No More Tomorrows: Canada’s Economic Refugees Need a Place to Live Today

No More Tomorrows: 

Canada’s Economic Refugees Need a Place to Live Today

For years we have watched tents appear in parks, along roads, beside waterways and under bridges.

We have watched people sleep in cars, doorways, shelters, abandoned buildings and derelict boats.

And we keep using the same word:

Homeless.

We believe it is time to change that language.

We prefer:

Economic Refugees

We are not using “refugee” in its legal or immigration sense.

We mean Canadians who have been economically displaced from normal housing and, increasingly, from normal participation in the communities in which they live.

The Tankers Are Already Here — Before Canada Adds Supertankers, B.C. Must Demand the Truth About What We Are Breathing Part 1

 

The Tankers Are Already Here — Before Canada Adds Supertankers, B.C. Must Demand the Truth About What We Are Breathing

What the existing Trans Mountain tanker fleet is discharging today, what another million-barrel-a-day pipeline could add tomorrow, and who should pay for the protection, monitoring and cleanup

When most people hear the words oil pipeline, they picture a steel pipe buried in the ground.

But the pipeline does not end at the shoreline.

The oil must be stored in tanks, pumped through a marine terminal and loaded onto ships. Those ships must travel through coastal waters, manoeuvre into port, wait at anchor, remain tied to a loading berth and then leave through the Salish Sea.

During much of that time, they are burning fuel.

Victoria Gets the Exhaust. GVHA Counts the Cash. Cruise ships, hidden pollution, conflicting emissions estimates, weak oversight

 

Victoria Gets the Exhaust. 

GVHA Counts the Cash.

Cruise ships, hidden pollution, conflicting emissions estimates, weak oversight and habitat restoration without source control

Every year, the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority issues another triumphant cruise-season announcement.

More ships. More passengers. More spending. More jobs. Another “successful” season.

What the public does not receive is the other half of the ledger.

We are not told, vessel by vessel, what fuel was burned while the ships sat beside James Bay. We are not told which diesel generators, boilers or gas turbines were running, how much fuel they consumed, whether exhaust scrubbers were operating in open-loop or closed-loop mode, how much wastewater was generated, what was stored onboard, what was transferred ashore and what was discharged after the vessels left Victoria.

The Lowly Sand Lance The Small Fish at the Heart of Our Fight to Save the Resident Orcas

The Lowly Sand Lance

The Small Fish at the Heart of Our Fight to Save the Resident Orcas

What we have watched disappear from Victoria Harbour, the Gorge Waterway and Portage Inlet—and why every beach, dock, storm drain and abandoned vessel matters

People sometimes ask why we have continued this work for so many years.

Why do we keep examining storm drains, walking shorelines, removing debris, documenting docks, reporting abandoned vessels, reviewing old reports, questioning governments and fighting for source control?

The answer is the Southern Resident killer whales.

We fell in love with these remarkable families long ago. Everything we have done since our swim event in 2000 has, in one way or another, been connected to their survival.

But saving Resident killer whales does not begin beside a whale-watching boat.

When the Gorge Stopped Turning Silver, Herring, Camossung, the broken Narrows and a restoration that was never finished

When the Gorge Stopped Turning Silver

Herring, Camossung, the broken Narrows and a restoration that was never finished

The decline of the Gorge herring was not inevitable.

There was a time when the Pacific herring returned to the Gorge Waterway in numbers large enough to change the colour of the water.

The schools moved beneath Craigflower Bridge and through Portage Inlet like a living tide. People stood shoulder to shoulder with fishing lines. Herring fed salmon, seabirds, seals and people. Their eggs covered eelgrass and other shoreline vegetation, feeding nearly everything that could reach them.

Older photographs show the crowds. Families remember the fish. Local residents remember water alive with movement.

Then the silver faded.

The decline of the Gorge herring is not a simple story about overfishing, pollution, one damaged rock or one careless government. It is the history of an entire estuary being altered piece by piece: first through settlement and hunting, then sewage and industry, then blasting, shoreline construction, docks, polluted runoff and the slow disappearance of eelgrass.

It is also a story of recovery. Community work helped bring life back to the Gorge during the 1990s and early 2000s.

But the recovery did not hold.

The fish returned before the governments responsible for the waterway had repaired the conditions needed for the herring to reproduce and survive.

That distinction lies at the heart of this story.

Who Stole the Gorge? How Four Municipalities Let Public Waterfront Become Private—One Dock, Hedge and “No Action” Decision at a Time

 

Who Stole the Gorge?

How Four Municipalities Let Public Waterfront Become Private—One Dock, Hedge and “No Action” Decision at a Time

Veins of Life Watershed Society — August 2026

We are not against docks. We are against public land quietly becoming private land in everything but name, sensitive habitat being occupied without proper assessment, and four municipalities managing one tidal ecosystem as four unrelated shorelines.

The Gorge Waterway, Selkirk Water and Portage Inlet do not belong to any one municipality, waterfront neighbourhood, government department or group of private landowners.

They are a connected tidal system linking Victoria Harbour with Craigflower Creek, Colquitz River, Hospital Creek, Cecelia Creek, Gorge Creek and the surrounding watershed.

They are also:

• public waters and public foreshore;

• fish and shellfish habitat;

• a migratory-bird sanctuary;

• an Indigenous cultural landscape;

• a recreational waterway;

• part of a working harbour;

• and the receiving environment for more than a century of urban and industrial pollution.

The Gorge does not recognize the boundary between Victoria and Esquimalt. Eelgrass does not change its legal status when the shoreline crosses from Saanich into View Royal. Fish do not stop at a municipal line to check which council is responsible.

Yet that is how the waterway continues to be managed.

Would You Swim Here? What routine beach testing does—and does not—tell us about Banfield Park, the Gorge Waterway and Victoria Harbour

 

Would You Swim Here?

What routine beach testing does—and does not—tell us about Banfield Park, the Gorge Waterway and Victoria Harbour

By John Roe, Veins of Life Watershed Society

On a warm summer afternoon, Banfield Park Dock looks like exactly what the City of Victoria says it is: a place to swim, paddle, sit in the sun and enjoy the Gorge Waterway.

The dock was substantially expanded in 2024. The City promotes it as a popular summer destination and a public access point for swimming and paddling. Families arrive with towels. Children jump from the edge. Paddleboards and kayaks move through the water. Houses and trees line the opposite shore.

It is a beautiful picture.

But a new dock does not create new water.

The water beneath Banfield Dock is the same tidal water connected to Selkirk Waters, Cecelia Creek, Rock Bay, the Upper Harbour and Victoria’s Inner Harbour. It moves past municipal storm drains, old industrial shorelines, contaminated sediment and places where sewage-related pollution has been documented for decades.

That history did not disappear when the ribbon was cut.

The public question is not whether the dock is attractive. It is not whether swimming in the Gorge should be encouraged as a long-term goal.

The question is much simpler:

What does routine beach testing actually tell a swimmer—and what part of the story is left out? 

I am not against swimming in the Gorge

More Conservation for the Money—and More Life in Our Waters - The Public Case for a Core Area Parks, Watercourses and Conservation Authority

More Conservation for the Money—and More Life in Our Waters

The Public Case for a Core Area Parks, Watercourses and Conservation Authority

Greater Victoria has heard promises of environmental coordination before.

Residents have watched plans, committees, strategies, studies and announcements come and go. Conservation organizations have survived by protecting their independence, building their own supporters and defending projects they have spent years developing. Farmers are accustomed to proposals that recognize the environmental value of their land but overlook the cost of keeping a farm productive. Industrial operators are understandably cautious when conservation proposals appear to threaten the future of the working harbour.

The Economy Is the Environment: How the City of Victoria Planned Away Its Working Harbour Pretty Condos, Vanishing Jobs—and a Harbour Reduced to a Backdrop

 

The Economy Is the Environment: How the City of Victoria Planned Away Its Working Harbour

Pretty Condos, Vanishing Jobs—and a Harbour Reduced to a Backdrop

Victoria likes to call itself a harbour city.

It likes the photographs, the floatplanes, the cruise ships, the marinas, the restaurants, the festivals and the expensive condominiums overlooking the water.

What the City appears much less interested in is the difficult, noisy, land-hungry work that made Victoria Harbour economically valuable in the first place.

For generations, the harbour supported shipbuilding, ship repair, commercial fishing, coastal shipping, tug and barge operations, warehousing, fuel handling, rail connections, metal fabrication, marine construction and thousands of skilled trades jobs.

The harbour was not scenery.

It was infrastructure.