Victoria City Council Decisions
Community Voices Matter gives residents of Victoria, British Columbia, a way to share their views on decisions made by Victoria City Council and to see how other residents feel about those decisions.
Each survey takes only a few minutes. You’ll receive a short overview of one Council decision, answer a handful of questions, and then see how other residents responded and how councillors voted.
Registration is free. Your individual responses remain confidential: they are never published, shared with others, or attributed to you. Survey results are reported only as combined totals.
Are Victoria’s tree canopy targets achievable?
Estimated time: 4 minutes (4 questions)
As well as Victoria’s urban forest being an important part of the city’s character, a fuller tree canopy helps cool neighbourhoods during heat waves, manage rainwater, and clean the air.
The City’s canopy growth targets are part of its long-term urban-forest and climate goals and are laid out in the City’s Official Community Plan (OCP). The OCP sets targets for housing as well as trees, including the kinds of housing to be built and where. Higher canopy growth targets have been set for established residential neighbourhoods, with lower targets for the downtown core and designated population growth areas.
Victoria measures its urban forest by tree canopy cover, the share of the city shaded from above by trees. The measurement uses aerial LiDAR, and has been made four times over the last two decades: in 2007, 2013, 2019, and 2023. Between 2013 and 2023, Victoria’s tree canopy grew from about 26% of the city to about 30%.
The 2023 canopy survey was the most recent canopy data available when the City developed the new OCP, which was adopted by Council in October 2025. The new OCP set a city-wide tree canopy target of 40% by 2050, up from the approximately 30% existing canopy recorded in 2023; the growth target would represent a canopy increase of about 33% by 2050.
On October 2, 2025, during the debate, Councillor Dave Thompson, who supported the new OCP, told the meeting that Victoria had added 100 soccer fields of tree canopy while adding 8,000 net new homes in multi-family buildings in the 10 years ending in 2023.
Three weeks prior, in a submission to the OCP’s public hearing on September 11, it had been pointed out that the City’s measurements showed slower canopy growth between 2019 and 2023. The canopy gained about 47 hectares in the six years to 2019, but only about 23 hectares between 2019 and 2023. Over those four years, the City gained about 82 hectares and lost about 58 hectares of canopy; the firm that took the measurements found the net gain for that period came mainly from existing trees growing larger, not from new planting.
Supporters of the new OCP point to the City’s strategy of adding housing mainly in denser, multi-unit buildings instead of spreading lower-density homes across more land. They contend that building up rather than out keeps more green space intact, reduces urban sprawl, and that, based on the 2023 survey, tree canopy and housing have both been increasing.
Critics point to the source of the recent canopy gains. Mature trees growing larger produced most of the increase, while redevelopment for denser housing usually requires mature trees to be removed. Critics have also voiced concern that the new OCP has reduced the required amount of plantable ground per lot available for replanting, and that young replacement trees can take decades to provide the same level of canopy as the trees they replace.
Vote record will be shown after survey completion.
Primary sources: Terra Remote Sensing Inc., “Above Ground Vegetation Change Assessment Using Multiple LiDAR Datasets, 2013–2023” (City of Victoria, March 25, 2025; obtained via FOI VIC-2025-120) • Rockland Neighbourhood Association Land Use Committee submission to the public hearing, September 11, 2025 • Official meeting record and meeting video, October 2, 2025 • Official Community Plan, Part 4.3
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