Prince George, B.C.- B.C. Supreme Court Justice Ronald Tindale has reserved decision in the Haldi Road challenge to the changes to the City’s Official Community Plan.

 

In today’s second and final day of the hearing, the City’s lawyer , Ray Young, told the court, an Official Community Plan is not an abstract vision, but rather one created in the mind of elected municipal officials. Council policies in that regard may be “sore thumbs” and may not be popular, but the vision “is what it is.” 

 

Young further argued there is no rule that policies within an OCP cannot be inconsistent with each other. In fact, there will be lots of inconsistencies, and council has to work their way through these and make the necessary trade-offs. In effect, an OCP is legally consistent because “council sees that it is so.” The exception would be if a court found an OCP or an OCP policy completely irrational. That issue aside, municipal governments must have broad discretionary powers, argued Young. 

 

Weighing the merits of competing OCP policies is a legislative matter, Young said, and this falls under the jurisdiction of the municipal level of government. Allowing a special needs housing in the Haldi Road neighbourhood dealing with vulnerable people in a rural area does not meet the definition of being unreasonable. Policies must be explicit, but also must have much flexibility and leeway.

 

In his rebuttal, Roy Stewart, lawyer for Haldi Road resident, Tore Pettersen, disputed Young’s arguments. According to Stewart, simply claiming that an OCP and zoning bylaws are consistent because council says they are, is not an acceptable or logical argument. “Things don’t happen just because council thinks it right,” he said. “They do so only if court thinks it right.” 

 

In further remarks, Stewart argued the proposed institutional designation (i.e. Recovery Centre for Women) was “shoe-horned” into an existing residential zone. In effect, the purpose of the two bylaws passed by city council was to manipulate the OCP and zoning bylaws to permit this institutional use. However, it is neither rational nor valid for a council to entirely exclude a residential aim for the zoning. “How can it be” he asked the court, “that the special needs institutional use that the Recovery Centre represents could rationally be described as residential?”

 

Young concluded his comments on behalf of the City of Prince George by arguing that, if the petitioner is successful against the city, no special costs should be granted. One of the reasons given was that the case does not involve legal issues of broad public importance but rather affect just one small neighbourhood. This claim, of course, is at variance with what Haldi Road residents have been saying for some time, i.e. that the amended OCP and zoning regulations that council has put forward will have an impact on all city residents and neighborhoods.