By Cailin Tyrrell and Sacia Burton

Right now, around 1.5 million tenants live across British Columbia, making up more than 660,000 tenant households. From the Lower Mainland to Vancouver Island, stretching to the Kootenays and Northern BC, tenants like you and me are experiencing extreme precarity in an unstable, unaffordable rental housing market.

Whether you’ve been renting for one, five, or 25 years, the profit-driven rental housing market, outdated residential tenancy policies, and loopholes in current housing legislation place tenants at the mercy of landlords. From our work at the BC Poverty Reduction Coalition (BCPRC) and Tenant Resource & Advisory Centre (TRAC), we know that thousands of people each year are left vulnerable to unstable and unsafe housing arrangements – and many are made homeless.

Taking on the stress of drawn-out issues with mould or pests. Dealing with inadequate heating and cooling during extreme weather. Staying in a bad or abusive living situation due to the high cost of renting elsewhere. We all are or know someone with a bad landlord story or a horrible housing experience. Yet we rarely hear about how these situations can be solved. 

Barriers to dispute resolution at the Residential Tenancy Branch (RTB) are further complicating systemic issues like discrimination and racism in the rental housing market, and are continuing to impose challenges on tenants who are already facing a disproportionate amount of the burden of this crisis. Between unfair rent increases of 23.5% or more that help pad a landlord’s wallet, unfair evictions that leave terminally ill tenants with no place to go, parents with young kids facing homelessness, and entire apartment buildings facing dozens of retaliatory evictions, there remains few accountability measures in place for the landlords that are wreaking havoc on tenants’ lives. 

Today, there is nothing stopping a landlord from serving back-to-back eviction notices to the same tenant, dragging out hearings for months at the RTB, and even continuing to do this across multiple rental properties – all at the same time. And we know that homeownership continues to be out of reach for those wishing to leave the rental housing market behind, trapping people in toxic tenancies that undermine their health and well-being. We also know that addressing these issues will take meaningful action from all levels of government.

Momentum is building for policy change that supports tenants. At September’s Union of BC Municipalities conference, councilors and regional directors from across the province endorsed a motion supporting the implementation of vacancy control, which would limit the amount landlords can raise rents in a unit between tenancies. For this policy to progress, we need leadership in our province to come directly from tenants, for tenants. By ensuring participation and oversight by people affected by inadequate or precarious housing, solutions can be developed to respond to tenants’ needs rather than profit-driven initiatives.

Today, on International Tenants Rights’ Day, we call on the next provincial government to not only recognize housing as a human right, but make the reforms that deliver on that promise. Government must, at minimum, take the profit out of eviction by putting the brakes on the uncontrolled rent increases between tenancies that fuel the eviction crisis. As we hear platform promises to solve the housing crisis and make life better for people in the coming weeks and months, it is crucial for tenants’ rights to be top-of-mind in provincial housing strategies. To curb the housing crisis and make BC livable for all, the time to act is now.