Finding Balance on Community Safety in Victoria

By Marianne Alto

On any given day in Victoria, when it comes to community safety, two truths can exist at once. In our city, there are different perspectives, priorities, and challenges when it comes to complex issues like housing, street disorder, drug use, and crime. At the heart of the issue is a tension between compassion and public order. As mayor, it is my job to hear everyone, and find a balanced way forward.

If we are honest about community safety, we begin with a common understanding: the status quo was not working, and Victoria cannot be the only answer to challenges that belong to the whole region. Our city already hosts 82% of the region’s supportive housing, 92% of its shelter spaces and the majority of street services which have been centralized in the downtown core over many years.

Municipal government does not control housing, health care, social services, addictions treatment or income support for our residents – gaps in which contribute to social inequity and disorder. The City can regulate public space, support partners, invest in services and improve coordination, but it cannot, by itself, solve problems that are shaped by provincial jurisdiction, court decisions and decades of pressure on social systems.

The City is confronted with varying perspectives and competing ideas about what community safety should look like: more services, centralized but also dispersed; faster action but with deeper consultation; more but less enforcement; streets without sheltering or disorder but somehow with a place for everyone – and that none of this is the business of the City. All those views are real and valid. That is why balance matters, and why it is so difficult. In practice, the City holds more than one objective at once. In delivering community safety, it works to reduce harm to people, businesses, and community while also lessening the conditions that produce harm in the first place. Balanced reality is a series of hard choices, made under pressure, with imperfect tools.

Victoria’s Community Safety and Wellbeing Plan reflects that reality. It emphasizes prevention, intervention and enforcement together, rather than pretending any one of them will be enough on its own. That means investing in housing, shelters, youth supports, outreach, relocation assistance, bylaw, policing, and partnerships and programs that help people connect to care, aid and opportunity, before a crisis escalates. It means addressing immediate disorder while trying to interrupt the factors that keep producing and feeding it.

We have implemented phase one of the community safety and wellbeing plan. The City has committed more than $5.4 million for community supports, shelter spaces, housing, and emergency weather response, $4.4 million for extra sanitation and capital improvements to streetscape and public realm related to safety and wellbeing, $3.6 million for bylaw and community safety hubs, and $2 million for additional police officers.

This work is not easy, and not every decision will satisfy everyone. But we cannot defend a status quo that was plainly failing too many people, nor wait for alignment from every order of government before acting.

Progress is being made. City staff are working with community service providers, and directly with individuals, to connect vulnerable people with housing and supports. We are opening new spaces and building better services, we’re investing in the tools and resources that prevent people from falling into homelessness and tend to those already there, and we’re gradually enforcing city bylaws that authorities have ignored for decades.

With Victorians’ patience, kindness and support, we will continue to listen to differing perspectives, seek the balance points in between, innovate and act, and be blunt about the limits of what the City can do on its own.