Fine too high for bylaw violation

Iqaluit city council’s decision this week to ask that a $10,000 fine be imposed on a small Iqaluit builder for the grave crime of constructing a one-bedroom apartment comes as no great surprise.

What else is to be expected from a municipality body that believes the creation of walking trails for yuppies is more important than the creation of healthy stocks of housing for working people and their potential employers?

Iqaluit’s housing shortage has always been severe, even at the best of times. But Iqaluit city council’s punitive and anal-retentive approach to the regulation of development has helped turn a severe shortage into a desperate one.

Over the past 18 months, they’ve turned down several reasonable proposals from private developers that would have eased the city’s housing shortage and helped government and private employers hire more staff. City officials have said that passage of a new General Plan and Zoning Bylaw will open up more land for construction, but it remains to be seen if Iqaluit’s embittered developers will be willing to risk their money within the city’s new regulatory environment.

In any event, desperate times provoke desperate measures. Numerous businesses and homeowners are resorting to increasingly ingenious methods of carving housing units out of a variety of unusual spaces, often behind the backs of prying city staff.

This may not be legal, but it’s naive to believe that the economic life of the community must come to halt until after the city finishes dithering with its new zoning system. Where there’s a demand for a commodity, someone will find a way of supplying it, whether it’s legal or illegal. The city’s policies have pushed the demand for housing to extreme levels — so they shouldn’t be surprised to find people taking extreme measures to supply that demand.

The city alleges that Iqaluit contractor Jens Steenberg snuck an illegal, one-bedroom apartment onto a building that was supposed to be a two-storey single-family house. What nerve.

But it appears as if, in spite of their own incompetence, the city of Iqaluit’s Inspector Gadgets have been able to put together enough information to prove that Steenberg actually violated a bylaw.

They’re punishment, however, is completely disproportionate to the alleged crime. There are many people in Iqaluit, let us not forget, who believe that the creation of new housing units is an act that should actually be encouraged, not punished.

We only hope that Steenberg and his lawyer can find a way of persuading a court to lower the ridiculous $10,000 fine that city council intends to levy. Simply having to live in a city run by our current town council is punishment enough.

JB