A commentary by a Victoria resident.
I see a lot of people trying to say that Vancouver Island is overpopulated, and that’s why we need to stop building new homes. How did this ludicrous idea get into everyone’s heads?
We’re a mountainous island in the Pacific with a population density of 27 people per square kilometre, with the densest urban area holding about 570 people per square kilometre.
That makes us slightly less dense than Borneo (30 people per square kilometre), where notable land uses include subsistence agriculture and Indigenous hunter-gatherer practices.
So we’re using our land and resources slightly less efficiently than people who haven’t significantly changed their way of life since the neolithic age.
In terms of technological development, climate, and geography, we’re much closer to places like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan — yet all of those places have national population densities in the hundreds, and urban population densities in the thousands — sometimes even in the tens of thousands.
They face many of the same challenges we do, but they somehow manage to house far more people.
Homelessness is either extremely rare or entirely unheard of in these places, while our relatively empty island has so few places to live that we’ve gotten used to seeing bylaw officers chase homeless people from park to park every weekend.
So yes, we should ask questions about how many people we can accommodate with the resources and infrastructure we have.
But this should be with an eye to updating our infrastructure so that we can accommodate more people in a planned and orderly manner, not to demand that the government go out of its way to keep the population low and scare off outsiders.
A lot of this work is already being done. Anyone who has taken the Capital Regional District’s watershed tour likely already knows that our reservoirs have more than six times the capacity than our population needs.
This puts us in a much better position to grow than Vancouver, which regularly runs out of water and relies on increasingly unpredictable snow melt to make up the difference.
But I don’t think the people who ask these questions want them to be answered, and they certainly don’t want the island to get better infrastructure so that we can accommodate the people that are already coming here.
They’re just in the habit of blaming all of our community’s problems on newcomers.
But we need to get over this attitude quickly, since we are blessed to live in a place that seems like it will be able to weather climate change relatively well.
This means that people are going to be coming here from places where climate change is not going to be so kind, and they are going to come whether we want them to or not.
We have a bit of time to plan for this, but we ought to be looking at the recent jump in population as a practice run, where we can figure out how we want to incorporate all the expected and unexpected that are going to arrive in the century to come.
>>> To comment on this article, write a letter to the editor: [email protected]
