Unease on Victoria's Waterfront
With the iconic blue Johnson Street Bridge slated for demolition and development on the rise, all eyes are on the future of Victoria’s waterfront .
A seagull’s cry echoes across the sparkling waters of Victoria’s Upper Harbour, just north of the creaky Johnson Street Bridge, an aging symbol of waterfront industry. There’s a whiff of sea salt and creosote in the crisp morning air as Ian Maxwell ambles along the docks of Point Hope Shipyard, talking about his ambitious expansion plans for the historic site. Perched on a narrow shelf of land just north of the blue bridge, Point Hope has operated continuously on the site since 1873. It’s the last remaining shipyard in a harbour where maritime industry thrived for more than a century.
Over the last 30 years, the rapid loss of industrial land along Victoria’s harbour, mostly to condo and resort developments, has fostered a common assumption: that the eventual disappearance altogether of heavy industry from the city’s waterfront is inevitable. But Maxwell, who rescued Point Hope from the brink of bankruptcy eight years ago, is determined to see to it that doesn’t happen. He’s planning a $60-million upgrade to the facility, the centrepiece of which is a $35-million graving dock, a specialized berth that can be drained to allow repair and maintenance on the hulls of large ships.
“It’s the first major investment in a shipbuilding facility in Victoria’s harbour in at least 50 years,” says Maxwell. “For generations, all the industrial land in the Upper Harbour has been nothing more than a land bank for developers. We’re trying to change that and protect the industrial lands for what they are.”
Measuring 170 metres long and 35 metres wide, the Point Hope graving dock will be able to accommodate all but the largest B.C. ferries, and will “affect shipbuilding on the West Coast for another 50 to 100 years,” Maxwell says.
In a stroke of fortuitous timing, Maxwell’s revamped shipyard could be well-positioned to reap the benefits of the federal government’s National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy, a $35-billion fund aimed at stimulating the country’s shipbuilding industry. Most of the money allocated to the initiative is earmarked for construction of navy and coast guard ships and will be split between two of the three major shipyards that submitted bids – North Vancouver’s Seaspan Marine Corp. and shipyards in Nova Scotia and Quebec. The remaining $2 billion is set aside for smaller shipyards and may benefit Point Hope in the coming years, said Maxwell, noting that his expansion plans were already underway when the NSPS was unveiled in June 2010.
Image: Nik West
The condos of Dockside Green loom over Point
Hope. If Maxwell gets his way, soon residents' views
will feature a 170-metre graving dock.
Rising from former industrial lands behind Point Hope, the eco-friendly glass-and-chrome condos of Victoria’s Dockside Green serve as a reminder that Maxwell is swimming against the tide. In the last five years, close to 500 people have moved into Dockside Green, a $650-million mixed-use development that, when completed, will house a population of 2,500, and will include 26 buildings, totalling 1.3-million square feet of residential, retail, office and light industrial uses.
City staff estimate that, in the last two decades, 2,500 to 3,000 dwelling units have been built along Victoria’s harbour. That estimate also includes major projects on Shoal Point, the Songhees lands just south of Point Hope, and the Selkirk waterfront.
Meanwhile, according to a recent survey by the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority (GVHA), about 85 per cent of the harbour’s industrial land base has disappeared, and half of what remains “is threatened by possible incremental decision-making related to development and zoning.”
It’s a dynamic that has isolated the harbour’s remaining maritime enterprises into tiny pockets and increasingly pitted them against newcomers who don’t appreciate the rattle and hum of traditional industry. Maxwell says the arrival of Dockside Green has led to ongoing complaints about noise emanating from Point Hope, forcing him to spend thousands of dollars on studies showing people the company isn’t breaking the noise bylaws. “It’s like the city writes us an open-ended ticket,” he says.
In James Bay, residents have long complained about the diesel fumes from idling cruise-ship traffic at Ogden Point, and the GVHA has responded by considering a massive electrical upgrade that would eliminate the need for cruise liners to idle while in port. Across the harbour, along the Songhees shores next to the tony Ocean Point Resort, fierce opposition to a proposed marina for luxury yachts last year forced the property’s owner to cut the moorage area in half.
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