Wilful Blindness Drives City of Victoria Homelessness Policy

Lately I’ve sent a flurry of Freedom of Information requests to the City of Victoria, three of which to investigate the scale of the homelessness problem and the city’s response. Specifically, I asked records pertaining to the following:

• Any statistics pertaining to warning or fines issued for violations of the Parks Regulation Bylaw‘s sheltering provisions under Section 16A, as well as ensuing impounds, for the year 2024.
• Any record from which originate the four-million-dollar figure Councillor Loughton invoked during the April 18 2024 Committee of the Whole meeting in the following quote: “[…] the City of Victoria spends over four millions a year on bylaw enforcement, public works cleanup crews, and parks remediation to manage the day to day of unsheltered homelessness […]” (seek to 1:44:50 in the recording).
• A comprehensive breakdown of the item “Overnight Sheltering” under corporate expenditures at page 68 of the the document titled “2024-2028 Financial Plan” found at https://www.victoria.ca/media/file/2024-2028-financial-plan.

Brace yourself for disappointment, because the replies were underwhelming. Simply put, the city admits the council made decisions having no idea what it’s talking about.

Let’s start with infractions to the Parks Regulation Bylaw. I obtained the following table:

This is for all of 2024. WN stands for Warnings and MTI for Municipal Ticket Information. As you can see, the bylaw sweep team issues hundreds of warning slips but almost no actual tickets, presumably because they would be practically impossible to collect, which shows the lunacy of an enforcement-based approach. Impounds and disposals are about as high as one would expect. I have no statistics pertaining to how many impounds were recovered; anecdotal evidence suggests the actual number is scarce.

But what’s far more interesting is this portion of the response letter: “The attached record was created for this request as the City does not maintain these statistics. The created record has been provided to you in their entirety.” This means council members ranted ad nauseam about the lack of bylaw enforcement on the ground without having requested any relevant data.

Let’s have a look at Krista Loughton’s 4-million quote next. You’d think she would have done her homework before using it in a council meeting, right? Well, shockers! the number is entirely made up, according to the response letter: “Please note, no records exist for your request. This office was advised that Councillor Loughton asked for an estimate of costs associated to Bylaw and Public Works operations related to overnight sheltering at a previous Council meeting. The amount was an estimate of Bylaw staff time combined with the costs of managing overnight sheltering. The figures used to make this estimate can be found in the 2024-2028 Financial Plan.”

I actually went through the 2024-2028 Financial Plan, and I’m unable to find a plausible way to produce this figure using the numbers in question. Besides, our final item pertains to the cost of overnight sheltering in that said document, so let’s have a look at this one:

Well, colour me surprised; what the budget advertises as overnight sheltering services isn’t actually spent on overnight sheltering, but instead on… waste collection and disposal. This is how much the city is spending throwing unhoused residents’ belongings in the garbage instead of, you know, actually sheltering them. And even city staff doesn’t know the gratuitous waste’s full amount.

I ranted in previous posts about the time I spent working on the petition for judicial review of the latest amendment to the Parks Regulation Bylaw prohibiting overnight sheltering at Irving Park and Vic West Park, currently before the BC Supreme Court. I actually did most of the groundwork, scrutinising all evidence on record we could use to demonstrate the council’s decision was unreasonable. Well, information missing from the record can be just as relevant, because lack of records shows wilful blindness, which isn’t an acceptable defence before a court of law. Expect some tough questions from the judge at the hearing in April, to which we know the respondent’s legal counsel won’t have a proper answer for lack of records.