October 9th, 2025
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tenant groups and advocates demand halt to stripping supportive housing tenants of their rights
Unceded and stolen Coast Salish lands – A coalition of tenant groups and advocates dedicated to housing justice are calling on the BC Government to immediately halt any plans to further strip Residential Tenancy Act (RTA) protections from tenants in supportive housing, while also asking to restore previously clawed back protections.
After clawing back a number of core protections for supportive housing tenants in 2024, the BC Government recently announced unspecified plans to further reduce tenancy rights in supportive housing, claiming “safety” concerns as the reason to do so. This work goes so far as to consider removing supportive housing from the RTA. Yet tenant advocates know that the RTA already gives landlords sweeping powers to address safety concerns, which are exercised regularly through the Residential Tenancy Branch, often resulting in eviction.
“The RTA does not prevent landlords from providing housing that is safe for their tenants and workers. The myth that it does relies on sensationalized narratives that do not reflect the experiences of tenants living in supportive housing,” says Robert Patterson, lawyer at Tenant Resource & Advisory Centre. “These changes are part of an effort by some non-profit landlords to exempt themselves from the RTA, enabling them to evict tenants without notice or recourse. But for tenants across BC, whose voices are being left out of this discussion, this would be a disaster."
We are deeply alarmed at any proposal that would further erode the rights and security of tenants in supportive housing by allowing their landlords to evict them without adequate notice or a robust ability to defend their tenancies. Security of tenure is a key principle of the RTA that must not be abridged for any tenant. Indigenous Peoples and racialized communities are already overrepresented in supportive housing and in evictions. Any clawbacks to the RTA are unequivocally colonial and will deepen systemic racism, at odds with BC’s alleged commitments to reconciliation and anti-racism.
“How does truth and reconciliation work into a plan that reduces protections for supportive housing when we know Indigenous Peoples are disproportionately represented?”, says Delilah Gregg, member of Western Aboriginal Harm Reduction Society, Police Oversight with Evidence and Research, and Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users. “This move ignores the reality of genocide and gentrification on these lands.”
Creating housing instability does not make workers in supportive housing any safer either. “For years, we have come up with policies and PPE requirements for dangerous workplaces,” says Pete Woodrow from the Surrey Union of Drug Users (SUDU). “Unions and health and safety committees across countless industries have helped to address and mitigate dangers to workers. How come the same approach is not acceptable now?”
Violence in supportive housing is caused by resource scarcity and the unregulated drug market. Without addressing the root cause of these issues, such as ensuring access to affordable, safe, and secure housing and regulating the drug supply, these issues will continue. We echo SUDU’s recent recommendations as immediate calls to action, and demand B.C. commit to upholding rights for all tenants under the RTA as it stands, work with supportive housing tenants, and recognize tenants as experts in their own safety and housing needs.
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Community Legal Assistance Society (CLAS)
CRAB Park/AYX Community Group
Kilala Lelum
Our Streets
Our Homes Can’t Wait
Pivot Legal Society
Police Oversight with Evidence and Research (POWER)
Surrey Union of Drug Users (SUDU)
Tenant Resource & Advisory Centre (TRAC)
Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU)
Vancouver Tenants Union (VTU) Steering Committee
CONTACT
info[at]vancouvertenantsunion[dot]ca
Backgrounder 1
This recent announcement comes after the Province’s drastic changes to the Residential Tenancy Act (RTA) in February 2024. The 2024 change removed the right of tenants in supportive housing to have guests, to privacy, and to any other kind of quiet enjoyment within their homes. For example, landlords can enter the units of supportive housing tenants without notice and can put unreasonable restrictions on accessing their units.
The BC Government claimed these measures would enable “quick and decisive action against problematic tenants and guests.” But the reality is that the removal of tenant protections denies tenants security, dignity and autonomy in supportive housing, where there is little to no recourse, even when being harassed by staff or other tenants. Stripping RTA protections further will remove accountability and meaningful remedy for tenants with physical and mental health disabilities and neurodiverse people facing discriminatory circumstances in supportive housing.
Since the RTA clawbacks of 2024 took effect, we have heard of:
- numerous supportive housing buildings passing total guest bans, where no tenant is allowed to have guests over;
- Residents of numerous buildings being forced to sign new tenancy agreements;
- A building manager entering into a tenant’s unit without notice for reasons other than a wellness check;
- another building where an Indigenous elder was told by building staff that she cannot have her children over for meals;
- Continuous violations of landlords’ requirement to ensure maintenance and repairs, including one building having lacked hot water for 3 months;
- landlords and building workers entering units with no warning or just cause.
Overwhelmingly, supportive housing tenants have reported to the undersigned that they were given no notice of these changes, and were not consulted. The additional changes alluded to by the BC Government have similarly excluded supportive housing tenants and other stakeholders from conversation and development.
Non-profit landlords already try to skirt their obligations to uphold tenant rights by arguing at the Residential Tenancy Branch that they provide “transitional housing”, which is exempt from the RTA. Tenants who are not covered by the RTA are unable to dispute evictions and violations of their rights through the Residential Tenancy Branch (RTB), and are instead forced to go through the Civil Resolution Tribunal, Small Claims Court, or the BC Supreme Court. It can be hard enough to find pro bono representation at the RTB due to how overtaxed the pro bono legal landscape is, but it’s near impossible to get pro bono representation with these other legal avenues. Any legal process is complicated and onerous, but especially so for vulnerable tenants going up against large institutional landlords.
All tenants across BC - no matter what kind of housing they live in - should be alarmed at any attempts to weaken the RTA. At a time when fewer and fewer people can afford homes, strengthening the RTA is more critical than ever, especially for vulnerable tenants. We have already seen David Eby’s government reducing the notice period for evictions due to sale of the property from four months to three this year - a change that only serves landlords. When the government prioritizes unaffordable market-rate housing supply and giving landlords power, tenants end up on the street or find themselves warehoused in heavily surveilled, jail-like environments with uninhabitable conditions and limited rights, all because they are too poor to afford other housing. When tenants lose rights, landlords profit.
The government has ignored the safety issues in supportive housing that tenants have been drawing attention to for years, such as frequently broken elevators that disproportionately affect tenants facing mobility barriers. The February 2024 amendments already left tenants without recourse when facing overly-restrictive guest bans or where their privacy is being jeopardized by housing providers.
Backgrounder 2
SUDU’s recent recommendations
- Consult people with lived and living experience of unregulated substance use and supportive housing residence to inform policy development in supportive housing
- Create minimum service standards and training requirements for supportive housing providers which include transparent third-party inspection, building maintenance, de-escalation, OFA 2 first-aid, trauma-informed care, and advanced overdose response with naloxone
- Stop exploiting workers through casual, non-unionized, and underpaid positions. Instead fairly compensate, provide ongoing training, and create unionized and non-casual positions in supportive housing to prevent burnout and maintain quality working conditions
- Require contracted housing providers to create authentic peer-led support, operational, emotional first-aid, and de-escalation roles for housing residents to more formally support site safety within their homes
- Require contracted supportive housing providers to solicit and follow-up on resident feedback, suggestions, and complaints through regular community meetings and by creating tenant advisory committees
- Expand the role of harm reduction-informed peer workers in all supportive housing environments
- Create peer-supported supervised inhalation spaces in low-barrier supportive housing, provide staff with effective PPE, organize floors by tenants’ drug of choice, ensure proper negative pressure ventilation, adequately maintain buildings, and seal windows to mitigate indoor smoking and related concerns
- Regulate the toxic drug supply, expand prescribed safer supply access, reverse harmful witnessed ingestion policy for new safer supply clients; & FREE DULF