I went to the kick-off event for the City of Victoria’s community planning process. It turns out the community plan has a theme of “sustainability” (I didn’t see this in any of the lead-up material, maybe it goes without saying these days?). It started off with pep-talks from speakers telling us we could be the greenest city with the greenest businesses and the best culture and the best urban design. Then we broke into tables to discuss a topic of the table’s choosing.

We chose food security, as in: we need to grow our own food; not as in: we need to feed the homeless or decrease our food’s carbon footprint. I hate food security. I think it’s a self-indulgent fantasy and a distraction from real issues. But I went along with the discussion because I’m nice.

It’s environmentally irresponsible and totally unrealistic. Dan, our table’s moderator, cited the food system discussion paper prepared by city staff: it would take 20 times the land mass of the City of Victoria to feed all its current residents. This lead one of our table members to have the insight that we’d be better off supporting outer municipalities to keep the agricultural land they currently have rather than put hog farms on the roofs of office buildings.

Our table, like most of the others, produced a fluffy statement (“we’d like our city covered in bees“). The one exception was Gene Miller’s table. Miller is the founder of Victoria’s alternative weekly and an ex-real-estate-developer. He currently writes a killer column for Focus magazine on urban planning and was nearly drafted to be mayor last election. His table came up with three very specific zoning proposals – gee, I wonder who at the table thought those up?