to be fully engaged. That has had both costs and benefits for the city.”

Former Monday Magazine editor Sid Tafler has started a new website, The Record, aiming to compensate for what he sees as a diminishment in local media.

On it he tracks the voting records of the mayor and council on 40 major developments in the city. Helps and councillor Marianne Alto voted for 95 per cent of the projects, he said. “If somebody’s voting 95 per cent approval, the indication to me is the person isn’t voting on each individual development on its merits.... They’re voting somewhat arbitrarily in favour.”

He said much of the development in the city is high-end and inappropriate for the incomes that people in the city actually have. The more development that’s approved, the higher prices go, he added.

Despite the number of new buildings, there are still many people sleeping in tents in the city and many anecdotes about people leaving town for places that are more affordable, he said.

“People are focused on little issues,” he said. “The big issue is growth. We have to carefully look at growth and whether it’s serving us.”

Another mayoral candidate, Bruce McGuigan, wrote an op-ed in The Record criticizing city council’s approach to development, declaring “the rezoning of our city without compensation borders on theft.”

Helps said the city’s economy has been strong and there are lots of stories about employers having a hard time finding workers because people can’t find housing in the city.

“I am in support of building new homes for people, and if I’m 95 per cent supportive of building new homes for people, I think that’s what’s necessary for our economy and in our city, so I don’t actually see it as a bad thing.”

Projections suggest the city will grow by 20,000 people by 2041. A commitment to climate action means building walkable, dense, car-optional, low-carbon communities, Helps said. “That means more density in the downtown and in village centres and around transit corridors.”

But there’s also a need for public or social housing, including with rents tied to what income assistance recipients receive, she said. “We need homes for people in this city and we need homes for people across a range of income brackets. The private sector is not going to deliver units at $375 a month or $600 a month. They’re not going to do that.”

The money the region has for social housing will build 2,000 rental units that are truly affordable, she said. The council has also made it easier to get a garden suite approved and in the last year gave the okay to 22, which is four more than the total for the preceding 12 years.

“We’ve been pulling all the levers we can,” Helps said.

New political dynamics

Past Victoria mayoral elections have tended to be contests between candidates with NDP connections and those put forward by the business community. That dynamic appears, however, to have shifted this time around.

While the shift may have something to do with new campaign financing rules banning corporate and union donations, Helps said she believes the fact she is seen as moderate and non-ideological likely contributed.

“Maybe I’ve covered a wide enough spectrum that people who are running are running for other reasons,” she said.

Both Hammond and Geoghegan say they are drawing support from across the political spectrum. While some paint Hammond as a conservative, and there are staunch conservatives involved in his campaign, public donation records show he personally has supported the NDP provincially and the Liberals federally.

Geoghegan worked as a political aide in Mike Harcourt’s NDP government of the early 1990s, but he’s clear that through his career he has worked closely with people across the political spectrum to get things done.

His read on the dynamics of the Victoria race is similar to Helps’s, though he puts it slightly differently. “The incumbent is somewhat politically amorphous,” he said. “It hasn’t left a lot of room for people who are ardent left or ardent right.”

Helps said she plans to keep practicing an “open hearted, joyful politics” that helps maintain a sense of connection and belonging as the city grows. “I think people are hungry for being part of a coalition of joy rather than a coalition of anger.”