Capital Daily for Monday, August 3

Victoria council wants to stop counting the city's unhoused population once a year and start tracking it in real time, by name.

At a Committee of the Whole meeting on July 30, councillors unanimously passed a motion pushing BC Housing and the CRD to accelerate the Homeless Individuals and Families Information System, known as HIFIS. The goal is a By-Name List: a live record of who is unhoused downtown and what specifically each person needs to get and stay housed.

Councillor Krista Loughton argued the point-in-time counts Victoria relies on now aren't good enough. Councillor Susan Kim raised a different concern her constituents had flagged, over who would actually be able to see the data. During the lunch recess, councillors rewrote the motion's wording to address those privacy worries before it passed.

The data push arrives a year into the city's Community Safety and Well-being plan, which a July staff report says has housed more than 75 people from encampments and opened Johnson Manor, a substance-free home for 20 people leaving recovery.

Carissa Fontaine and Karissa Sehn had just flown back from Amsterdam. Instead of catching their connection to Saskatoon, they spent the night on the cold floors of Toronto's Pearson airport, told it would be at least two more days before WestJet could get them home.

"People were not helpful at all, unfortunately," Sehn said at the empty WestJet check-in desk.

WestJet's flight attendants went on strike at first light Sunday after the airline and CUPE failed to reach a new contract, and the carrier halted all flights on one of the busiest travel weekends of the year. The airline had already cancelled departures out of Vancouver Island airports in the lead-up, so Island travellers were left rebooking or eating the cost of their own arrangements. Wages and pay for ground work were the sticking points, less than a year after the same fight grounded Air Canada.

Getting off the Island wasn't much smoother by sea. A vehicle fire at the Tsawwassen terminal Friday pushed back sailings on the Swartz Bay route, and BC Ferries expected its major routes at or near capacity all long weekend, matching last year's 130,000 vehicles.