A City for Everyone
Marianne’s platform draws on her years of experience as a City Councillor, her record of listening to and working with a wide variety of community leaders from a range of sectors and residents from across the city’s neighbourhoods, and her demonstrated ability to bring people together to address the most urgent challenges and create opportunities that improve the lives of all city residents.
A City for Everyone is built around six interconnected and mutually supportive areas of opportunity that work together to move Victoria forward as a safe, people-oriented, economically thriving, just and inclusive community.
Housing
A home for everyone
- Accelerate the Victoria Housing Strategy, Rapid Deployment of Affordable Housing and Village and Corridors plans
- Reconsider the Missing Middle Housing Initiative
- Create a city land bank program
- Plan and redevelop Evergreen Terrace lands
- Complete the Douglas Corridor comprehensive development plan
- Complete the 10 year OCP review
- Consider a limited property tax holiday for purpose built rentals
- Reward purpose built affordable and rental housing
- Reward programs to minimize tenant displacement
- Offer incentives for arts and cultural amenity spaces
- Small scale housing ambassador
- Heritage accommodation for energy retrofit/efficiency
- Convert commercial real estate spaces into housing units
- Create requirements and rewards for distributed density
- Ease zoning for tiny homes and secondary suites
- Work with the province to accelerate housing for unhoused folk
City Services
Public works that meet the needs of residents
(“No pothole left unfilled”)
- Enhance budgets for roads, sidewalks, active transportation, accessibility, maintenance
- Renew public gardens to support the moniker ‘A City of Gardens’
- Encourage more urban food gardening
- Ensure responsive services that meet the needs of residents
- Ensure predictable, transparent public works service delivery
- Undertake a master plan service update for the Victoria Fire department
Well Being
A Healthy, Safe, Active Community
Social Spaces
- Crystal Pool redevelopment
- Enhanced use of Royal Athletic Park, including SD61, community organizations’ programs, and public access
- Parks acquisition strategy for new recreation opportunities, playgrounds, plazas and parklets, activating the Parks and Open Space Master Plan
- Development rewards for constructed, or contributions toward, public realm, public and community space enhancement
- Increased support for arts and culture – advancing the Arts and Innovation District plan, the Cultural Spaces Road Map, and the Create Victoria Arts and Culture Master Plan
- Tax relief or reductions, and additional funding, for community serving groups
Health Services
- Housing, financial and practice incentives for health professionals and the wellness workers that support and assist them
- Permissive tax exemptions for not-for-profit health societies, health co-operatives and clinics with doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, and other health professionals and wellness workers
- Support for training spaces for wellness workers
- Advocacy for harm reduction services throughout the region, and safe supply
Comfort & Safety
- Enhanced funding for civilian community crisis response teams
- Increasing emphasis on/focused funding for community policing
- City-wide safety and security initiative
- Increased public realm cleaning and maintenance, bylaw services, ambassadors etc.
- A renewed ‘welcome/thank you’ program for businesses and residents
- Support for residents’ efforts to improve their neighbourhood’s well-being
- Support for every recommendation in the provincial Special Committee on Reforming the Police Act report Transforming Policing and Community Safety in British Columbia.
Climate Adaptation
Protecting the planet, neighbourhood by neighbourhood
- Implement the City’s Climate Leadership Plan, Electric Vehicle and Electric Mobility Strategy, Zero Waste Victoria strategy and GO Victoria
- Create regular hot and cold weather shelters and relief services
- Enhance tree and native planting programs
- Update the Urban Forest Master Plan and Tree Protection Bylaw
- Require shore power for ships docking at Ogden Point
- Offer education on household climate emergency readiness
- Enhance local emergency response services
- Expand free transit services
- Identify more car share parking spaces
- Explore a curb management strategy
- Create incentives to upgrade household infrastructure
- Complete the Bicycle Master Plan
Economy
A strong economy pays our way forward
- Activate Victoria 3.0
- Protect industrial and manufacturing lands
- Increase downtown business improvement programs
- Redevelop the Victoria Conference Centre
- Realize the Arts and Innovation District
- Support efficient investment in the city
Indigenous Relations & Reconciliation
Creating a shared future
Acknowledging the Land
- Recognize lək̓ʷəŋən names of particular regions or places within what is now called the City of Victoria
- Acknowledge and consider lək̓ʷəŋən heritage at the same time the City of Victoria’s heritage is acknowledged and considered
- Remediate the health of the Gorge waterway and Inner Harbour
- Establish areas of Victoria that acknowledge the land as a living entity with rights and privileges
- Establish programs that enable City Council and City staff to learn about historical lək̓ʷəŋən uses of and practices with local lands and water
- Use or include lək̓ʷəŋən place names on site signage, and develop public acknowledgements of current and historical lək̓ʷəŋən leaders
Lək̓ʷəŋən Teachings
- Ensure that the voices of lək̓ʷəŋən Elders, Knowledge Keepers and Youth are included in reconciliation recommendations
- Ensure history; recognition of lands, stories, language; and presence is included in artistic lək̓ʷəŋən and architectural expressions of Victoria, and in city planning
- Acknowledge the legitimacy of lək̓ʷəŋən oral history
- Develop public acknowledgements of current and historical leaders amongst lək̓ʷəŋən people
- Provide adequate funding (full funding or enough to enable matching funding) to the Nations to catalyze the longhouse build atop Migan/Beacon Hill
- Urge the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority to work with the Nations to revisit an Indigenous village/historic visitor opportunity at Ogden Point
Lək̓ʷəŋən Language
- Ensure that Council and City staff have access to local Indigenous language resources currently available and that the Mayor should be able to provide greetings in the lək̓ʷəŋən language
- Establish a lək̓ʷəŋən language learning app so that public presenters, local and visiting, can properly pronounce “Lekwungen” and other local words necessary in territory acknowledgements
Indigenization and Decolonization
- Establish a requirement that new Council and senior staff participate in a process, such as the Kairos Blanket exercise, to learn about the truth elements of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action
- Ensure that local media has information about the work the City of Victoria is doing with lək̓ʷəŋən people and why
- Revise these Charges as needed as the City travels its journeys of Reconciliation, in conversation with the City Family
- Establish opportunities, focusing on lək̓ʷəŋən ways of doing and being, for Council members and staff to learn how to Indigenize their professional practices
- Organize presentations and smaller dialogues between City Family members and Council members and senior city staff who are not part of the City Family
- Establish Indigenous-focused anti-racism training for Council members and staff
- Include information and training about the city’s commitment to Indigenous relationships in orientations or onboarding processes for new Council members and city staff
City Council Practices
- Advocate to the province to allow municipal governments to engage with First Nations or other groups of Indigenous people in camera, i.e., in closed meetings
- Ensure that lək̓ʷəŋən or other Indigenous peoples’ needs are not being used to advance agendas that have nothing or little to do with reconciliation
- Encourage, at school district, provincial and federal levels, the establishment of a lək̓ʷəŋən -focused school or schools, and support lək̓ʷəŋən programs in public schools across Victoria.
- Support lək̓ʷəŋən business and entrepreneurial initiatives
- Meet with other governments, particularly local municipal governments, to share the story of Victoria’s relationship process with local Indigenous peoples
- Set expectations for City Councillors’ actions, observance, and knowledge of lək̓ʷəŋən history, cultures and practices
- Implement and resource the recommendations that arise from the Indigenous Relations Function research and investigation work
- Make the Reconciliation Grant a permanent part of the city’s operational budget, indexed to inflation
Relationship or Leadership Agreements
- Enshrine the City Family as an ongoing responsibility of Council
- Ensure the continuation of Reconciliation Dialogues, beginning with one that focuses on lək̓ʷəŋən children and youth
- Develop a Memorandum of Understanding, related to governance, relationship, and culture, with Songhees and Esquimalt Chiefs and Councils