Victoria City Council submitted eight resolutions to this year’s Union of British Columbia Municipalities convention. Half will never be debated. One asks delegates to endorse a coastal policy Ottawa already conceded in July. Another rests on a deepfake a sitting councillor created of himself. None address the LNG decisions the province is making now. One of the eight is a second run at a resolution Vancouver Island’s councils rejected in 2019.
The City of Victoria runs water, sewer, roads, zoning, parks, fire services and bylaw enforcement for 92,000 people on 19 square kilometres. Its 2026 UBCM package asks the federal and provincial governments to regulate artificial intelligence, to have BC’s municipal association sue major fossil-fuel producers, and to maintain an oil-tanker ban on a coastline 700 kilometres away. Two other motions, on marine vessel fuel and pickup-truck hood heights, did not make the book at all.
UBCM ruled that Victoria’s post-secondary affordability resolution falls outside local-government scope and struck it from the agenda. Nobody voted it down. It will simply not be discussed.
UBCM also changed its screening rules last year, and has not published how it applies them.
How UBCM works
The Union of British Columbia Municipalities speaks for local governments and member First Nations. It cannot pass laws. Its influence comes from the fact that when the membership endorses a resolution, it becomes association policy, goes to the province, and the relevant ministry has to answer in writing. One council of nine cannot do that. Two thousand delegates can.
So the test is whether a resolution reached the floor, and whether anything came of it afterwards.
Reaching the floor is the hard part now. A bylaw amendment passed at last year’s convention, 2025-ER1, gave the Resolutions Committee the power to decide what the membership sees. Four criteria trigger exclusion: duplication of policy set in the past five years, local-government scope, clarity and format, and whether an issue is regional rather than province-wide.
This is the first year it has been used. Of 229 resolutions, 84 went into an appendix that will not be debated. Another 32 were referred. UBCM has not published a test for what “local-government scope” means, and there is no appeal. Referred resolutions can be brought to the floor only by a three-fifths vote of delegates. Appendix items cannot be brought forward at all.
The convention runs September 14 to 18 in Vancouver. Victoria’s eight motions split as follows:
Debated: NR22 (AI regulation), NR30 (emissions authority over existing buildings), NR32 (fossil-fuel class action), NR34 (North Coast tanker ban).
Referred, no debate: RR4 (Community Housing Fund), RR22 (mobility scooters in bike lanes), RR23 (active-transportation grants).
Excluded: APX52 (post-secondary affordability).
Victoria City Council voted to send eleven items up this cycle, counting the two that never reached the book. Four will be debated. That is a year of staff time and committee agenda space in a city whose mayor is campaigning on housing and street disorder.
The Resolutions Committee
The committee that did the screening has five members, all of them public:
Councillor Pete Fry, Vancouver, chair
Councillor Gord Klassen, Fort St. John, vice-chair
Councillor Kevin McIsaac, Fernie
Councillor Jenna Stoner, Squamish
Councillor Trish Mandewo, Coquitlam, listed as on leave
ER1 says resolutions are excluded “as determined by the Resolutions Committee.” There are no published minutes and no per-resolution vote records. So these five made the calls, and that is as far as the record goes. Which of them wanted what cannot be established from outside.
All five also sit on the UBCM Executive, and their own councils file resolutions. Squamish sponsors NR29 on air quality, immediately ahead of Victoria’s NR30. Councils sponsor resolutions rather than individual councillors, so this is overlap rather than conflict. It is a small province.
There is a transparency problem at both ends of this. Victoria cannot show the public who moved most of its resolutions. UBCM does not publish reasons for the exclusions.
It is worth knowing what the new power was used for. AVICC’s member governments, meaning elected local officials voting in a room, endorsed three of Victoria’s resolutions in April. Those were the buildings resolution, the mobility-scooter resolution and post-secondary affordability. UBCM then referred the scooter resolution and struck post-secondary affordability from the agenda. Two items that had won a vote of Vancouver Island’s local governments were pulled, and no reason was given for either.
The AI resolution
Victoria councillor Jeremy Caradonna built this one on a video he apparently commissioned and scripted himself. The production is amateurish. No fabricated clip of him ever circulated. No constituent was deceived, no impersonation occurred, no complaint was filed. He screened it at Committee of the Whole on April 2, and then asked the room: “What recourse would I have to protect myself? What recourse would we have as elected officials?”
He called computer-generated content “a national security threat,” and asked for “reasonable, rational, and enforceable regulations.” He did not ask for labelling, or watermarking, or money for media literacy.
Enforceable rules on manipulated depictions need somebody to sort deceptive fabrication from reporting, satire and commentary. That line has never been clean anywhere it has been attempted. Under a rule written to give elected officials recourse, the journalist is not the one sorting.
Disclosure: this publication made an AI-generated video of Caradonna and Councillor Matt Dell on June 1, raising piña coladas at Crystal Pool, the facility Victoria City Council is replacing at a cost of $209.2 million. It ran with our reporting on that project. Caradonna’s resolution passed two months earlier, so it was not a response to us. The relevant point is scope. Our video is the sort of thing an enforceable rule would have to make a ruling about, and we would not be the ones ruling.
Victoria City Council passed the resolution unanimously. Nobody is recorded raising enforcement, or jurisdiction, or free expression.
Councillor Chris Coleman then amended it to send copies straight to federal AI Minister Evan Solomon and provincial Minister Rick Glumac. His reasoning was that not every convention resolution advances. He was right about that. The amendment guaranteed the text reached two ministers whatever the floor did, three months before the floor sat.
The tanker ban, and the class action
NR34 is Victoria’s. It asks the province to maintain the 2019 North Coast oil-tanker ban, and Victoria City Council passed it on February 5.
On July 2, Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier David Eby announced a multibillion-dollar package that preserves the northern ban, reportedly “in accordance with a proposed route of a new trans-provincial pipeline.” The package included LNG support, a $3.5-billion North Coast Transmission Line, Roberts Bank expansion and a Fraser River tunnel. Behind it sits a November memorandum between Ottawa and Alberta contemplating a bitumen pipeline to the West Coast carrying 300,000 to 400,000 barrels a day.
The northern ban survived. The pipeline question moved south, to the coast Victoria sits on.
Dogwood’s communications director, Christina Smethurst, called the July agreement “a three-way grand bargain for a maximalist oil and LNG agenda,” in which “Eby will get to expand the LNG industry he’s been pushing for with even more federal support, in exchange for rolling over on a possible Alberta pipeline to the South Coast.”
NR34 does not touch that. It asks a convention to confirm what two governments settled ten weeks earlier, and it will pass. There is a cost to that. An endorsed resolution becomes standing UBCM policy, which then triggers the five-year duplication screen. A narrow reaffirmation of the northern ban could block a sharper resolution naming the South Coast or the pipeline until 2031.
NR32, also Victoria’s, revives a strategy Vancouver Island municipalities rejected in 2019. Then-mayor Lisa Helps declined to defend her own city’s climate-cost-recovery resolution at that year’s AVICC convention, saying delegates preferred collaboration. View Royal Mayor David Screech described the outcome as “soundly defeated.” At UBCM that September, Victoria’s companion resolution carried a recommendation to endorse and was never voted on.
UBCM’s screen only bars duplicates within five years. The defeat is seven years old, so the resolution came back. No position changed in between.
One point of attribution, because the two get confused locally: the “Sue Big Oil” campaign belongs to West Coast Environmental Law. Dogwood is one of more than forty endorsing organisations and has no litigation position of its own.
No resolution on LNG
Local governments across the capital region sent 21 resolutions to UBCM this year. None of them mention Ksi Lisims LNG, Canada Infrastructure Bank financing, or BC Hydro’s allocation of power to LNG plants and data centres.
Those are the fossil-fuel decisions the province is making in 2026. Victoria reached 700 kilometres north for a ban that was already safe, and said nothing about the decisions in front of it.
The regional record is no better. Of those 21 resolutions, eleven will not be debated. Four were referred as duplicates. The other seven went to the appendix, and they cluster. Saanich and Central Saanich both filed on team-based primary care. Oak Bay filed on student food security and on student ferry fares. The Capital Regional District filed on fare-free youth transit. Health care and post-secondary costs are not run by local governments. UBCM does not publish its reasons, but the pattern is not hard to see.
The housing fund resolutions
Saanich, Radium Hot Springs, Victoria and the AKBLG Executive each filed a separate resolution asking the province to reinstate the Community Housing Fund. They became RR2 through RR5. Vancouver filed a related motion on housing targets as RR1.
All were referred without debate because they duplicated one another. One jointly sponsored resolution would have been heard.
Who is on the UBCM Executive
Above the Resolutions Committee sits the Executive: President Cori Ramsay (Prince George), First Vice-President Jenna Stoner (Squamish), Second Vice-President Mayor Sarrah Storey (Fraser Lake), Third Vice-President Aimee Grice (Oliver), and Past President Trish Mandewo (Coquitlam). The AVICC seat is held by Vanessa Craig of the Regional District of Nanaimo, who took it from Nanaimo councillor Ben Geselbracht at April’s AGM.
No capital-region municipality holds a seat on either body. Twenty-one resolutions came from this region this year, and nobody involved in screening them was from here.
Gary MacIsaac retires as Executive Director after this convention, after nineteen years. Kim Grout replaces him on September 8. Jamee Justason is the resolutions analyst.
AVICC did its own screening on March 27, under an executive led by Geselbracht. Alison MacKenzie of View Royal was the one capital-region member on it. AVICC does not publish a resolutions committee roster.
What is not on the record
Movers and vote tallies for six of Victoria’s eight UBCM resolutions are missing from public records.
Two resolutions Victoria City Council passed vanished before the book was published, and AVICC does not publish a list of what it rejected.
The city’s meeting software blocks automated searches. Local coverage of these decisions is behind paywalls.
UBCM publishes no committee minutes and no reasons for individual exclusions.
Compare that with private lobbying, which is a matter of public record. Dogwood’s BC Lobbyists Registry filing names its designated filer, Matt Takach, its registration date, its listed lobbyists including Alexandra Woodsworth, disclosed as a former public-office holder, and every ministry contacted.
Outsiders have very little purchase on any of it. Only member elected officials may speak or vote at convention. Non-members can buy a seat in the plenary for between $1,220 and $1,903, and sit there quietly.
October 17
Victoria City Council chose where to spend its attention this year. It pursued questions that had already been settled while the province was deciding about LNG and pipeline routes. On housing it filed separately from four other councils rather than joining them. It had nobody inside the process that screened the results, and it left no record of how its own councillors voted.
Alto launched her campaign on May 20 on housing and street disorder. Her council spent the year lobbying Ottawa about deepfakes and a coastline 700 kilometres from City Hall.
Four questions for the incumbents, and for the delegates who vote on NR22:
Which body decides whether a published depiction of a councillor is lawful?
Would this article and the video that ran with it be covered by the rule you asked for?
What does NR34 get that the July 2 agreement did not already give?
Why does no resolution from this region mention LNG?
The resolutions session opens on the morning of September 16. Victoria votes on October 17.
Sources:
2026 UBCM Resolutions Book · UBCM Resolutions Committee · UBCM Executive 2025-26 · 2025-ER1 · 2026 AVICC Resolutions Disposition · AVICC governance · Victoria council · 2022 official results · Victoria News: ‘reasonable guardrails’ for AI · Victoria News: AI regulation using AI rendering · Castanet/Times Colonist: Victoria urges senior governments to rein in AI · The Skeena: reaction to the July deal · Elections BC local election financing · BCGEU 2022 labour-endorsed candidates · Why Dogwood doesn’t endorse · BC Lobbyists Registry: Dogwood Initiative (Forest Futures) · WCEL Sue Big Oil
A note on the record: the UBCM book’s body text is not machine-readable through the channels available to us, so resolution wording comes from AVICC’s book where items ran there first, and from contemporaneous reporting. Movers and vote tallies for six of Victoria’s eight resolutions are not publicly retrievable.