Marg Gardiner

Evidence vintage (summary). Verified 1 Sep 2026 against the refreshed and authorized campaign site, priorities and voting-record pages, City biography, current Facebook and X profiles, 29 Apr re-election coverage, monthly newsletter and four-year council record. Re-verified 2 Sep 2026 for the 12-topic rating card: home, priorities, voting-record, meet-marg, resources, endorsements, news and voter-survey pages, plus both WordPress sitemaps for page lastmod, Victoria Buzz (Harbour motion 2 Jul 2026; decriminalization motion 5 Sep 2025), Victoria News (budget 11 May 2026; amalgamation question 26 Jun 2026), CHEK (VicPD 4→2 on 3 Mar 2026; salaries 13 Nov 2025) and Saanich News (canopy motion 4 Apr 2025). Times Colonist pages returned 403 on this pass and are flagged for re-opening before publication.

Web, campaign & socials (checked 1 Sep 2026). Campaign site · Priorities · Voting record · Facebook—2026 campaign · X · City biography

Profile. Marg Gardiner is a first-term Victoria councillor with a background in chemistry, public management, regulatory enforcement, programme management and data analysis. She holds a BSc in chemistry and an MBA in public management/administration, has lived in Victoria for more than two decades and served for 16 years on the James Bay Neighbourhood Association board before election. Her community work has covered public safety, land use, accessibility, transportation, parks, economic development and air quality. On council she has been one of the most consistent fiscal- and public-safety dissenters, opposing each annual tax increase and the Missing Middle policy. For voters, her campaign offers the clearest method-based alternative on budgeting and neighbourhood consultation, while her record on policing, supervised consumption and land use makes the substantive trade-offs unusually explicit.

2026 campaign and social verification. marggardiner.ca is now a current, authorized campaign site for City Council and CRD director with biography, priorities, voting record, endorsements, donations, volunteering, news, voter survey and campaign email sign-up. It is organized around four priorities: safe streets, liveable neighbourhoods, respect for the taxpayer and transparent governance. The site makes a direct zero-based-budget commitment, calls for every dollar to produce measurable results, supports police funding, opposes current Missing Middle/OCP density rules, advocates stronger community input and records her attempt to seek closure of The Harbour supervised-consumption site. Its statement that City reserves fell from about $300 million to $160 million is a campaign claim that was not independently reconciled in this pass and should not be quoted as a verified City statistic without checking reserve definitions. The current Facebook page is linked directly by the campaign; X identifies itself as her only campaign account. No clearly attributable campaign Instagram, Bluesky, Threads, TikTok or YouTube account was located.

Sources. 2026 campaign site, priorities, voting record, City biography, 29 Apr re-election coverage, current social profiles, monthly newsletters, council records, Capital Daily and Times Colonist reporting.

Current-platform note. The explicit promise “I will zero-base the budget” materially strengthens the evidence for M65 and is more specific than the July record. The platform still lacks a defined review cycle, programme test, dollar savings target, residential tax glide path, debt and reserve ratios, Household Bill, permit benchmark and quarterly city-wide dashboard. The mark counts below are the July–August prose assessment and are superseded for scoring purposes by the 12-topic rating card; they are retained until the 11 Sep lock as the narrative record, not as the score.

📋 Accountability. Opposed every budget and every Missing Middle vote — a consistent record. No published position on managed competition despite the strongest method rhetoric on council, which is the clearest gap between her framing and a mechanism.

🧩 Rating card, 2 Sep 2026. Scored on the 12-topic card. The internal proposal is C at n = 15 of 55, mean 1.17, and the proposal held C under every downgrade tested. Six Close cells (enforce existing bylaws, COLA tax cap, provincial refusal threshold on supportive housing, zero-based budgeting, IAP2 consultation, urban-forest canopy), six Partial, one Partial+ (amalgamation, capped by the incumbent rule), and two Opposed — M6, where the 2026 ask is to cut City housing bylaws to the provincial floor, and M11, where she rejects low-barrier Housing First. Two 📋 Record lines shown and not scored: the Police School Liaison Officer claim, and her NO on the Mayor's Community Safety and Well-Being Plan. Twenty-eight of the fifty-five measures have no source at all — the honest shape of a four-priority platform that is deep on safety, taxes, density and consultation and silent elsewhere.

Corrections and precisions from the 2 Sep pass. (1) The campaign site is WordPress, not NationBuilder, and it publishes a lastmod for every page in wp-sitemap-posts-page-1.xml: priorities 2026-04-20, home 2026-04-21, voting record 2026-03-29, voter survey 2026-05-11. Earlier notes recording "no lastmod published" were wrong. (2) Her priorities page states "9.24% for residential"; the verified City figure is 9.34% (7.28 overall, 4.78 business). A 0.10-point error on her own platform — note it, do not build an argument on it. (3) The reserves claim (over $300M to about $160M) still has not been reconciled against City reserve definitions and must not be quoted as a City statistic.

Two positions the framework has no measure for, and one live tension. She commits that "the City of Victoria must be prepared to support involuntary confinement for those who are a danger to themselves and others" — unscoreable, because the Program has no involuntary-care measure. She also commits that "the City must end financial support or tax exemption to social service programs which permit illicit drug use." That is not a gap in her platform, it is a direct tension with the Program: M65 states that its programme review is "not a viewpoint test," and M83 sets a viewpoint-neutral civic-access test of lawful use, safety and municipal purpose. M83 has no cell in the 55, so nothing is scored either way, but any reader comparing her to the Program on grants and tax exemptions will land on this, and the public card should not be the first place it is noticed.

The largest answerable gap: the CRD seat. She is seeking a CRD director seat alongside re-election, and has published no position on regional cost — nothing on the $1.07B Goldstream filtration plant, nothing on a per-household rate-impact statement, nothing on the City's annual position at the CRD table. A seat sought is not a source, so M70c stays a dash. It is the single question most worth putting to her: she is asking for the seat that decides the file.