DOING BUSINESS

Jul 27
19 min read

Updated: Aug 17

LIVING AND A LIVING

Part of what makes this place so great, aside from the natural beauty and great climate, is that it’s almost impossible to live here. Victoria is among the most expensive locations on the continent and, thus, in the world. Victoria, today as in the past, offers truly obscene housing, grocery, and transportation costs. (You can find accounts from early settlers talking about the cost of housing being outrageous. You see, it was only ever so.) Comparable cities are places like Vancouver and Toronto; though, depending on the study, Victoria occasionally ranks as less affordable than those. Due to its small population, Victoria typically isn’t in the rankings of global cities; but in terms of unaffordability, being on par with Vancouver puts this place in line with the most expensive coastal cities in the US and locations around the globe such as Sydney, Hong Kong, and London — but with far lower median income and higher housing, food, and fuel costs than many of those places.

Paired with the basic cost of living, it costs more and takes far longer to get from Victoria to another major city than doing so from almost any capitals or major population centers in North America or most other places. To be clear, the best travelled route for visiting my family in Vancouver, say, takes not less than five hours each way, and often closer to six. That makes travel to the nearest mainland city in Canada longer and much less palatable than a plane ride to any one of dozens of US cities, or about the same time it takes to fly to Denver or San Diego, for example. And though you can fly to Vancouver from Victoria quickly via seaplane, my preferred method, it does cost the same or more than to get deep inside the US. (I’m looking right now and Harbour Air is offering one-way Victoria to Vancouver for $99 while WestJet says Las Vegas is $81 and LA is $101…) Remoteness is really the essence of this place. Doubtless, for many people that isolation is a real bonus and why they live here.

As far as work goes, the major employer is government. Most of the other major operations are also funded by taxpayers; so, in my mind, government. There are the direct government jobs at local and provincial levels, then defence (primarily with CFB Esquimalt), as well as the Vancouver Island Health Authority and related hospitals. Those are by far the largest employers. If you were to remove all levels of education, also government funded, from the picture of largest employers in the region you’d see there’s virtually nothing else happening here aside from maybe Thrifty Foods, the local, large-scale grocer. The city really does have a shocking lack of business and industry and, as a result, employment opportunities. Victoria has no top research or art institutes, the post-secondary schools are small with middling performance, there are no acclaimed orchestras or dance troupes, nor does it have any big league sports teams or notable minor league ones, either. Nothing. Being the major hub on the coast, there's a ship-building industry here, they just don’t bid on billion dollar provincial transportation contracts and ones the whole island population is almost entirely dependent upon. Which is pretty weird. But we do have other ships coming in.

A DESTINATION OR TRUCK STOP?

Some tell me Victoria is a tourism destination. I don’t buy it. Don’t get me wrong, I think the city should be a tourism destination and for any number of reasons; I just don’t think it is. Why? Well, we’ve made a big deal about expanding our cruise ship port. Doing so has helped land nearly a million foreign visitors here in the last year by ship alone. Trouble is, effectively none of those people arrived because they heard about Victoria and chose to come here. You see, America’s Passenger Vessel Services Act, a protectionist maritime transportation policy in place since 1886, dictates that only US-built, owned, and crewed vessels may operate between domestic ports. Given that 95% of all cruise ships are foreign-built (typically in Italy, Germany, Finland, or the Netherlands) and foreign-flagged (often in the Bahamas, Malta, or Liberia) to avoid US labour laws and, of course, to dodge taxes and regulations, effectively all ships travelling between the ports of the contiguous United States and Alaska are required by US law to stop in British Columbia. So, a Holland America, Norwegian, Carnival, Princess, or nearly any other cruise ship from San Diego or Seattle, as is typical, is required to drop anchor in Vancouver, Victoria, Nanaimo, or Prince Rupert before going on to Juneau, Ketchikan, Skagway, or Sitka or otherwise incur penalties including fines of almost $800 per passenger. With many ships holding between 3,000 and 5,000 passengers, those fines would be in the millions, making the PVSA a legitimate deterrent. So, you see, Victoria is not actually a choice for virtually any of those incoming ships or their passengers who have as their actual destination Alaska.

And, as someone who spends their days downtown in the city’s tourist quarter, I can assure you that although the streets at times may be teeming with foreigners, these cruise ship passengers are seldom packing the eateries and drinking establishments or hopping into cabs to catch a Harbour Cats game or find any of our fabulous farmer’s or maker’s markets. Part of the reason for this is that those arriving by ship already have all their food and beverages for their trip paid for in advance and provided onboard. Too, so many of these vessels dock and leave just a few hours later. As I write this, in peak tourist season, the vast majority of the ships here this month and last, well over a hundred, arrived at around 7 or 8pm and had a departure time of 11pm or midnight that same evening. Only 10 of 62 (or 16%) of vessels-borne “tourists” arriving in Victoria in August 2025 were in town outside the operating hours of the vast majority of local businesses — yes, even those shops and eateries between the cruise terminal and the tourist-oriented neighbourhoods of downtown. Of course, if a ship shows up at any time on a weekend or a Monday, well, half the town is shuttered the whole day, so… And maybe you've noticed that 9,000 cruise ship passengers from three ships are not being serviced by a thousand or a hundred or just a dozen horse-drawn carriages or pedicabs but only a couple here and there. So, if you ask me, this place, this tourist destination so-called, doesn't even really want tourist dollars — even if those tourists were spending. I mean, right near the ship terminal and steps from Fisherman’s Wharf are Shoal Point Coffeehouse, Finest at Sea Seafood Market and Food Truck, and Imagine Studio Cafe. Those all shut their doors before 85% of cruise ship passengers (or 825,000 annual visitors) even arrive. And all the eateries at Fisherman’s Wharf itself close between 5pm and 9pm, as if to declare “We do not want your business!” Those real tourist-oriented spots like Butchart Gardens, Craigdarroch Castle, the Royal BC Museum, or Emily Carr House are closed by 7pm. Even the IMAX theatre has its final show of the night starting at 6 or 7pm. And most of the shops in James Bay and on Government Street and nearby, places like Market Collective, Munro's Books, Eddie Bauer, Paboom, the Papery, and others all close before 7pm. And, of course, no one is doing whale watching tours or fishing expeditions after the sun goes down. All of this has to be either a systemic rejection of cruise ship passengers as customers or someone’s finding that those passengers simply do not spend money on these attractions. What else could it be?

We should pass a protectionist cultural policy requiring all cruise ship (and airline) passengers to pay an additional $4 fee ($2.90 US) and to sit through a one-hour Attenborough-style film starring Carrie-Anne Moss, Molly Parker, Seth Rogen, and Ryan Reynolds (sporting costumes including: the hooded nudibranch, seaside centipede lichen, northern abalone, and marsh shrew, of course) and a soundtrack with songs by: Aidan Knight, Kathryn Calder, The Be Good Tanyas, Mother Mother, Brasstronaut, Delhi 2 Dublin, Five Alarm Funk, and Dayglo Abortions. Seriously, what are you people doing with your lives? Instead of this all we have are the same gorillas and dinosaurs available everywhere else throughout the English-speaking world. Lame!

Just to drive this cruise ship passenger point home, the number of US visitors to Victoria and captured in tourism data tends to be roughly on par with the number of documented cruise ship passengers. For example, a 2024 report showed Victoria receiving a total of 936,000 “US tourists”. Weirdly, at the same time, folks documented 970,000 “cruise ship passengers” and the exact same number the previous year. I don't know how to make sense of that. Still, those and similar sources preaching the vibrancy and vigour of our tourism industry offer reports and studies proposing that those folks on those ships drop $90 million here each year. The local paper, for example, recently explained:

...[P]assengers and crews from cruise ships account for $90 million in spending. Notably, per-person spending for paying passengers is $100, while crew members average about $140 per person, according to the [Destination Greater Victoria] report.

Does that make sense to you? It looks to me like someone just divided $90 million by those 900,000 visitors. But I don't know how they arrived at the $90M figure to begin with. The closest thing I found was a 2024 report from the tourism industry titled “Greater Victoria 2025-2035 Destination Master Plan”. In it they spell out how:

…[T]otal cruise visitor expenditures included approximately $23.7 million on tours and local transportation, $14.6 million on retail goods, and $6.7 million on food and beverages. [or $45 million]… Overall, local spending by cruise lines amounts to $84 million on services including transportation, warehousing, port fees, ship agents, and stevedores [aka dockworkers] each season.

Neither of those is $90 million in passenger spending or anything of the sort. Regardless, would a $100 per person spend even be coherent? I just noted how folks paid for all their meals onboard the ship they arrived on, meaning that the vast majority of passengers are unlikely to be buying additional food and drink off the boat. And I noted how most of the ships that come here land outside most of our shops' hours of operation, meaning that those same bars, pubs, and restaurants are virtually all that's available for those folks to spend money on. So those two facts don't pair well or obviously result in much spending. Then add to that what you probably already know about cruise ship passengers, especially those on short voyages like Seattle to Sitka, less exotic ones of this sort, or at the shortest stops on those same trips: many passengers don't disembark at each port of call. From what I can find and what former passengers tell me, it's perfectly normal for 20-40% of folks to stay onboard at any one stop. The Victoria Harbour Authority even spelled this out in their 2024 report: "By October 30, Victoria will have welcomed 316 calls and approximately 970,000 passengers. Over 700,000 passengers disembarked the ships to explore the city’s attractions, landmarks and restaurants." Meaning: nearly 30% didn't get off the boat and someone is including those same 270,000 people who didn't want to see Victoria as "visitors". So then, doesn't all the above mean we're talking not about almost a million people but merely those:

A) Who got here at a time when they could spend money (maybe only 10-20% of 970,000 folks, or just 160,000),

B) Who actually got off the ship (only 60-80% of those 160,000, or maybe 120,000), and

C) Who did hop in a cab or on a bus, pedicab or carriage, and go to a bar or restaurant, retail shop or attraction at some point (some fraction of the above)

So then, if their annual spending total is vaguely accurate, the per-person spend isn't anything like $90M (or maybe $45M) divided by the total cruise ship passengers, as the accounting looks, and yielding maybe $100 per person. It would have to be something like $90M (or half that) divided by something less than 100,000. So we're talking $450 or maybe $900 per spending passenger? But then doesn’t that mean the going story is that a typical family of four, say, hops off the ship and goes into the Spaghetti Factory or Milestones, Finn's or Pagliacci's and drops, what, $1,800 or $3,600? On average? In what universe? Yes, Americans are good eaters and like to drink but I've worked at several local restaurants in the tourist district and can assure you that a typical party of four from Louisiana or Nevada is not getting 14 steaks, 32 cocktails, 25 desserts, and then leaving a $750 tip. That's a problem because, to land this zany average, we can be certain there isn't a corporate team or wedding party of a hundred on every single boat taking limos to Sooke or Sidney and dropping $85,000 on three-hour helicopter whale watching tours, either... Again, as ever, the math ain't mathin', my friends. You could, of course, get to the suggested number if everyone on every ship was required by law to get off the ship and stay two nights in a local B&B or hotel. Then $100 per person would at least be plausible. But that isn't reality.

To my mind, all of this makes Victoria, in any real sense, even today with an expanded cruise terminal, more closely approximating a highway gas station or truck stop than a “destination” or even just a stop-over for tourists. At least, that’s certainly true for most people arriving downtown by boat. And yet, that is very much not what the tourism sector or local government or anyone else endorsing the city, or just any locals speaking positively about their town, would tell you. I feel like the tourism sector should highlight how almost no one is coming here and how crazy that is. Like, when visitors arrive in Vancouver from major cities they all highlight how empty the parks, cycling trails, and running paths are. They note the lack of line-ups and how un-busy every venue is. They point out how shocking it is to find downtown so close to the mountains, beaches, and sea. Well, Vancouver has nothing on Victoria on any of those fronts. Stop pretending this place is a thriving travel destination catering to folks from all around the world; as far as I can tell, it isn’t.

ISLAND TIME

People do come here though. And if you are one of the millions of other annual visitors to Victoria, what you’ll find here is likely a little different than where you’re from. If you know what to expect you won’t be disappointed and, like me, you can just enjoy how laughable it all is. Like so many islands all over the planet, things are done at a slower pace and with less frequency in Victoria. To put yourself in the right frame of mind you should grab an ‘90s Walkman and sync your heart rate and breathing to some King Tubby. You see, Victoria operates as if it’s an unpopulated rural village, and occasionally one from a previous century. How so? Well, as noted, you’ll find many businesses with operating hours around 10am to 4pm, Monday to Friday or Tuesday to Saturday or some other highly curious offering. Of course, if you live here you probably work (how very 20th century of you); and if you work, these operating times mean you’re likely to find yourself unable to do what you want or get what you need during the times permitted by your perfectly normal work schedule. And, like for cruise-goers and under many other circumstances, you may not be able to access these businesses even as a visitor. So, for example, despite there being more local cafes and bakeries than you could visit, you should not expect to grab a latte or croissant before 7 or 8am (and occasionally 10am), except maybe at Starbucks. Funny, right? But this city and the culture we’ve cultivated here are much weirder than that.

With this sort of timing, many places like cafes enjoy accommodating customers by not providing power or internet. You gotta love it! It’s a little game they like to play. Despite effectively all their customers wanting or needing these, and half their customers coming in with laptops, they tell themselves they’re being more community-oriented, promoting social interaction, when all they’re doing is making it hard or impossible for folks to do what they need to do. Me: “Here, take $10,000. That’ll cover installing three outlets and their energy consumption for the next four decades.” Them: “What, are you crazy?!” My personal favourite is when these places have wi-fi and also allow the public to use it but the thing is password protected and the password is in effect a secret, so you have to go and ask someone. Makes you wonder why they don’t install a moat and drawbridge?

Actually, there is a moat. Despite being between the major Pacific Northwest hubs of Seattle and Vancouver, it’s actually easier to get something shipped to Anchorage, Alaska, than Victoria, BC. For instance, many major consumer goods companies, such as Ikea, the original flat-pack, easy-ship, built-it-yourself furniture company, will, still in the 21st century, simply not send you a couch or desk — not for any price. Me: “What if the timeline for delivery is open ended and I give you $5,000 for your troubles?” Ikea: “Sorry, we cannot do that.” (Yes, you certainly can hire a third party who specializes in resolving just this sort of problem. I’ve done so. It is its own gong-show.) But that's not an Ikea thing. The same is true of every furniture company I can find. And I've had these same conversations with the lovely folks at Structube, who proposed I rent a truck, hop on the ferry, and drive to their warehouse on the mainland, even with their "Free shipping over $299" and despite their condition "For postal codes located outside of the free delivery zone, additional shipping fees will apply." Me: "Just charge a reasonable ‘additional shipping fee.’" Them: "To Victoria? Don't be ridiculous!" So, that is to say, one could get annoyed or one could just laugh and remember one doesn't live in Edmonton or Ottawa.

On a similar note, don’t try and buy anything online from any local businesses in Victoria. Even though this part of the world was already big into supporting local, during the pandemic and then in the early second term of the Trump administration most locals were even more so compelled. And yet, into the third decade of the digital epoch and almost as many years into the revolution placing everything online, it’s still perfectly normal to find even major operations without a website (or at least without one updated since 2014 or that's otherwise unusable.) Even more often than that you’ll find stores with websites but ones that share few or even, mysteriously, none of their offerings on there. Also common are the shops who publish their wares but do not allow online purchasing, never mind delivery. My favourite are the businesses who lack any indication of their store hours; or, better yet, those who post their hours but, as you’ll discover, those contradict what’s found elsewhere online or even what’s displayed on the front door of their business. Chef’s kiss

Who knows what’s going on with all this? Maybe the owners are working hard to burn through their inheritance or lottery winnings or maybe the whole thing is just a front for money laundering or some real estate scam. Who can say? What we do know for sure is that businesses do not want your money! Actually, I laugh about this sort of thing a lot. If you spot a guy on the street with wild hair standing in front of a closed shop, flailing his arms and exclaiming to himself “Pardon ME, I’d presumed the business was trying to MAKE MONEY!” or “Oh that’s right, we live in Vatican City!”, no, that guy is not inebriated or suffering a mental health crisis, it’s just me trying to support local business.

Here’s a perfect anecdote that just happened. My friend rode her bike over and we hung out for a bit. We were near the place she and her husband like to get their coffee beans from. So we popped over and, of course, being Monday, the place was closed. Next door to it is a place that sells wonderful locally grown vegetables and flowers and, noticing someone in the garden, I proposed we walk over and pick something up. Around the block we went only to discover it was also closed, this being Monday. So I asked her if she had been to the new cafe just one block away. She hadn’t. We walked on over. Closed Mondays. All we wanted to do was spend $100 at some local mom-and-pop shops. “No. Not allowed. Who do you think you are? This isn't New York City!”

THE REAL CRIME

Living here, what everyone seems constantly astonished by are the regular business closures — a candy, clothing, or jewellery store, perhaps, or maybe a cannabis dispensary or hybrid appliance-hardware-clothing-camping-homegoods-garden shop (yes, I’m talking about you, ol’ Capital Iron) — who inevitably decided to go with a business model incorporating both banker’s hours and no online shop or mere digital catalogue of their wares. And upon closure, the owners so often wish to claim for the public record that they were forced to shut down due to lack of public support or something. To that I blurt, “Comedy!” Alternatively, many businesses and former businesses talk about shuttering due to a significant increase in street crime. Which, as you’ll see, is actually an even weirder claim.

While increased crime does appear to be a consensus sentiment, I wasn’t sure this perception matched reality. So I went looking. Look out, he’s doing his own research again! And when I did so I found the Victoria police reporting a lot fewer calls for service than many other major cities. Compared to Winnipeg, for example, Victoria seems to have half as many significant incidents per capita. To be a little more specific, it’s not that calls to police for violence, social order, and property related incidents have been stable and haven’t seen a sudden jump over the last five years; it’s that all those appear to be down, with no wild spikes or exponential curves in the data — and rather contrary to what seemingly everyone has intuited.

Going a little further, I found Statistics Canada data on total Criminal Code violations. There I learned that, looking at the rate of criminal charges for all adults in Victoria, in the early 2000s the rate was around 3,600 per 100,000 people. That fell to below 2,500 by 2011 and was down again to around 1,600 by 2021 — this, if you’ll recall, despite reports of a huge crime spree at the outset of the pandemic when people stopped shopping and going to work. Given this trend, you might say “Ah ha, it was the youth, the troubled YOUTH!” Nah. The rate of youth charges went from a high of around 7,000 prior to 2010 and then just dropped off the cliff. By 2013 the number was down to below 3,000; by 2018 there were fewer than 2,000; and in 2022 and 2023, the last years on record at the time of writing, the rate was less than 1,000.

Looking at property crime, breaking and entering, and theft specifically, these also seem to be taking place at around half the rate they were twenty years ago. Shoplifting below $5,000 hasn’t really changed in the last 25 years and shoplifting over $5,000 hasn’t done anything interesting, either. The worst years in the last 20 were 2008 and 2023, both of which saw 10 total incidents. 2007 through 2010 saw a bump with a total of 25 incidents and 2020 through 2023 saw a similar bump with 24 total over that period. Nothing seems outrageous there or even like anything the public would perceive as unusual.

Hungry for more data—

Yes, I’m really into this sort of thing, partly because my wife loves to declare her unwavering desire to visit some far flung locale I know little about which, upon investigation, is either two decades into a civil war, was recently ravaged by a spate of brutal terrorist attacks, or is otherwise renowned for their kidnapping… “But the hotels are cheap. And, I mean, look at these birds!” she’ll inevitably rebut... Wait, where was I? Ah yes—

Hungry for more data, I also looked at the Crime Severity Index for Victoria over time and compared what I found with other Canadian cities. In the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, Victoria’s CSI was between 150 and 110. This dipped to between 80 and 60 in the last decade on record. To parse that a little more, violent crime specifically in those same time ranges fell to about half while non-violent crime followed a similar trajectory. This doesn’t appear apocalyptic. And these numbers are certainly better than other medium-sized towns like Abbotsford or Kelowna, Lethbridge or Edmonton, Saskatoon or Regina, Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, or Sudbury, say — all of which are lovely and have great plant shops and pubs who are able to stay open. And I just cannot imagine things here in Victoria suddenly soared to record-breaking highs in the one year in which data is not yet available.

Interestingly, along with this data showing an absence of crime I did find results from an annual survey about the public’s feelings about crime. When asked “Do you think that crime in Victoria has increased, decreased or remained the same during the last 5 years?” the percentage of locals reporting their perception of an increase in crime jumped from 41% in 2020 to 69% in 2024. So, something’s going on, only not an explosion of actual crime.

The real crime we need to talk about is the state of customer service in Victoria. I always tell friends and family visiting from the US that they should think of Victoria more as a colony of France or something and less like a constituent of North America. I describe how when I visit almost anywhere in America the service from baristas and wait staff to cab and bus drivers is almost unrecognizable: the attention, the courtesy, the speed, the well-concealed bitter resentment… That’s not what’s happening here. And my friends and family always seem surprised and wonder what I mean. So I give them an example. I tell them about how I’ve been going to a cafe here in Victoria every week for years, giving them many thousands of dollars at this point. I tell them how I typically order a drink, then cross the cafe and find myself a seat. As one does. I explain how when the barista finishes making the order they will call out the drink and place it next to the espresso machine, there at the opposite end of the cafe. They won’t meet me halfway or even just place it two steps to their right, where I paid. And under no circumstances (yes, even despite the cafe being empty, there being three of them behind the counter not doing anything, and my giving them a 20% tip upon ordering on every one of the maybe one thousand visits I’ve had to this place) will they ever simply deliver the drink to my table — just as you would do even for your mortal enemy, because it’s a customer service job and you have nothing else going on. (We won’t get into them not making the drink at all, which happens all the time but I imagine only to myself…) This sort of thing is so curious and so persistent that, well, you can only laugh and enjoy it as a kind of quirky cultural phenomena. In fact, respect for cultural nuances requires you observe the west coast norm of smiling and saying nothing. I like to tell people that when this happens to them, they should not be surprised or annoyed but instead just laugh and do like the locals do and throw another toonie in the tip jar on the way out.