The largest housing project in Victoria’s history got approved because a handful of young adults gave up their Thursday night. I know because I’m the one who brought them.
As a twenty-year-old student at UVic in early 2023, this was the first public hearing I’d ever been to. Most of the other young Victorians in the room were in the same boat. City council meetings tend to be dominated by whoever has time to spend on local issues, and in Victoria, that’s older, more comfortable homeowners who feel strongly about preserving the character of their city. This one was no different.
The project proposed thousands of units of new housing and historic levels of density and height in Victoria’s downtown core. At the hearing, there was a clear split in terms of the age demographic. The vast majority of people on the older side were against the project, and pretty much everyone on the younger side was in favour of it. There were probably seventy-five seniors against the project, and around twenty people under the age of thirty in favour.
Most young people talked about not being able to find a place to live, a competitive rental market, feeling like they were being pushed out of the city, or that they couldn’t stay over the long term because there weren’t enough affordable places to live. Common reasons against approving the project were that it was too tall, it didn’t fit the character of the neighbourhood, and the downtown core couldn’t handle more people. The sentiment was that Victoria should stay exactly the same.
One woman even recited the ABCs of why the project shouldn’t be approved, getting all the way to “S is for shadows” and “T is for traffic” before she ran out of time. The entire moment felt like a parody, something out of Parks and Rec.
There was a clear divide in lived experiences among the speakers. The group against the project didn’t want change in their community, while the group in favour of the project required change to live in the city.
The development eventually got approved after three nights of council meetings. The first two nights were solely speakers and recorded videos, and the third night was council debate. Supposedly, the project would not have been approved without the support of the speakers under thirty who showed up at the city council meetings.
What does that say about the subjective nature of democratic participation if the approval of thousands of units of housing rests on who is free on a given Thursday night? If fewer young people had shown up, perhaps one of Canada’s most expensive cities would have notably less housing. Not every housing project or bill is as lucky as this one was.
Today, public hearings are hosted on weeknights. This makes it hard for students, adults with young families, or working people to access such events and have their voices heard. As a result, these in-the-moment feedback systems are skewed to people who have the free time to show up. Even recorded videos and emailed letters seem to lack the impact of a real human body in the room.
Our local democracies work well for the groups of people who are so passionate about issues that they can set aside parts of their lives to stand up for what they believe in. These perspectives are important, and we shouldn’t villainize them, but we also can’t over-index on in-person engagement. Fighting new housing on a project-by-project basis is flawed. It reopens a debate about city values at every hearing and keeps the battle ongoing no matter how well organized you are.
Outside of the niche challenges of housing approvals, government data is notoriously opaque and difficult to access consistently. This compounds if you’re an everyday person without unlimited time or resources on your hands to unify fragmented sources or submit endless freedom-of-information requests.
Even platforms in traditional party politics feel skewed towards people who already participate, and why shouldn’t they be? As Canada’s population continues to age, there’s an increasing push and pull between what is best for the young people of the country and what serves the dominant voting class that each party is vying to win over. Rural and urban communities have felt this divide for decades. Quite frankly, this won’t change all at once. We can start by admitting that the current civic environment serves young people poorly and understanding that we shouldn’t expect politics to abandon the dominant voting class. It can’t be an us-versus-them mentality.
Instead, we need to ask ourselves how we can improve participation, and as a result, achieve transparency and representation that benefits all parts of the Canadian population.
Technology has the potential to both fix this and amplify efforts to get new groups of people excited about participatory democracy.
My experience mobilizing young voices has shown me that there are two key opportunities for integrating technology into civic processes. The first is making democratic participation more accessible; the second is making the many layers of decision-making more transparent and efficient, especially where subjective stakeholder input can become procedural delay. At first glance, these goals seem to pull against each other: one calls for more public input, while the other seems to remove individual projects from public debate. But the tension disappears if we distinguish between setting a vision and implementing it. The public should be deeply involved in creating the plan. And once that plan is adopted, projects that clearly align with it should not have to relitigate the same questions again.
I. Technology for Democracy
There are a number of promising initiatives across North America that aim to integrate software and AI into political organizing, housing approvals, and government transparency. Taken together, they show how technology can ease and clarify the democratic processes around housing.
Town Hall Tracker is one of the more interesting efforts. It was built off the side of Parth Pasnani’s desk. He started it after moving to Kingston, where a council candidate knocked on his door and he realized how out of the loop he was. “I felt super disconnected from the city,” he says. “I didn’t even realize there were municipal council elections going on.” The tool takes the long, dense council meetings that cities increasingly post to YouTube and uses AI to pull out the decisions, quotes, and vote results that actually matter. What Pasnani wants to build toward is getting ahead of meetings, so someone can be alerted about an agenda item they care about before the vote rather than reading a summary after it. “There’s this vision we have of participatory democracy,” he says. “That is idealistic and doesn’t work out in practice because the people that really influence decisions are the people that show up and they tend to be older. So my hope is that technology makes it easier for young people to get involved.”
A couple of months ago I built a version of this myself, scraping municipal rezoning and development data from six Canadian cities into one place, mostly to see whether it could be done. The interest it drew from planners and developers I knew surprised me. Pasnani has shown there’s clear opportunity to put a tool like this in the hands of community advocates.
On the city side, Vancouver runs a platform called Shape Your City. Every rezoning in the city gets its own page where residents can read the proposal and leave a comment, and staff are expected to respond. It’s a tangible step in the right direction. The catch is that you still have to know the page exists to use it, which usually means it reaches the people who are already paying attention. In that sense it makes participation easier for the engaged without doing much to reach everyone else. More cities should offer something like this.
Others have taken on the job of explaining the system rather than tracking it. Uytae Lee, through his CBC series and YouTube channel About Here, has probably done more than anyone to show ordinary Canadians how housing decisions actually get made. One of his videos is bluntly titled “Why public hearings are undemocratic and mostly meaningless.” His work shows how important communication is because before anyone can take part in a process, they have to understand it.
In the United States, a company called Sway is taking a different approach to political organizing. Sway is an app built around the idea of voting groups. A person joins a group on an issue they care about, follows the advocates and organizations they trust, sees who those advocates endorse, and tracks how their own representatives actually vote on these issues, all in one place. The goal is to give ordinary people the same kind of coordinated leverage that unions and lobbyists have always had. This is done by making it easy to show how many voters care about something and enabling them to move together when it counts.
Advocacy groups across Canada already keep informal lists of which councillors support new supply and which don’t. A tool like Sway would turn that scattered, word-of-mouth knowledge into something public and organized. It hasn’t come to Canada yet, and it isn’t clear that it plans to, but the idea underneath it is sound. Software can unify fragments of political will and help users focus them where efforts will matter most.
Build Canada is the country’s closest version of a unifying effort around data, transparency, and innovation. It started in early 2025 as a volunteer group of entrepreneurs and policy people, including Daniel Debow, a former Shopify executive, and Lucy Hargreaves, who had worked as a chief of staff in the federal finance ministry. It has since grown into a full-fledged nonprofit organization, with Hargreaves as the full-time CEO, Debow as a board member, and dozens of entrepreneurs as donors. The group publishes specific, well-argued policy proposals, and recently launched an outcomes tracker that lets anyone check, at a glance, the status of more than six hundred commitments the federal government has made.
Their tracker is one of the few ways through which the gap between what a government promises and what it delivers is clearly laid out and visualized for the public. A transparency tool like this should not need to come from outside of government. I interviewed Hargreaves about the role of AI in government and her vision for the future of Build Canada in late May.
Each of these projects has the potential to influence greater change as their visions are built out further. While every one is different in nearly every way, the common thread is that they all put the onus on the citizen to act. This is either because they are created by private citizens who are passionate about creating change or because awareness of the project’s solution requires a user to be already plugged into the existing system.
Today, it is almost always the burden of the citizen to stay aware. Why should the government not make it as easy as possible for members of the electorate to be educated on what’s going on in the government, what decisions are being made, and how money is being spent? Even something as niche as what housing is up for approval should be accessible without proactively navigating through multiple windows of archaic software where information is only obtainable at a specific lead time.
How do we fix this? Well, as Marshall McLuhan said, “the medium is the message.” In this case, that means that institutions need to build solutions that meet their electorate where they’re at. Maybe that medium differs depending on the part of the electorate. Different levels of government could make multiple media available for everyone, ranging from an app to direct mail. Imagine if you could subscribe for notifications on issues that mattered to you when you voted, then receive alerts via mail, email, social media, or an app when something you care about is being voted on. Think of how much easier it would be to follow politics if you weren’t constantly chasing information about what was going on.
Maybe the future of a technologically enabled democracy just looks more like direct democracy.
The bottom line is that democratic participation comes down to how well governments communicate information to their citizens and engage them. Transparency should be a core pillar of a responsible government.
II. Technology against Vetocracy
The second opportunity for technology is in streamlining the civic environment, particularly with respect to the sheer multiplicity of points at which delays and practical vetoes to appear in a given process, like in the approval of a development project.
Canada’s opportunity is greater than asking how we can use technology to organize better or increase participation. We need to find ways to move beyond “vetocracy” by making regulatory approvals less convoluted, which could start with the institutional adoption or expansion of digital tools built by individuals and organizations.
Simplified processing doesn’t mean that we need to sacrifice conformity to existing regulations. It should start with looking at our approval systems through a modern lens and thinking about ways to replace bottlenecks with more efficient, technology-enabled solutions. A handful of governments across North America have begun to rethink the way they make housing decisions and reconstruct their processes with technology at the core.
In November 2023, the same year as the Victoria hearing, British Columbia passed Bill 44. It limits subjectivity in the approvals process by removing the need for a public hearing for any residential project that already conforms to a city’s Official Community Plan (OCP). This shifts debate on the future of the city’s built environment from the project level to the plan itself. As a result of the increased importance of each OCP, BC now requires updates at least every five years with public input. It’s close to a direct translation of this argument into provincial law. Critics have argued that this change, coupled with upzoning, takes site-based decisions out of the hands of local government and limits public oversight on uniquely local projects.
Miami’s experience is one answer to that worry. When the city replaced its old zoning with a form-based code in 2009, it became the first major American city to do so. The code's structure enabled projects to be automatically approved, subject to administrative sign-off, or directed to further review. This means opportunities for public comment are focused on housing developments that warrant a hearing, concentrating scrutiny on the small number of cases that deserve it instead of every proposal under the sun. In practice, rewriting an entire zoning code is a significant undertaking that requires planning capacity most cities just don’t have.
Austin’s record is a great example of how change doesn’t need to happen all at once. The city removed discretion and subjectivity from its system gradually across 2023 and 2024. It did so by allowing more homes by right on a typical lot and cutting its minimum lot size by more than two-thirds. After an audit found permits were taking an average of 345 days, Austin brought in an AI system from a company called Archistar that reads residential drawings and checks them automatically against the restructured zoning and building code. The software acts as the first hurdle, clearing the repetitive, objective work so that staff can spend their time on the unique details of every project.
Closer to home, Canadian cities are already adopting the same kind of system. Burlington, Ontario, was one of the first, and others, including Surrey, Kelowna, Vancouver, and Ottawa have since signed on, part of more than two dozen municipalities across North America that are now using AI to pre-check permits.
These patterns of offloading aspects of housing approvals to automation raise a difficult question. Can we truly trust software to help make a land-use decision, and what happens when it gets something wrong? Honolulu is one city that tried to automate, failed, and then learned from its mistakes. In 2019, the Hawaiian capital tried to force speed, mandating its permitting department to approve or reject affordable housing within ninety days, with automatic approval if it missed. Without the staff or the tools to deliver, the rule fell apart and projects still took close to two years. Then, in late 2025, the city added the missing piece, an AI tool called CivCheck that checks permit applications for code compliance before they reach a human, and residential wait times dropped from about six months to around a week. The goal of the tool is to automate what’s possible, not the entire project. CivCheck handles the parts of an application that can be measured against a rule and passes everything else to a person for final review.
At the ambitious end of the spectrum, full automation already exists, though only for the most standardized work. SolarAPP+, a platform built by a U.S. national lab, issues instant residential solar permits in more than 160 communities, while Symbium does something similar for backyard homes in California. The more objective and standardized a decision is, the easier it is to automate. This frees the time of experts to make the tough decisions that require real judgement calls and proper community engagement. There is a case for discussing what automation means for the human and democratic aspects of land-use decisions, even in expensive, supply-constrained housing markets. But with cities across the U.S. and Canada putting AI into permitting, and review times falling by half or more, the opportunity is hard to ignore.
Whether solutions like these are implemented everywhere or only in some jurisdictions to start, there are clear ways for technology to transform our democracy for the better. The structured nature of the housing approvals process makes it a strong place to start, but opportunities to expand are endless.
Technology gives governments the ability to both better understand the opinions of their electorates and to act more efficiently on the decisions that follow. That forces us to decide how direct we want our democracy to get. Imagine a world where tracking a housing project, or weighing in on a new bill, is as easy as ordering Uber Eats.
Until we get there, we’ll keep trying to build the future the way we did for that housing project in Victoria, three slow nights at a time.
Julian Wells is the co-founder of North Group, a firm that builds AI for business. He also founded Studenthaus, a consumer intelligence platform for student housing, and was the youngest person selected for the 2024 class of BCBusiness 30 Under 30.
Article photo by Michal Klajban, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.