The CRD Dog Owners and friends for Good Governance Society was formed in August 2023.

Restoring Balance and Evidence-Based Governance

in Saanich Parks

Summary: the needed balance

The Capital Regional District Dog Owners and Friends for Good Governance Society (CRD DOGGS) represents a significant share of Saanich residents: most Saanich residents (75%) view dogs as vital to our social fabric and almost half have dogs in their family. We seek democratic fairness, evidence-based governance, and balanced park sharing that respects families, seniors, environmental protection, and responsible dog owners alike. We are not an interest group seeking exclusive privileges. We are advocates for fairness, compromise, and good governance.

Who We Are

CRD DOGGS is a member-funded, non-profit advocacy group representing a large, yet currently disenfranchised, segment of the South Island electorate. Our members include families, seniors, hikers, walkers and outdoor enthusiasts who value both environmental protection and access to public parks and trails. We support science-based conservation measures where a clear rationale exists and believe all park users deserve a voice in decisions affecting public parks. Our Values, Principals and Responsible Ownership Expectations can be found on our website CRDDOGGS.ca

We fully recognize that park planning must accommodate everyone: seniors, young families, individuals with disabilities, areas truly in need of protection and people who are comfortable sharing spaces with off leash under control dogs and those who are not. Our core objective is to move away from divisive, exclusionary restrictions and return to a balanced park system. This includes restoring a reasonable number of the lost natural trail spaces where residents and their companion animals can experience nature together off-leash under control and supporting responsible dog ownership.

Our Priorities

1. Improve access to public parks and trails for all residents, including but not limited to those needing off leash trails and parks.

2. When not already done in existing nature preserves, protect environmentally sensitive areas and wildlife habitat.

3. Return a fair and reasonable amount of natural trail and park spaces to leash optional under control.

4. Support evidence-based park management and measurable outcomes that balance environmental concerns with fair community access.

5. Ensure all park user groups are represented in planning and decision-making.

6. Promote responsible dog ownership, stewardship, education, and compliance.

Our Record

● The Panama Flats Proposal: Worked collaboratively with Saanich staff on a balanced proposal to protect wetlands while maintaining public access and leash optional under control opportunities.

● Central Saanich: Provided constructive input into the Central Saanich Parks and Trails Master Plan.

● Oak Bay and Other Jurisdictions: Engaged constructively with Oak Bay and other local governments on regional park access and responsible dog management.

● Stewardship: Advocating for practical park improvements and local stewardship initiatives.

Our Concerns

● The continued, systemic loss of accessible off leash under control trails and green spaces across the entire Capital Regional District, especially in Saanich.

● Planning processes failing to adequately reflect the views of all park users. Consultation when not using the data is not listening.

● The growing structural pressure on remaining parks as regional recreational opportunities continue to decline.

● In PKOLS a focus on the long existing and widely used trail and not on creating protections for the 90% or more of the park that has no trail access.

The History

The current friction in Saanich is not a conflict between residents; it is the direct result of a top-down, agenda-driven policy shift that abandoned evidence-based decision-making and democratic consultation.

The 2021 Catalyst and Policy Pivot

• In May 2021, Mayor Fred Haynes introduced a motion to abruptly terminate off-leash access in three major Saanich parks. Public correspondence was immediate and overwhelmingly opposed to these changes. The motion was withdrawn.

• Council then approved a $200,000 budget to launch the People, Pets, and Parks (PPP) planning process.

• In October 2021, council passed a localized leashing bylaw for Cadboro Bay (Gyro Park beach), and Saanich became the only municipality located within the Federal Victoria Harbour Migratory Bird Sanctuary to match its municipal restrictions to Federal Regulations. Subsequently, most of its municipal bylaw enforcement resources have focused on that single location.

The Flawed Planning Process of 2022

The PPP project launched in the spring of 2022. Community stakeholders raised immediate concerns regarding poor survey quality, data biases, questionnaires and informational materials that pointed to predetermined outcomes. Although feedback from surveys, letters, and an open house clearly demonstrated that increasing leashing restrictions lacked widespread community support, the restrictive policy direction remained unchanged.

Public Rejection and Forced Approval in 2023

In May 2023, the draft PPP was released for public feedback. Council members immediately began defending the document, as written, in the media, signaling their intention to ignore community input.

Public opposition was swift and unprecedented: over 9,000 people signed a petition to halt the leashing recommendations and force a redesign. An overwhelming volume of opposition letters flooded the municipality, and Saanich stopped including public letters in meeting agendas, an action never seen before or since, including for the Quadra MacKenzie plan which had an even higher volume of letters.

Despite impassioned and well-informed public speakers and writers overwhelmingly rejecting the proposed changes, Council voted unanimously to approve the PPP strategy in June 2023, publicly relying on three flawed rationales:

1. Council claimed the SPCA supported the plan, which was untrue; the SPCA explicitly requested the statement be recanted, but Council failed to do so.

2. Council claimed alignment with the W̱SÁNEĆ Leadership Council based on a single email received the night before consultation closed. Indigenous communities were not consulted, and the Director of Parks stated, at a public meeting on June 8 th , 2023, that only Urban Indigenous were impacted and were included as part of general public consultation.

3. Council claimed a silent majority wanted the plan as written. This directly contradicted all council correspondence and their own independent research, which showed that two-thirds of residents did not consider off-leash access in Saanich parks to be a serious issue.

In September 2023, facing sustained public blowback, Mayor Dean Murdock attempted to blunt the impact of the PPP changes with a set of recommendations that included adding more off leash access and returning the beaches to the status quo. Council accepted only a small portion of the Mayor’s adjustments and unilaterally added an extendible/retractable leash ban to the final bylaw during third reading - a restrictive measurethat was never part of the original project scope or public consultation, and which has proven impossible to enforce.

Saanich has failed to provide any information on how the success of the PPP will be measured and assessed. Even specific activities, such as signage or “pop-up-parks” (a summer program where small, temporary fenced spaces are created in 3 parks), do not seem to establish success criteria instead choosing to increase restrictions or threaten dog owners with the loss of access to even the limited post PPP spaces remaining that allow leash optional under control recreation.

2026 - PKOLS Fencing

In 2023 Mayor Dean Murdock specifically directed that the whole leash-optional trail in PKOLS not be fenced. The 2026 plan to extend the fencing to encompass the entire loop was made in reaction to ongoing demands from the PKOLS-Mount Doug Conservancy. No other community or resident group was consulted on this decision, even though it affects all park visitors.

The only groups consulted in the initial design, before the expansion was approved, were CRDDOGGS and the PKOLS-Mount Douglas Conservancy. The Peg and Post system used is flimsy, requiring near constant repair, ugly and unsafe for children, pets and wildlife. Council has received hundreds of letters and calls to date that demonstrate this fence is widely disliked by most visitors to PKOLS.

Costs: To date staff have indicated that just under $110,000 of PPP funding was spent on the benches, gates and initial fencing of 1/3 of the leash optional trail. Currently there is fencing and open space staggered along the trail. This also includes the gate removal, trail use signage and on-going repairs. This is about 10% of the $972,000 PPP funding that was allocated from the 2024 surplus.

In April 2026, a further $270,000 was added to the PPP funding, redirected from a staff plan to add this money to reserve funds. This money is specifically to extend the PKOLS Peg and Post fencing around both sides of the entire 1.7-kilometer leash optional loop, which will create a narrow, caged path requiring on-going unfunded costs to repair the damage from dropped branches and wildlife that happens very regularly.

Agenda vs. Evidence: what the data shows

The current restrictions are frequently justified using anecdotes regarding environmental degradation and public safety. However, the official data collected by the municipality and global scientific consensus tell a completely different story:

● Ecosystem Impacts: Peer-reviewed data and global assessments (including the International Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services [IPBES]) confirm that the actual drivers of ecosystem decline are climate change, industrial pollution, and landscape-scale habitat loss—not companion animals. Wildlife disruption is primarily tied to general human presence and poorly planned trail infrastructure. In fact, during a 27-day observation period on Cadboro Bay beach, dogs were observed bothering wildlife just 4 times out of 143 observations.

● The Myth of Public Conflict: Between 2019 and 2022, Saanich Parks received just over 300 dog-related complaints. Upon analysis, 44% did not involve dog behavior at all (they simply contained the word dog in the database), but were about signage or waste bins. Only 12%—roughly one complaint per month across the entire municipality—involved actual dog or owner behavior.

CRD Animal Control was contracted by Saanich in June 2022 to take over animal control, each officer adds approximately $230,000 in costs for Saanich. There are currently 2 assigned to Saanich Parks. The data they provided for 2023 through 2025 show the same low volume of complaints. See appendix E for details.

Facts from the People, Pets and Parks study and Saanich data:

● The vast majority (73%) 1 of daily park users are dog owners.

● Two thirds of Saanich residents had no concerns about off-leash dogs parks and beaches.

● Close to 80% of Saanich residents welcome dogs as a part of our community (86%), have positive experiences with dogs (83%) and feel safe when dogs are around them (75%), 11% do not feel safe around dogs.

● Close to 75% of all respondents and non-dog owners believe there are benefits to Saanich having most of its parks be leash optional parks.

● From May of 2021, when Mayor Fred Haynes unilaterally decided to try to end off-leash access in 3 Saanich parks, letters to council meetings on this topic have come in 3 to 1 in support of maintaining most leash optional access.

1 PPP Appendix F Statistically Phone Survey Results 24% of 300 respondents =72, 52% of 101 dog owners

=52.5, 52.5/72=73%

2 PPP Appendix F Statistically Valid Phone Survey Results, page 13

3 PPP Appendix F Statistically Phone Survey Results page 11

4 PPP Appendix F Statistically Phone Survey Results page 9

5 Count of letters to Mayor and council for specific Meetings from May 2020 to October 2023

The Policy Myth: The 56 Parks; Reality

The municipality frequently states that dog owners have ample space, citing 56 leash-optional parks. This figure is highly misleading and creates a false sense of abundance. 80% of these designated spaces do not provide meaningful, usable exercise space.

When you filter those 56 parks by functional criteria—defined as a 1.0-hectare minimum and space for a basic 20-minute walk—the inventory collapses:

● 15 parks are under 1 hectare.

● 37 parks feature playgrounds or sports fields, which legally exclude off-leash access and drop the remaining land below a usable size.

● PKOLS (Mount Douglas) remains the only natural trail destination left in the municipality for off-leash walking, and its available path is under 2 km.

Ultimately, only 8 parks across all of Saanich are genuinely usable for shared off-leash exercise.

Other Jurisdictions

Saanich’s restrictive approach directly contradicts modern urban planning trends across Canada, which prioritize expanding off-leash spaces to increase compliance and lower user conflict.

“Over-regulation actually creates less compliance. So, if we don’t get this balance correct, it’s only going to cost us more.” - Coun. Rebecca Bligh, Vice-Chair, Metro Vancouver Regional Parks Committee

● Metro Vancouver (Pacific Spirit Park): Rejected staff recommendations to reduce off-leash access, opting instead to preserve balanced, multi-use trail networks.

● Comox Valley Regional District (Seal Bay Sanctuary) A 642 Ha Natural park filled with a complex trail system that includes mostly leash optional trails with special closures for nesting and other wildlife needs.

● Fredericton, NB (Killarney Lake Park, 2025): Designated over 6 kilometers of an existing natural park trail network for off-leash use specifically to satisfy community desire for natural recreation.

● Port Moody, BC (Bert Flinn Park): Expanded off-leash trail networks directly adjacent to ecologically sensitive areas, utilizing targeted trail design and monitoring rather than blanket bans.

● Toronto, ON (High Park Ravines): Upgraded trail systems specifically to seamlessly integrate off-leash trail access with adjacent natural ravines in an environmentally sensitive manner.

● Other Expansions: Municipalities including North Vancouver, Port Coquitlam, Delta, Edmonton, Markham, Waterloo, and Seattle have implemented active expansions of their off-leash networks between 2023 and 2026 to manage growing populations equitably.