Tenants and allies pay a visit to the Minister's office on April 11, 2026.

To: The Honourable Christine Boyle, M.L.A. 

      Minister of Housing

CC: Amshen Joan Phillip, M.L.A.

                             April 8, 2026

Signatories updated 2026-04-15

Re: Urgent concerns regarding Bill 11, Residential Tenancy Amendment Act

Dear Minister, 

We are at a major crisis point. We write to you with significant concerns about Bill 11, the Residential Tenancy Amendment Act, currently before the BC legislature. It is our understanding that Bill 11 could reach third reading as soon as April 13, 2026. We write as a coalition of groups whose mandates include housing for all and protections for tenants in BC. Residents of supportive housing are distressed about the implications of this Bill, and we share their concerns. We ask that you suspend Bill 11 indefinitely or, in the alternative, until a new working group is struck, with representation from supportive housing tenants. 

The amendments proposed under Bill 11 open the door for arbitrary, aggressive, and fast-tracked evictions carried out with impunity. As you know, supportive housing tenants are already at risk of being made unhoused – in fact, a tenant only becomes eligible for supportive housing after BC Housing has determined that, without housing support, they would otherwise be at risk of homelessness. Your proposed legislation, which consolidates landlords’ power to arbitrarily evict tenants, and to issue “cooling off” periods to tenants, will have the foreseeable consequence of exacerbating this risk. Representatives of the BC Government have expressed hopes that compassion and safeguards can be added in the policy and regulation phase of implementation, but this hope is false; Bill 11 is discriminatory and will cause significant harm. Tenants and tenant stakeholders, who have been left in the dark about the development and implementation of Bill 11, cannot rely on landlords’ goodwill to ward off the most extreme possible outcomes that this legislation would allow for. 

This Bill comes on the heels of significant carve-outs that the  BC Government made to the RTA in 2024, which decimated crucial tenancy protections for tenants in supportive housing. Bill 11 – the latest iteration of this downward trend – is all the more serious in the context of a provincial budget, approved by the legislature in February of this year, that freezes the expansion of non-market housing in BC. Longer waitlists and less housing to go around will only increase the pressure to evict. All of this comes amid a public health emergency due to the toxic drug crisis which reaches its 10 year anniversary next week. 

In our community, Bill 11 is referred to as the “summary evictions” amendment. To name all of our concerns and issues with the bill would perhaps take too much time for review, so we will share a few specific key concerns:

• The Bill stipulates that if a tenant possesses (on their person or in their unit) a “weapon” – which the Bill leaves undefined, and which could presumably refer to anything from a kitchen knife to a screwdriver – the tenant could be subject to immediate eviction at the discretion of the nonprofit landlord; 
• Bill 11 grants landlords the right to evict supportive housing tenants on the spot, implement “cooling off” periods (i.e. short-term immediate evictions for certain tenants), and punish tenants (including via eviction) for the actions of guests and other non-residents;
• Bill 11 proposes to amend the RTA so as to give you and future Housing Ministers leeway to unilaterally make various critical changes to the RTA in the future, skipping the legislative process entirely. This includes the ability to designate supportive housing units or buildings as “transitional housing,” which, as you well know, is entirely exempt from RTA protections.

From Bill 11’s conception and throughout the entirety of the process, tenants and tenant rights organizations have not been invited to participate, nor have they or we been kept informed on the proceedings of your working group. We know that a process of this nature will always reflect the interests of those involved; for example, a process that includes a seat at the working group table for representatives of the police will always be beholden to police interests and their politics. Compassion will be tempered by the desire to contain, control and incarcerate people. The use of “safety” to justify changes to the Residential Tenancy Act reminds us of the Vancouver Police Department’s exploitation of “safety” to justify increased police spending, and the recent publicity stunt known as Taskforce Barrage in the Downtown Eastside. 

This process, which you declared was initiated in response to the concerns of vocal nonprofit landlords and management (as opposed to tenants), has now resulted in at least two pieces of legislation that install additional power with non-profit management and leave supportive housing tenants – largely comprised of racialized people, Indigenous people, people with disabilities, and people at threat of being made unhoused – at a loss for housing security and legal protections.

We also want tenants to be safe, but the conception of safety upon which Bill 11 relies is insufficient, and it is  dangerous and irresponsible to use the pretext  of public safety to justify amendments to the Residential Tenancy Act that will in fact endanger people.

All of the above indicates this Bill is not ready to be passed. We ask the Minister to suspend Bill 11 indefinitely, or in the alternative, to convene and consult a new working group of tenants, drug users, and other allied stakeholders who represent the needs and desires of supportive housing tenants in BC. 

Time is short. We ask that you respond to this letter promptly.

Signed, 

Our Streets 

Our Homes Can’t Wait (OHCW) 

Community Legal Assistance Society (CLAS) 

Vancouver Tenants Union Steering Committee

Ayx Community Bus/CRAB Park

Pivot Legal Society 

VANDU 

Victoria Tenants Union