Highlights:
● SAVE THE DATE! SUNDAY OCTOBER 2, 7:00 - 8:30 PM GVAT HOUSING AFFORDABILITY ASSEMBLY
● Write to support Gorge View affordable housing proposal today! (Public hearing Thursday July 28!)
● Win! Oak Bay allows secondary suites and boarders, without additional parking
● Profiles: Yvonne Hsieh & Camosun College Students’ Society

Greater Victoria Acting Together members have been campaigning to get Oak Bay to improve their secondary suite and roomers / boarders policies for years. And now Oak Bay has directed staff to create a better policy that some other area municipalities!

Greater Victoria Acting Together’s unions, faith, service, environmental and student organisations representing tens of thousands of people have had a busy year and many successes! We have supported decision makers to take steps to protect us from a changing climate, address affordable housing and find community first ways to address opioid overdose deaths.

Members of the Mental Health and Addiction Research Team met with a team in Eugene, Oregon to learn about its success in developing community support for a successful alternative for crises involving mental illness, homelessness, and addiction. They also studied some Canadian examples.

At the urging of Greater Victoria Acting Together (GVAT), Councillor Jeremy Loveday made a motion to allign “the City of Victoria’s vehicle kilometres travelled targets with the targets within the Clean BC plan.” On June 9th Council voted unanimously in favor. This is an important step as the BC government’s CleanBC target is much stronger than Victoria’s present target for replacing automobile traffic with public transit, walking, rolling, and cycling.

In 2020-2021 GVAT member groups invited their members to the virtual town halls organized by the Project bringing stories of people in the region with lived experience of being unhoused to various community associations and allied groups in Victoria.

By shifting from raw log exportation to value-added industries we could employ up to 32 times as many people per cubic metre of timber, allowing reduced harvest, expanded economic benefit and greater employment.

While Saanich has had affordable housing policies for almost 15 years and participates in regional housing programs, the municipality still faces a severe deficit of affordable rental housing. The recent Saanich Housing Strategy considers current and future needs and identifies a dozen high-priority actions to diversify and expand the affordable housing stock.

This month Victoria City Council voted unanimously in favor of the Rapid Deployment of Affordable Housing policy, which will expedite and lower the cost of building affordable non-profit, government and cooperative housing. “This makes Victoria the first municipality in B.C. to approve an accelerated process for affordable housing city-wide.”

Scientists and climate experts tell us we have all the scientific information we need to know we face catastrophe if business as usual continues and we also know we have technology to make the transition. What is missing is sufficient engagement from the population at large. GVAT has started hosting conversations so we can reflect together on what we can do, and are doing, to save our common home.

The 2022 provincial budget announced in February contained an exciting announcement: $35 million will be spent over three years to help former youth in care, almost half of whom experience homelessness within one year after they age out of foster care at age 19.

On March 28, Climate ART Co-Lead Jane Welton facilitated a wide-ranging Zoom conversation with members of the Social & Eco Justice Committee at Holy Cross Catholic Parish. Jane began by defining the difference between “climate change” and “climate Justice,” giving examples of how economically advantageous countries like Canada could work to achieve the latter.

My point of view is that if GVAT is to make a difference it will do so because its action research teams have developed holistic views of the problems we seek to address and have revealed the root causes of the problems we have identified. Such understanding can provide meaningful context to the concrete proposals that we make.

GVAT’s “A Roof For Everyone” workshop had a strong turn out with 34 in-person attendees.

In October 2021 the BC government adopted a new target to reduce “distances travelled in light-duty vehicles by 25% by 2030, compared to 2020.” GVAT has requested that the City of Victoria thank the provincial government for this bold target, and commit to meeting or beating the CleanBC 25% by 2030 target.

The first transportation project the provincial government announced since the Capital Regional District passed its new transportation strategy is bus lanes and new transit stops on a future Rapid Bus route. This is good news. The CRD’s new strategy calls for improving public transit and active transportation rather than increasing highway capacity for cars.

Councillors voted unanimously in response to ­letters from ­Greater Victoria Acting Together, a coalition working on climate action, affordable housing and mental health, and the Action Committee of People with Disabilities. Capital Bike also supports the change.

Eric Doherty, a registered professional planner and a co-lead of a group called Greater Victoria Acting Together Climate Justice Action Research Team, is an advocate of the project. "To me, it's a no brainer as far as climate action to make it so more people — a broader section of the public — can use the cycling facilities that we are already building," Doherty said to host Robyn Burns on CBC's All Points West.

Op-ed by GVAT Climate Justice Team co-leads - CRD must push province to fund rapid bus instead of expanding highways

Attending GVAT meetings over the last couple of months has confirmed our intuition that the voices of our parishes would be a great fit for this group. The campaigns that GVAT endorses emerge through teams focused on three present crises: mental health and addiction, climate change, and affordable housing. All of these domains have been included in the conversations I have had with parishes about Transforming Futures and about the concerns they have for their communities.