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.
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Does Victoria’s tree-planting approach support its canopy targets?
Estimated time: 5 minutes (5 questions)
Victoria’s urban forest is an important part of the city’s character. A fuller tree canopy also helps cool neighbourhoods during heat waves, manage rainwater, and clean the air.
Victoria measures its urban forest by tree canopy cover, the area of the city shaded from above by trees. Recent measurements show that Victoria’s canopy grew from about 26% of the city in 2013 to about 30% in 2023. However, the firm that conducted the measurements found that the net gain between 2019 and 2023 came mainly from existing trees growing larger, not from new planting.
Victoria’s tree canopy targets are set out in the City’s Official Community Plan (OCP), adopted by Council in October 2025. The OCP sets a city-wide target of 40% by 2050. Targets vary by area, with higher growth targets for established residential neighbourhoods and lower targets for the downtown core and designated population growth areas.
In April 2025, during OCP discussions, Council voted to require five-year tree canopy growth targets for the city as well as five-year neighbourhood-specific tree-planting targets.
City staff told Council in April 2025 that the City plants approximately 300 to 350 trees a year on public property.
Records also show where those trees are planted. Between 2019 and 2023, close to half of the new public trees, about 46%, were planted in parks rather than along the streets and boulevards of residential neighbourhoods, where the OCP sets higher canopy growth targets. In James Bay, for example, 330 of the 449 trees planted by the City were in a single park, Beacon Hill.
Whether Victoria meets its 2050 canopy targets will depend on several factors, including how much planting the City does and where new trees are planted.
Although Council directed staff to include neighbourhood-specific planting targets in the new OCP during the April 3, 2025 OCP discussions, they do not appear in the OCP Council adopted in October 2025.
Primary sources: City tree-planting records, 2019–2023 (obtained via FOI VIC-2024-082) • Official meeting record and meeting video, April 3, 2025, Committee of the Whole • 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) • Official Community Plan (Victoria 2050), Section 4.3, Urban Forest
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