Fox Guarding the Henhouse: Why Is a Global Real Estate Giant Deciding North Saanich’s Housing Future?
British Columbia’s housing policy machine just got a lot more interesting and a lot more troubling.
According to investigative reporting by Sasha Izard published on the CRDA website, the BC NDP government handed North Saanich’s housing advisory role to CBRE; one of the largest commercial real estate companies on the planet. Not an independent planner. Not a neutral consultant. A company that actively buys, sells and markets property, including in the very municipality it’s now advising.
Let that sink in: the same industry with skin in the game is now shaping the rules of the game. Referee and player.
Izard’s reporting raises serious questions the mainstream media seems to be avoiding. Why isn’t anyone asking about this is a conflict of interest? A firm with financial incentives tied to land values and development potential has been advising the BC NDP provincial government to build more houses in a district that’s the agricultural powerhouse of the province and with low population growth to boot.
The bigger pattern: developer lobby, meet provincial policy
But this isn’t an isolated incident, Izard argues. It’s part of a longer story involving the Urban Development Institute (UDI), the province’s most influential developer lobby group. Drawing on Freedom of Information (FOI) requests and years of reporting, the article traces UDI’s fingerprints on provincial housing legislation. These include the mandatory housing targets now being imposed on many municipalities and the erosion of local governments’ planning authority.
A major flashpoint and something we’re seeing playing out in North Saanich right now is CBRE’s advisory report suggestion to remove North Saanich’s Urban Containment Boundary (UCB).
UCBs are a long-standing environmental and planning safeguard to prevent urban sprawl and ensure local farmers can keep farming. CBRE wants this moved so they can build condos that according to population data from Statistics Canada, North Saanich doesn’t need. Izard says this is a troubling shift where ecological protections are increasingly removed to allow uncontrolled, high-rise urban expansion.
Corporate capture that North Saanich residents will foot the bill
Izard lays out a timeline of developer lobbying, political donations and closed-door meetings over lunches between developer lobbyists and government officials, describing the result as nothing short of the “corporate capture” of BC housing policy. The thing is the North Saanich Official Community Plan (OCP) is not opposed to new housing development; it says: “Growth should be carefully managed to ensure that the qualities that define North Saanich—including its rural landscape, environmental assets, agricultural lands and community character—are maintained.”
The OCP offers the guardrails for housing; that it is sensitive to rural and agricultural character, that allows developers to make reasonable profits (not obscene profits) and certainly not at the cost of erasing vast tracts of tree canopy and fundamentally altering the rural and agricultural character of the district.
Now here’s the kicker: while the province pressures municipalities to approve high-density projects and strips away public consultation at the local level, many of these developer-led projects have failed to sell. The result? Local governments have reportedly been pushed by the province to buy up unsold developer-built units; meaning taxpayers are bailing out the same developers whose lobbying made the rules in the first place.
So who’s really planning your neighbourhood?
Izard’s reporting is a call to attention: the local Official Community Plan, genuine housing needs and environmental protections are being sidelined in favour of developer priorities, dressed up as a ‘housing crisis’ by provincial housing policy.
The question for residents isn’t just “what’s being built next door.” It’s “who’s actually deciding and who do they answer to?”
SOURCES
