When homes and businesses are spread out, they require more money in infrastructure than they generate in property taxes, meaning higher tax bills. By encouraging more effecient use of our limited land, we can keep property tax increases down without cutting funding to the essential services and infrastructure that Victorians rely on.

Currently, the city livestreams their meetings using software that’s glitchy and unintuitive to use, and the links to the streams can only be found deep in the city’s website. The software does have accessibility features that are valuable, so we shouldn’t abandon it. Rather, we should simulstream meetings to YouTube as well. It’s a popular platform that basically everyone knows how to use, allows pausing or rewinding during the stream, and municipalities like Oak Bay already use it. If middle-schoolers can figure this out for their Twitch streams, we can too.

Finding out who voted for what should be as easy as possible. Following examples from municipalities like Saanich, Victoria should create a voting dashboard on the city website, to make it clear who supported and opposed each motion.

Too often, large developers treat fines as “the cost of doing business”, and blatantly violate bylaws regulating noise and traffic. We should increase these fines significantly, so that they serve as an actual deterrent to bad behaviour and not just an annoyance.