North Saanich’s OCP already sets out where, when and how new housing should be delivered. Why is an external real estate adviser being brought in to rewrite it?
North Saanich adopted its new Official Community Plan on July 14, 2025.
The Province’s first-year housing reporting period ended just 17 days later.
Yet the completion of 12 homes against a first-year target of 60 is now being used to justify outside intervention and recommendations that gut the newly adopted plan. How can the OCP be blamed for housing results that were recorded almost entirely before it came into force? The question is not whether North Saanich should build more housing. It should and the community has already made a plan to do exactly that. The real question is why the Ministry of Housing is relying on CBRE, the world’s largest commercial real estate company, headquartered in Dallas to make changes to the resident-informed plan before that plan has been given any chance to work.
The plan residents helped build
The OCP was developed through years of public consultation, including engagement sessions, surveys, public meetings and opportunities for written feedback. The District itself acknowledged that residents’ input played a vital role in shaping the final plan. (District of North Saanich)
It is not a plan to stop housing. It is a plan to deliver housing. Responsibly.
North Saanich is required to deliver 419 net new homes by July 31, 2029. The OCP directs growth toward suitable and serviced locations, particularly areas with access to infrastructure, transit and daily needs, while protecting agricultural land, environmentally sensitive areas and the District’s rural and agricultural assets. (District of North Saanich)
The implementation process is already underway. Following the OCP’s adoption, the District began rewriting its zoning bylaw to align zoning with the new plan. The draft includes new townhouse zones, updated multifamily provisions and clearer rules for secondary suites, carriage houses and guest cottages. (connectnorthsaanich.ca)
The OCP already provides for affordability and housing choice
The OCP does more than designate land for development. It establishes concrete affordability expectations, including:
- Requiring 10–20% of units in new multifamily developments to be affordable, or an equivalent cash contribution.
- Securing 10% of lots in new bare-land or strata subdivisions as affordable housing.
- Requiring at least 5% of units in proposed hotels to be available as staff housing.
- Expanding gentle-density options such as secondary suites, cottages and carriage homes.
This is a balanced housing strategy: more homes and more housing choices, but located where infrastructure and services can support them.
What CBRE wants changed
CBRE wants to go considerably further. They include extending the Urban Containment Boundary, reducing parking requirements, reducing minimum lot sizes, permitting more duplexes and townhouses, enabling buildings of up to six storeys and muzzling the Community Planning Advisory Committee.
The CBRE report also calls for OCP and zoning amendments to enable specific development proposals. These measures may be appropriate in dense urban municipalities, but North Saanich is not a generic urban real estate market. Its limited transit, rural roads, agricultural activity, infrastructure constraints and environmental responsibilities require locally grounded planning.
CBRE recommends reducing parking requirements while also recommending that a detailed parking-demand analysis be conducted later. That sequence deserves scrutiny: local evidence should inform the policy change, not follow it.
Build the homes according to the plan
This is not a choice between housing and no housing. It is a choice between implementing the OCP created with residents or reopening that plan to an outside commercial real estate company before its housing strategy has even had a chance to prove itself.
North Saanich has a housing target. It has a timeline. It has an OCP. And it has begun the zoning work needed to implement it.
Build the homes. Meet the targets. But respect the plan the community helped create.
SOURCES
