Matt Dell

Evidence vintage (summary). Verified 1 Sep 2026 against a refreshed 2026 campaign site and policy page, City biography, current social profiles, December 2025 re-election coverage and the four-year council record. The prior statement that no 2026 campaign site was located is obsolete. Re-verified 2 Sep 2026 (pass 2) during the 12-topic rating card build: campaign page modification dates recovered from sitemap.xml, the eight policy theme pages read individually, and five 2026-era council actions added that this page did not carry — the 24 Nov 2025 infrastructure-reduction motion, the 3 Mar 2026 UDI membership vote, the 7 Apr 2026 curling-club grant, and the two motions carried 23 Jul 2026 on cooling and on derelict buildings.

Web, campaign & socials (checked 1 Sep 2026). Campaign site · Policies · X · Facebook—public page · Facebook—campaign/personal profile · Instagram · City biography

Profile. Matt Dell is a first-term Victoria councillor, provincial-government policy professional, former neighbourhood-association leader and longtime musician and arts organizer. He served five years as president of the South Jubilee Neighbourhood Association and has volunteered with National Little League and the Oaklands Parent Advisory Council. He holds a master’s degree in political science from the University of Victoria and lives in South Jubilee with his spouse and two children. First elected in 2022 with 13,899 votes—the third-highest total in a 37-candidate field—he has emphasized housing supply, public spaces, arts and culture, climate action and walkable neighbourhoods. For voters, the central assessment is delivery: his current campaign foregrounds projects and approvals from the term, while his voting record includes support for every annual budget and for the majority’s growth strategy.

2026 campaign and social verification. mattdell.ca is now a current, authorized re-election site with donations, volunteer recruitment, a record section and a linked policy programme. Its 2026 homepage highlights housing and affordability, a downtown public library, local business and tourism, completing Crystal Pool by 2030, parks and trees, streets and sidewalks, arts and events, and safe walkable neighbourhoods. The policy page expands this into eight themes: housing and affordability, climate, parks and amenities, neighbourhoods, arts and culture, downtown, governance and reconciliation. Correction, 2 Sep 2026: the pages ARE dated, and the text is largely 2022 carry-over. The site publishes modification dates in sitemap.xml: /policies 2026-08-24, /record 2026-08-13, /about 2026-08-12, the eight theme pages 2026-08-04, /endorsements 2026-07-28, home 2025-12-17. NationBuilder simply omits the Last-Modified response header, which is why the earlier pass read the pages as undated. Separately, the theme-page prose is 2022-vintage text republished under those 2026 dates: it says an external governance report appeared "earlier this year" and that "this report shows a new council has work to do," and it asks for support of "the recommendations for improved governance from the 2022 report" — all written before the 2022 election. The working ruling is that re-publication under a 2026 authorization, linked from the home page under "My priorities for 2026," makes it 2026 campaign text; but it is directional, uncosted, and the single most important thing to put to Dell before anything is published about him. X and both Facebook identities are active public channels; his campaign/personal Facebook profile reports a 2026 Victoria Labour Council endorsement. The Instagram identity is the one published in his 2022 materials, but a reliable current-post chronology was not available. No dedicated Bluesky, Threads or TikTok campaign account was clearly linked from the site.

Sources. 2026 campaign site, policy page, City biography, December 2025 re-election coverage, 2022 election results and council records. The site’s accomplishment totals are campaign-attributed until matched to City approval, completion and spending records.

Current-platform note. The current campaign materially improves the evidence base, especially on renter protection, non-market and rental construction, a 2030 Crystal Pool completion objective, a new downtown library, public amenities and cultural spaces. It still does not publish an ACTW-style permit-service benchmark, tax or debt rule, quarterly city-wide dashboard, major-capital referendum threshold or municipal AI-governance standard. Existing marks below are retained pending the 11 Sep lock rather than raised from broad policy language. The scored 12-topic card is now built — 14 of 55 measures scored, 10 Record lines, 31 dashes, internal proposal C at mean 1.21.

Five 2026-era council actions added 2 Sep 2026, three of them against interest. (1) 24 Nov 2025 — Dell moved to reduce the City infrastructure allocation from 5.5M to 4M dollars, with add-back if non-market-change revenue exceeded 1M; carried 7-2. Victoria Buzz reports the reduction could affect roadwork, fleet, parks infrastructure and playgrounds. This sits against his 2026 "invest in streets, sidewalks & infrastructure" line and is the one sourced miss on the card. (2) 3 Mar 2026 — council voted 8-1 to end the City's Urban Development Institute membership on a motion arising from Coun. Hammond; Dell was the lone vote to keep it. (3) 7 Apr 2026 — Dell moved, with Coun. Loughton, a 175,000-dollar grant to the Victoria Curling Club ice plant, three and a half times the 50,000-dollar threshold at which ACTW would require a published three-part grant test, in a cycle whose draft plan needed 8.38M dollars of cuts. (4) 23 Jul 2026 — the cooling motion he moved in May with Couns. Thompson and Caradonna was adopted unanimously, directing staff to report on amendments to the Rental Property Standards of Maintenance Bylaw ensuring no prohibition of cooling devices; that is the Program's own named M64 instrument, and it is the strongest single alignment on his card. (5) 23 Jul 2026 — a derelict-and-neglected-buildings motion moved with Coun. Thompson carried unanimously: "it's not acceptable for property owners to let their buildings remain empty or fall into disrepair… especially important in the downtown core, where we've seen some prominent buildings sit empty for many years."

Questionnaire status. Livable CRD launched a Capital Region candidate scorecard on 4 Aug 2026 and will publish candidates' verbatim answers alongside partner grades; responses are due 18 Sep 2026, so no Dell answers exist yet. The Homes for Living ranking that names him is 2022, not 2026. His /endorsements page still reads only "More coming soon…", so the Victoria Labour Council endorsement remains a Facebook-only, third-party item.

Not used, and why. A partisan substack compiled a long list of Dell council actions and FOI-sourced quotations. Its verifiable items were re-sourced independently and are above; its characterisations are frame and tone, which this framework excludes. Three of its claims remain unverified and are deliberately absent from the card: that Dell was absent for the 2 Oct 2025 Official Community Plan adoption (material, because his Record page claims the OCP as an accomplishment), that he voted against a public-engagement programme on the draft City budget, and the Aug 2023 code-of-conduct complaint restriction. Open the council minutes before any of these is used.

📋 Accountability. YES on every budget; "between 2023-2025 the City of Victoria had the lowest municipal tax increase of most surrounding major cities," a comparative frame rather than a restraint commitment. No permit benchmarks, no dashboard, no ZBB position. His ❌ on managed competition was removed in v1.8 for having no source.

Fact-check of his comparative-tax claim, completed July 31 2026 — largely TRUE, and the wording matters. Dell's statement was that Victoria had "the lowest municipal tax increase of most surrounding major cities" between 2023 and 2025. Checked against the neighbouring municipalities: Victoria ran 6.15% / 7.93% / 6.99%. Saanich ran 7.19% / 7.93% / 8.02%. Esquimalt ran 6.3% / 7.72% / 9.90%. Oak Bay ran roughly 11.6% draft / \~9.7% / 11.4%. Langford ran 12.41% / 15.6% / 9.77%. Colwood ran 6.43% / 4.9% / below 5%. Verdict: cumulatively Victoria was lower than Saanich, Esquimalt, Oak Bay and Langford, and higher than the smaller Colwood. "Lower than most" is defensible and sourced. "Lowest of all" would be false, and he did not say it. Oak Bay's 2023 and 2024 finals and Colwood's 2025 final carry minor source discrepancies and are flagged in the Open Questions block. This is recorded because the framework's own accountability rule cuts both ways: a claim that survives checking should be recorded as surviving.