Mayor Marianne Alto wants four more years to fix her first sixteen

Marianne Alto ran for mayor of Victoria, British Columbia, in the October 15, 2022, municipal election. She was sworn in on Nov. 3, 2022, after serving 12 years as a city councillor. Experience was the centrepiece of her campaign. It has since become Exhibit A of her prosecution.

While Alto warmed a seat on council, Lisa Helps heated the mayor’s chair, and together they burned down the era that produced today’s fights over housing, street disorder and public safety. Helps is remembered for suggesting residents billet the unhoused while she kept renting out her own place on Airbnb. This is the kind of contradiction that doesn’t need embellishing, only repeating.

Alto campaigned on experience. Victoria got a municipal remake of the E&N Railway instead: expensive, endlessly discussed, barely moving, and always one feasibility study away from actually happening.

Start with the Dowler Place Access Hub. City Hall managed to turn a harm-reduction drop-in centre into a full-blown communications catastrophe, bad enough that Alto had to publicly apologize for how poorly the neighbourhood was consulted before the doors ever opened. The hub is operated by SOLID, the Society of Living Illicit Drug Users, a peer-run harm reduction organization.

Then came the dumpster fire backlash, the bylaw disputes over unpermitted outdoor structures, and the inevitable smouldering retreat. What started as a casual walk-in daytime shelter got rebuilt, brick by bureaucratic brick, into a strictly managed, 24/7 transitional facility with vetting, intake criteria and enough paperwork to drown a Briggs Orca visiting the Inner Harbour. A grassroots harm-reduction idea went in one end of City Hall and came out the other end wearing a lanyard.

Residents say they found out too late. Rumours that the hub would double as a supervised consumption site spread faster than the city could hold a meeting to deny it, and whatever trust existed between City Hall and North Park went up like a vape pen on dry grass in August.

Meanwhile, encampments grew, open drug use became part of the streetscape, and the same faces cycled through the same blocks. Council’s answer, consistently, was another meeting about another strategy; motion carried, nothing moved.

Eventually, public safety climbed high enough on the polling to matter, and City Hall discovered it had a chequebook after all. Roughly $10 million later, taxpayers are still waiting for anyone to show them the receipts, not the invoices, but the results.

Councillor Stephen Andrew has pointed out that Alto has spent 16 years helping author the policies that produced this exact crisis. Promising a fix with less than a year left on the mandate isn’t leadership so much as timing.

At council presentations, residents looking for hard numbers came away empty-handed. No benchmarks, no performance indicators, nothing to measure against — just the same open question taxpayers keep asking without an answer: is any of this actually working, or are we just paying to watch it happen?

And the taxpayers declare their love for Super Save Fencing.

Property taxes, at least, have been unambiguous. They have climbed with the steady confidence of something that has never once had to justify itself. Residents are told that inflation, policing costs, infrastructure and provincial downloading left no alternative. Maybe. But when the budget grows faster than the city funding it, eventually people notice they’re bankrolling an orchestra that keeps hiring trombones and forgets to show up in the Inner Harbour on BC Day.

Alto herself communicates with the warmth of an insurance adjuster reading you the exclusions on a claim you already know is denied. Nothing is ever quite broken, and nothing is ever quite fixed; every answer arrives pre-wrapped in enough qualifiers to survive a fact-check. She avoids confrontation the way a raccoon avoids daylight, instinctively, and with the practiced calm of something that knows the trash isn’t going anywhere.

The result is a governing style built entirely out of stalling technique: consensus as delay, caution as strategy, and a mayor who can explain city priorities only in the passive voice.

Then there’s housing, where Alto’s enthusiasm for density is matched only by her reluctance to say what it actually costs. Every planning meeting produces another tower and another promise that infrastructure will catch up eventually. Details to follow, as always. Density used as a philosophy instead of a tool starts to look less like planning and more like a hammer that’s decided every neighbourhood is a nail. Ask Fernwood, Harris Green or James Bay how that’s going.

Empire Donuts should name a doughnut after her, Marianne Brûlée Victoria.

Alto will run again on stability, experience and collaboration, which can be construed as a tidy slogan for four years that already happened. Victoria doesn’t need to imagine what those qualities produce anymore; she’s been living in it. The only real question left for voters is whether they mistake more of the same for progress a second time, you know, to pass through fire again.

Come on baby, light my fire.