Independent · non-partisan · costed. A citizens' framework for Victoria's 17 October 2026 election, free for any candidate to adopt. 46 days to go
A city that works.
Travellers already rank Victoria among the best small cities in the world. By 2030, it is also the best run.
The household was billed 9.34%. The operating budget rose 31.4% in three years — $300.0M to $394.1M — while downtown safety fell to 59% from 83%.
Why it needs to — the record, in six figures
The record, and what we commit to instead.
The left column is Victoria's published record. The right column is what this framework binds itself to — every one of them costed in Every Measure and tracked by the 12 Commitments.
12 commitments. Measured every quarter.
Twelve numerical targets, each with a published baseline, each reported quarterly. The first two are the ones no other candidate in this race can copy, because they require the arithmetic to have been done first. The rest are what the arithmetic pays for.
01Residential tax rateTarget: ≤6.5% Year 1, ≤5% Year 2, about CPI + population growth Year 3 onward. Capped on the residential rate, not the total levyBaseline: 9.34% residential in 2026 (7.28% total levy, 4.78% business). Four straight years above inflation plus growth
02Verified annual savingsTarget: $8–14M per year in operating savings verified and banked by Year 4, published line by line against the year they were promisedBaseline: $0 currently reported. No competitive benchmarking, no zero-based review, and no published savings register exist today
03New homes (composition)Target: 12,000+ net new units by 2030, 25% missing middle, 20% 3BR+, 15% non-marketBaseline: 2,359 net new units delivered in 2 years, against a 5-year provincial target of 4,902
04Rental vacancy rateTarget: 5%Baseline: 3.3% (2025, highest since 1999)
05Unsheltered homelessnessTarget: -50%Baseline: ~320 people
06Crime severityTarget: -15%Baseline: CSI 152.65 (2024, down 11%)
07Graffiti removalTarget: 90% within 48hBaseline: No current standard
08Permit speed (by category)Target: Simple under 6 weeks, complex under 6 months, rezoning under 9 monthsBaseline: 3–18+ months by type; no benchmark currently published
09Downtown vacancyTarget: 5% storefrontsBaseline: ~11% (current)
10Dangerous intersections redesignedTarget: All 10 of the top 10 by collision history, redesigned or reconstructed within the termBaseline: 0 redesigned, and no published collision inventory exists, so the top 10 has never been named
11Transparency deliveredTarget: Lobbyist registry live, FOI application fee abolished, Integrity Commissioner appointed, and all 16 quarterly reports published within 30 days of quarter endBaseline: 0 of 3 in place, and no quarterly performance report is published at all
12Climate and canopyTarget: -50% GHG by 2030 (vs 2007); 35% tree canopy by 2035Baseline: -31% achieved, 19 pts to go; canopy roughly 30%
Every quarter, the scorecard is published. No excuses. No spin. Just results. Row 11 is the one that makes the other eleven checkable: a framework that demands quarterly outcome reporting from a council and does not put its own reporting record on its own scorecard is asking for a standard it has not accepted.
The twelve are the headline set. The full instrument panel behind them — every indicator with its baseline, source, direction and cadence — is 2030, Measured: the KPI Library. Where a KPI and a Commitment could be read to conflict, the Commitment governs.
This framework holds no office and cannot publish a report on its own — the commitment is to whichever candidate adopts it. Where and when: if a candidate elected October 17, 2026 adopts this framework, the first quarterly report falls due within 30 days of the end of their first full quarter in office — Q1 2027, so by early April 2027 — published on the City's own website per Measure 67, with this page updated to link it.
Thirteen measures define this framework.
More than a hundred costed measures is a toolkit, not a reading assignment. These thirteen define the framework; every other measure supports one of them. Each carries a beside its heading in Every Measure.
- 01Measure 65 — Zero-based budgeting. Every one of the City's 200+ programs justified from zero on a rotating cycle. The engine that pays for everything else on this page.
- 02Measures 66–66d — The Taxpayer Guarantee. A capped tax glide path, over-collection refunded to taxpayers rather than swept into reserves, a debt rule, and one published Household Bill.
- 03Measure 15 — Competitive testing for waste and street cleaning. In-house and private bids on the same specification, both directions; the cheaper competent option wins.
- 04Measure 7 — Published permit times, by category. A published target for every permit category, and your answer in writing.
- 05Measure 26 — Downtown Public Order Team. One integrated command for the blocks that need it most.
- 06Measure 27 — Bylaw enforcement 6 AM to 10 PM, 7 days a week. Disorder does not keep office hours; enforcement should not either.
- 07Measure 11 — Cut unsheltered homelessness by 50%. Housing-First with STEP throughput, capacity-first enforcement, and a published quarterly count.
- 08Measure 30 — Modern smart streetlighting. The Kelowna/Halifax model: LED, IoT, lit all night — and no cameras, no behavioural AI, no audio surveillance.
- 09Measures 71 + 73b — A downtown revival with an owner. Storefront vacancy from 11% to 5%, one Team Victoria office, one number, one flagship event.
- 10Measure 45c — One signature public-space project. A Pandora linear park or a continuous Inner Harbour promenade: shortlisted by residents, approved by referendum, delivered on time and on budget.
- 11Measures 77 + 78 — You vote on the big spends. A referendum for new capital over $25 million, and the 5-step process for every major project.
- 12Measure 79b — An Integrity Commissioner, anchoring the Integrity Package: lobbyist registry, FOI fee abolished, published mandate letters, and a council-pay rule.
- 13Measure 64b — Seismic and coastal resilience. The hazard Victoria actually faces, funded and scheduled.
If you read only one pillar, read A Well-Managed City. It pays for the other four.
The Balance Sheet.
A safer, cleaner, greener, better-managed city — with tax increases on a credible glide path back to inflation + growth. Spend smarter, not more.
The cap is on the residential rate, not total revenue — a cap on the total would let a council deliver a 9% homeowner bill and describe it as 6.5%. Any increase above the cap requires a supermajority of Council, 6 of the 9 members (the mayor plus 8 councillors), with a public explanation on the record. The same 6-of-9 standard governs the M66b refund, the M66c debt rule, the M66d utility discipline and the M50b arts floor.
Back to inflation plus growth, in three budgets.
Each cap is on the residential rate, not on total revenue. Going above any of them takes 6 of 9 Council votes and a public explanation on the record.
Your household bill, on the 2026 numbers
The 9.34% residential increase meant about $323 more on a home assessed at $1,015,000 (City of Victoria; Victoria News, May 2026). Enter your own assessed value to scale that figure, and see what the same 2026 bill would have been under each cap.
This is the 2026 bill only, scaled from the published median-home figure. It is not a forecast: what a capped rate costs in later years depends on assessed values nobody can responsibly predict, and the framework does not project them. Utilities and the CRD requisition sit on top of the rate and are not included.
Five Pillars · One Foundation
Every measure belongs to one of five pillars, anchored by a foundational commitment to right relations with the host Nations. Every one costed.
Victoria is built on the unceded traditional territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking peoples — today represented by the Songhees Nation and the Esquimalt Nation. Any serious program for the City must recognize this and build it into how the City operates, not just how it speaks.
The full program includes specific measures on government-to-government working tables, Indigenous procurement, lək̓ʷəŋən place names, cultural protocols, and urban Indigenous services. See Foundation measures M1–M5 →
How to use this framework.
There is no exclusivity and no campaign attached to this document. The goal is to raise the standard of debate — to make it normal for Victoria candidates to publish costed, measurable, sourced platforms with quarterly accountability.
- Endorse the framework in whole or in part
- Adapt individual measures to your platform
- Challenge the cost estimates and source links — publish your own
- Multiple candidates can run on these ideas, and they should
- Start with the one-page summary — the 60-second version
- Then read the measures on the issues you care about
- Suggest improvements — every measure is open to criticism and correction
- Ask your candidates which specific measures they support — or check the candidate scorecard first, to see who already has
- Share with neighbours and community associations
- This framework was drafted from publicly available research and reporting
- If you have technical expertise and want to contribute corrections or new measures, please contact us
- Credit attaches to the underlying idea, not the framework
Where the candidates stand.
Every candidate with a live door, read against this framework — 20 candidates, 12 topics, 55 measures. A measure is answered only when a sourced sentence with a URL and a date says so, and every answered cell opens onto that sentence. The one letter is applied from the published rules, and only once a candidate has five answered measures — it is not computed on the page and it is not an average: an unweighted mean lets a thin card with one strong mark outrank a wide card with an honest spread. Several candidates carry no letter yet, and some carry nothing at all: that is unknown, not empty, and never a fail.
The caveat that matters most: most challengers publish their detail in September, so a field read in early September under-reports challengers against incumbents who have four years on the record. The scorecard says who is on it and who is not, and why, and every figure on it is checked against the published table at build time. Read who is counted, and who is not.
See where the candidates standWhoever you are, Victoria should work for you.
0% ideology. 100% pragmatic.
We started where the truth is most visible: the budget. Politicians make promises; numbers don't lie. Victoria's operating budget grew 31.4% in three years, from $300.0M in 2023 to the $394.1M adopted for 2026, alongside $160.1M in 2026 capital improvements (both figures from the 2026–2030 Financial Plan adopted May 7, 2026) — with VicPD's budget nearly doubling in a decade, from $50.6M to $86.8M requested for 2026, and no competitive benchmarking, AI, or smart infrastructure deployed. For every problem a Victorian faces daily, we applied the same six-step method.
The method has a delivery half. Who owns each measure, what happens in the first 100 days, and what publishes every quarter are set out in Implementation & Governance.
No major new public project without these five steps.
The Dowler Place file proved why this matters. Under this framework, no project skips any step.
Victoria in 2030.
Everything below is the result of the measures in this framework being delivered. It is written in the present tense because that is the point of a plan.
Travellers already rank Victoria among the best small cities in the world. By 2030, it is also the best run. That is the change on offer. Not more money. Management.
It is a Saturday morning in June 2030 and you walk Pandora from Cook Street to the harbour. Four years ago this was the street Victoria was known for, for all the wrong reasons. Today it is a linear park. Trees, benches, kids on a playground, storefronts open on both sides. Nobody was pushed to the next block to make this happen. Housing came first, the province paid its share, and the City published the count every quarter until the unsheltered number fell by half. Then Victoria voted, on a ballot, to build the park. It opened on time and on budget because every invoice was public.
Where the park meets the water, you keep walking. The waterfront walkway runs further than it did, and the signs carry the lək̓ʷəŋən names first. The continuous Inner Harbour promenade, runner-up on the signature-project ballot, is next on the list. A city that delivers one project on time and on budget earns the mandate to build another.
None of this happened by luck. It happened because Victoria changed how it is run.
In 2030, Victoria is the city that refunds you when it over-collects your taxes. The credit lands on your notice, not in a reserve. That is Measure 66b, written so a later council cannot quietly reverse it. Tax increases stepped down each year until they matched inflation plus growth, and the only new debt is debt voters approved on a ballot.
Your permit answer comes in writing. A date, published targets, quarterly results. Builders stopped routing around Victoria, 12,000 homes were approved, and most of them got built.
Every capital project over $25 million goes to the voters. Crystal Pool proved it in 2025, and the signature ballot proved it again: residents say yes to good projects. They just want to be asked.
And the city works at street level. A bylaw officer answers at 9 PM. Graffiti is gone in 48 hours. The streets are lit all night. Downtown vacancy sits near 5%, and the storefronts that were dark in 2026 have tenants.
Every quarter, the dashboard publishes every number, green or red, no spin. You do not have to trust anyone. You can check.
Victoria’s budget grew 31% in three years, from $300 million to $394 million, and the city did not get 31% better. That gap is the mandate. Close it, and everything above is paid for without a single new tax. Every line here has a measure, a cost, and a date behind it. If the numbers do not move, you will know by 2028, not at the next election.
No council has ever offered Victoria that deal. This framework does. The 12 Commitments below are how you check whether we did it.
What the City actually controls.
Before making promises, we must be honest about what the City of Victoria actually controls. Many of the problems residents face — healthcare, criminal sentencing, income support — fall under provincial or federal jurisdiction. We advocate aggressively to senior governments for action in their domains, but we never promise what isn't ours to deliver. See the full plain-language guide →
A framework that discusses only the City and the senior governments leaves out a large and fast-growing share of what a household actually pays. That is why the regional level is on this diagram.
Every measure, in full.
Every measure, with its full text and budget impact, lives on its own page — the public number is the 12 Commitments scorecard below, reported quarterly; the framework carries far more than that, and deliberately no longer states a total, because three earlier versions published a count that did not survive a hand count.
Read every measureWhat we are — and what we're not.
- Non-partisan and open
- Costed and sourced
- Measurable and quarterly-reported
- Adoptable by any candidate, in whole or in part
- Open to correction by anyone with expertise
- A political party
- A candidate slate
- Exclusively held by any one candidate
- Final — every measure is open to refinement
- A substitute for the work of the host Nations or senior governments
- →Govern like managers — measure, adjust, deliver
- →Consult before building — and listen to the answer
- →Visualize before constructing — AI imagery and GIS analysis, not demolition
- →Protect the environment with results, not slogans
- →Enforce the rules that exist — before inventing new ones
- →Respect taxpayers — every dollar audited, every quarter reported
- →Cost every promise — no measure without a budget line
- →Publish one household bill, not just a tax rate
- →Publish the rules for our own AI before we use it
- →We don't do ideology — we do results
- →We don't make promises we can't measure
- →We don't pick fights — we fix problems
- →We don't spend first and justify later — taxpayers decide on big new projects
- →We don't try things in real life when we can simulate them first
- →We don't deploy public surveillance — no City cameras, no behavioural AI, better lighting instead
- →We don't let a machine decide about a person — a named human decides, every time
Neighbourhood priorities.
Every neighbourhood in Victoria has its own character and its own concerns. This framework is city-wide, but implementation must be neighbourhood-specific — so there is a page for each of the City's 12 official neighbourhoods, plus Harris Green. Where things stand in 2026, what lands here measure by measure, the first 18 months, and how you check. Zero new measures, zero new cost: what these pages add is sequencing and siting.
The honest answers.
The questions we hear most — and the answers we stand by. More are answered on the full FAQ page.
"You're too pro-business / anti-environment"
"You're cutting services / austerity"
"You don't care about homelessness"
"You just want to privatize everything"
"Referendums slow everything down"
"You're going to put surveillance in our streetlights"
"How does this differ from a candidate platform?"
This framework is open.
This is a framework, not a campaign. It is open for adoption, adaptation, and improvement by any candidate or civic organization in the Victoria 2026 election cycle. Multiple candidates can run on these ideas — and they should. The goal is to raise the standard of debate.
For residents
Get a quarterly digest of which measures are advancing, which are stuck, and what the next council needs to hear from you.
For candidates & organizations
There is no copyright restriction on the use of this framework. Attribution is appreciated but not required. Adapt freely.
Honest about timing: these are steady-state figures at the end of a four-year implementation. Year-one savings are a fraction, and the Year 1 cap is the binding constraint rather than a comfortable one. The full line-by-line math is in the Savings & Revenue Analysis.
Two gated conditional tiers — roughly $450–700K/yr (v1.8: the M20 AAA maintenance standard, end-of-trip facilities, and the M23b frequent-network stop standard) and $500–850K/yr (v1.9: M26b civilian crisis response, M28d community paramedicine, M80c Local Area Plan capacity). Each proceeds in Year 2 only if the M15, M65 and M68 savings are verified as tracking at the end of Year 1; the two clinical measures additionally require a confirmed provincial or health-authority cost-share partner, because municipally funding a clinical service outright is the downloading M70b exists to refuse.
Two capital items: the M64b City-owned seismic retrofit, uncosted pending inventory, and the M45c signature public-space project ($40–80M), referendum-gated under M74. Neither is quietly netted into the headroom.
These are commitments to spend savings that arrive, not savings that are hoped for. A framework that quietly spends its own projected savings before they arrive is doing exactly what it criticizes the current council for doing.
Every range published, including the one that hurts.
Annual figures at steady state, at the end of a four-year implementation. Bars show each published low-to-high band on a shared scale.