Orders of the Day

Hon. R. Kahlon: I call Motion 34 on the order paper.

Government Motions on Notice

MOTION 34 — EXTENSION OF SITTING HOURS

Hon. R. Kahlon: I move Motion 34 on the order paper:

[That, notwithstanding Standing Order 2 (1), the adjournment time of the sitting of the House commencing at 1.30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 15, 2024, be modified to 9 p.m.

And further, that this modified time of adjournment extend to the application of Standing Order 3 and to the interpretation of the ordinary time fixed for adjournment of the House in the Sessional Order adopted by the House on March 4, 2024, enabling certain proceedings of the House to be undertaken in three sections.]

T. Stone: I wanted to take a brief moment to speak to Motion 34 that is on the order paper and certainly understand the intent of this particular motion, which serves to adjust the hours that this place sits by a couple hours tomorrow night, tomorrow being Wednesday, so instead of rising at 7 p.m., we would rise at 9 p.m.

I want to say that on behalf of the official opposition, I do appreciate, when we’re in the last session of the year that there will be an election coming up, this fall, that there are some unique time requests from different members, mostly pertaining to retirements, that have, I think, been well accommodated by both government and the official opposition. A number of members in both parties won’t be seeking re-election.

So as not to compromise estimates time — most notably, the Premier’s estimates time, which is coming up and is set to start tomorrow and go through Thursday — I certainly understand that one option to facilitate that would be to add some extra hours onto the calendar.

I do want to make the point as well…. Not to presuppose what might be coming next, because it hasn’t been brought forward yet, but I have a Spidey sense that the Government House Leader may rise to his feet sooner than later and, recognizing there are only a couple days left in this legislative sitting, may be asking this chamber to approve some time allocation in order to complete the remaining business that’s on the order paper.

[1:40 p.m.]

To the extent that I am not crossing too many lines in commenting on that here, I just want to say again that the management of this House is really the primary responsibility of the Government House Leader. I think we were all surprised — certainly the official opposition was surprised — that two new pieces of legislation were only introduced in this House yesterday and are being subject to second reading today. It would appear to be the government’s intent to have these pieces of legislation sail through this place and become law.

It’s really unfortunate that two pieces of legislation would be left to literally the dying days of the session with minimal time to debate that legislation — or, really, compressed time. I think it does demonstrate the approach that this government has taken over the years, which has been a continual erosion of the role that this chamber plays in debating legislation, having adequate time to do so.

For that to work, there is a good-faith sort of expectation between the government and the official opposition that the official opposition will be provided with the scope and scale of the government’s legislative agenda by a certain point in the legislative session, usually by about the midpoint. That would give the official opposition time to adequately determine how to best prioritize the legislation that’s in front of this chamber.

That is certainly not possible when new legislation is introduced with a couple days left in the session. That’s deeply regrettable. I think it, again, reflects a level of disrespect for this place, which is unfortunate.

Also, I want to note that there is one other piece of legislation for which there is just no possible way that it is going to be able to be completed without time allocation. That is Bill 21, the Legal Professions Act. My understanding is that this chamber is on clause 7 of a bill that has literally hundreds, over 300, clauses. We’re just in committee on clause 7 of this bill. There is no way that this bill will receive the scrutiny that it requires, that it demands.

The second reading speeches, I think, were quite notable, from members in this chamber, about the attack on the legal profession that this bill really represents, the erosion of independence of our judiciary and the legal environment in British Columbia. The pattern that this demonstrates yet again…. It was health care professionals through Bill 36 previously. It was engineers before that, and now it’s lawyers that this government is seeking to strip of their independence.

It’s an important piece of legislation, and this Bill 21 will not receive the scrutiny that it’s going to require because the government will have no choice…. With two days left in the session, only being on clause 7 of this bill, there is no possibility the government can get this done without imposing time allocation.

Again, time allocation, for those watching, is effectively…. It’s otherwise known as the guillotine or closure. It is a tool that the government has to unilaterally end debate on a piece of legislation, a stage of the debate and the legislation entirely, by a specific time and a speci­fic day. That’s what’s coming. That is deeply regrettable and unfortunate and, I think, reflects a disrespect for the proceedings of this place.

Mr. Speaker, thank you for the time for me to be able to register those concerns of the official opposition as we move forward in the final few days of this legislative sitting.

The Speaker: Seeing no further speaker — nobody? — on Motion 34, all those in favour indicate aye.

Motion approved on division.

[1:45 p.m.]

Standing Order 81.1

ADOPTION OF GOVERNMENT
BUSINESS SCHEDULE

Hon. R. Kahlon: An agreement with opposition cau­cuses could not be reached, so I move:

[That, pursuant to Standing Order 81.1 (2):

1. The question on the motion for second reading of Bill (No. 26) intituled Name Amendment Act (No. 2), 2024, and the question on any motion in amendment thereto, be put by 3.30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 14, 2024, without further amendment or debate, and that, if a division is called, it shall proceed forthwith in accordance with Standing Order 16 (2).

2. The question on the motion for second reading of Bill (No. 27) intituled Municipalities Enabling and Validating (No. 5) Amendment Act, 2024, and the question on any motion in amendment thereto, be put by 6.15 p.m. on Tuesday, May 14, 2024, without further amendment or debate, and that, if a division is called, it shall proceed forthwith in accordance with Standing Order 16 (2).]

The Speaker: Thank you. This motion is not debatable or amendable.

Motion approved on division.

Hon. R. Kahlon: In this chamber, I call second reading of Bill 26, Name Amendment Act.

In the Douglas Fir Committee Room, I call Committee of the Whole for Bill 25, Haida Nation Recognition Amendment Act.

In the Birch Committee Room, I call estimates of the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General, followed by the estimates of the Legislative Assembly and officers of the Legislature.

[J. Tegart in the chair.]

Second Reading of Bills

BILL 26 — NAME
AMENDMENT ACT (No. 2), 2024

(continued)

Deputy Speaker: The House is resuming debate on Bill 26 at second reading.

Recognizing the Leader of the Third Party.

S. Furstenau: Thank you, Madam Speaker. My colleague reserved his right to continue in the debate. How­ever, he is occupied, I’ll swear, at the moment, so I will rise to speak to Bill 26, the Name Amendment Act.

This legislation is aiming to close a loophole that is claimed to have allowed a violent criminal to change his name. I think we can all agree that public safety is paramount to a well-functioning society. We fully support the measures to protect the public from violent offenders who are deemed to be a risk to public safety. We support the addition of a criminal record check, when name changes are requested, to allow for the registrar general to determine if a person’s requested name change poses a risk to the public.

However, we have some concerns about the legislation, the main one being the ambiguity of a “prescribed offence.” In public statements, the Minister of Health has listed three offences that would be included in this legislation. They include murder, sexual assault and sexual assault against children. Bill 26 includes two specific designations that would prevent people from changing their names. These are for a “dangerous offender” or a “long-term offender,” as defined in the Criminal Code of Canada. These additions make sense to us.

However, the inclusion of prescribed offence in clause 2 lays the ground for potential unintended consequences. I’m going to pick up on the comments that were made by the House Leader for the official opposition, in that how we proceed with debate in here matters. How legislation is brought forward, is introduced and is debated matters.

[1:50 p.m.]

This legislation was introduced yesterday, three days before the end of a parliamentary session, three days be­fore the end of a parliament. It includes, of course, this…. It’s not specified in the legislation which offences will be included, as the minister’s public statements seemed to indicate, but the ability for the Lieutenant-Governor-in-Council to determine what offences will be included in this legislation and to determine that by regulation.

We’ve had this conversation many, many times in this chamber, in the last four years, about the tendency for governments to bring in legislation that leaves an enormous amount of the defining over to regulation. That is done behind closed doors by order-in-council. This approach to legislation means that what the public doesn’t have is clarity and certainty about what specific offences will be included in this legislation.

If the public were to go by the minister’s public statements, they would think it’s really clear. This legislation covers murder, sexual assault and sexual assault against children.

My concern is that those definitions have not been included in the legislation. They’re left till later, after we’re done here with this debate, after we’re done reviewing this legislation, which is our job. It’s left to, once again, the Lieutenant-Governor-in-Council, the cabinet, to determine not in public, not in view of the public, not in debate, not in the written legislation, but later. It gives that power, in perpetuity, to the government to add to their list of prescribed offences.

While the public might think that they’re in total agreement with this legislation…. It makes sense. It’s public safety. We want people who have committed these serious offences — for the public to know who they are.

I really question why this government has chosen to in­clude a prescribed offence that will be determined later in regulation. It’s, unfortunately, just a trend that we’ve seen again and again from this government, an accelerating trend and one that really undermines the transparency and trust-building that really has to go into all work of democracy.

We have a trust issue in a lot of democracies. We have a trust issue in this country and in this province. It’s a time for every government to lean into the greatest level of transparency that they can.

I will be raising this at committee stage. Just to make it clear, while we support the intent and the purpose of this bill, we do have real concerns with what’s being left to be done after the debate is finished.

Deputy Speaker: Seeing no further speakers, Minister of Health.

Hon. A. Dix: I want to express my appreciation to the Leader of the Third Party, the Leader of the Opposition, the member for Prince George–Valemount, the member for Prince George–Mackenzie and the member for Surrey South, who participated in the debate.

There’s some discussion of how the legislation came to be and the work we’re doing. I heard what the Opposition House Leader said about the bills coming in when they did. They really reflect what has been, certainly, my ap­proach. That has been to attempt, on legislation — sometimes successfully, sometimes less successfully — to work with everyone.

There’s a certain saying that prominent cases can make bad law. They can also make good law in the sense that issues arise that come to your attention, and you’re able to take action against them.

[1:55 p.m.]

In this case, some of the immediacy of the issue was raised at a hearing of the B.C. Review Board. It led both the Premier and the Leader of the Opposition to take a position saying that this shouldn’t happen. People who commit serious offences, in this bill defined as prescribed offences, shouldn’t be allowed to change their names. There’s a public safety issue and an issue for the families of those who are their victims — for the victims themselves, in many cases — and for public safety.

The Premier directed me, and the Leader of the Opposition subsequently provided a private member’s bill, to see if we could take action now to address this issue. I felt we could.

People worked very hard, and I think the result is a legislative act that is a direct response to a real problem that we can solve together. I want to acknowledge everyone who played a role in that process, including all of the members who spoke today.

I think there’s often talk between political parties about these issues. I just want to acknowledge people who have lived through these questions — in your constituency, hon. Speaker, the people of Fraser-Nicola — who, when these issues are raised, wherever they’re raised, suffer a sense of grief and loss and sometimes anger, which one would expect in such cases. Having been part of families, both on my side and my wife’s side, who have lost people to violent crime, I can understand that, although I have to say that doesn’t necessarily give you more insight, just more understanding of the grief.

There’s a need here, I believe, to act. We’re acting.

I appreciate the comments of the Leader of the Third Party about issues of regulation. I think this is the right path in this case, for a couple of reasons. You want to give, in circumstances where the law is an evolving thing, the ability to take steps and to deal with laws that can change at the federal level, especially when you’re dealing with the federal Criminal Code.

Secondly, you want to do a full review to make sure you’re capturing everything that needs to be captured. That’s the reason why that’s done. We’ll have an opportunity to debate that.

It’s my general view…. This is something that the member will know and share. It is reflected in a bill that was mentioned earlier, Bill 36, which was longer because we tried to do less in regulation and more in the bill. I thought that was important, and I believe it’s part of my expression, as a minister, of how you bring change through legislation. You want, in my view, as much as possible, often, to have things in the bill in the House.

I do think, in this case, this is the right path to take. We’ll have an opportunity to discuss what that is. There’s, of course, a number of categories. There’s the prescribed offence and the category of dangerous offenders, where people are not allowed to change their names here in this legislation.

The prescribed offences focus on the offences themselves. They’ll include offences that cause serious harm to others. We think of homicide. We think of aggravated sexual assault or sexual offences, really, of any kind in­volving children, I think, and other such offences which cause serious harm to people.

Those are the categories in the bill. I think they’re the right categories. I think we can move quickly both to bring the bill into force and to ensure that we’re responding as a Legislature to all those who advocate on these issues. There is always a discussion about who’s involved. Is it the government? Is it the opposition? Is it the Third Party? Who is initiating these processes?

I think there have been people who have been advocates for those who’ve suffered loss in crime. There have been advocates for that who have been notable in B.C. for a long time. I think that we have to pay tribute to them. They’ve raised these issues.

A series of actions have been taken, both for support for victims of crime and responses in legislation that see the impact that, especially, violent crime can have on people. It never ends. It doesn’t matter if the crime was committed in 1985 or 2008 or whenever it occurs.

[2:00 p.m.]

I can tell you the grief doesn’t end. That means we have to be conscious of that and conscious of taking action to ensure that the community is protected to the maximum possible degree.

I think this legislation makes a small contribution to that. I appreciate the comments of the opposition members, of two opposition leaders, in this debate, and I look forward to answering questions at committee stage.

With that, I move second reading.

Motion approved.

Hon. A. Dix: I move that the bill be committed to Committee of the Whole House to be considered at the next sitting of the House after today.

Bill 26, Name Amendment Act (No. 2), 2024, read a second time and referred to a Committee of the Whole House for consideration at the next sitting of the House after today.

Hon. R. Kahlon: I call, in this main chamber, second reading of Bill 27, Municipalities Enabling and Validating Amendment Act.

BILL 27 — MUNICIPALITIES ENABLING
AND VALIDATING (No. 5)
AMENDMENT ACT, 2024

Hon. R. Kahlon: It’s my pleasure to speak to second reading of Bill 27. I move that the bill be now read a second time.

I’m here today to talk about the proposed amendments to the Municipalities Enabling and Validating Amendment Act that deliver on our government’s commitment to improve housing stability and health and safety for vulnerable residents in the Vancouver Downtown Eastside.

Historically, SROs have provided affordable rental homes to members of the Downtown Eastside community by providing rents geared to income or at income assistance shelter rates. However, some bad actors are raising rental rates to as high as $2,000 per month, making them out of reach to many in the community. This results in homelessness for many who can no longer afford to live in these buildings.

At the request of the city of Vancouver, the proposed MEVA amendments would validate the single-room-occupancy vacancy control bylaws, thereby bringing them back into force. Vacancy control for SRO buildings will maintain them as affordable housing stock while the prov­ince continues to revitalize and replace SROs as part of our Downtown Eastside housing strategy.

Since summer 2022, the province has been working with the city of Vancouver, Indigenous and other community partners to develop and implement a coordinated, comprehensive response plan to support people experiencing homelessness in the Downtown Eastside. We have intensified our efforts to develop new shelter rate and supportive housing options in the community. This has included renovation work to maximize occupancy within existing assets, as well as opening 662 units of new housing in the Downtown Eastside since August 2022, and we’re expecting another 588 net new units to open by winter 2025.

I would also like to add that we have been working with housing advocates in the Downtown Eastside to ensure that people not only have housing but also have access to supports — working with organizations like the SRO Collaborative to ensure that they are able to support residents that are living in SROs in the Downtown Eastside.

All of this is important. It’s a very important community here in British Columbia. Therefore, this amendment is one of the many actions our government is taking to protect housing stability and ensure health and safety for some of the most vulnerable residents within the Vancouver Downtown Eastside.

K. Kirkpatrick: Thank you to the minister.

Today we’re talking about a piece of legislation brought forward by government which is meant to validate the city of Vancouver’s bylaws, which enable them to impose vacancy control on 3,600 — specifically 3,600 — single-room-occupancy units in the city of Vancouver.

Now, I will mirror, parrot a few of the comments from previous speakers on the previous bill. It’s that despite promising otherwise, this government has introduced two significant pieces of legislation in the dying days of the sitting of the House, with only a few months left to go before an election.

[2:05 p.m.]

It strikes me that this is just not a democratic way of actually giving the public and giving legislators the opportunity to truly be able to digest, ask questions and understand what kind of legislation we are passing in this House on behalf of British Columbians. This follows a troubling pattern of ramming through legislation in the final days of sessions, and it really does avoid proper scrutiny.

This is my fourth year here. It’s going to be my last, as I’ve decided not to run again. But I will tell you that there have been…. I have found it troubling the way that legislation is passed in this House. This does, with respect to this bill, because it is included in those concerns.

I had the opportunity recently, with the Speaker, to meet with some members of the Scottish Parliament. The Speaker, of course, was there as well.

One of the questions that I asked — because I was troubled, as there had been a lot of things going through quickly here: how long does it generally take to have a piece of legislation go through the Scottish Parliament? Their parliamentary system is very similar, of course. Ours is based on the Westminster model.

The woman who was equivalent to the Speaker of the House said to me: “Well, it’s minimum three months. Sometimes it’s at least a year, between when the time something is introduced to the time it actually gets passed.” They are, in essence, all exposure draft bills, so the public actually has an opportunity to take a look at them.

When I said to this woman, “Well, you know, last week, we introduced something on a Monday, and it came into practice, in force, on Friday,” they were dumbfounded. I think that’s problematic with our system here.

I do think that this government has consistently taken advantage of the fact that that scrutiny is not baked into our system here and taken advantage of a significant majority, where on many of the bills — and I presume this bill as well — MLAs, members on the government side of the House, don’t even stand up to speak to them because they don’t have to. They don’t have to justify them. They can just push them through.

Here we have another bill which, on the surface, might seem fairly straightforward, but there are some fundamental concerns. It does raise issues that, some time in the future, might actually be bigger than what this piece of legislation is. Having the opportunity to talk about those things and ask about those things is important, but we’ve been told already today that we have to limit the amount of time that we’re going to have to speak to this bill. So yeah, this does undermine our democratic process.

What does this bill do, and why do British Columbians want to know about this? It effectively enacts vacancy control measures. This limits rent increases not only during the tenure of a single tenant but also between tenancies. By validating these bylaws, the government invalidates the need for…. What the city had done is to go to court in order to be able to allow them to implement these vacancy controls. They were told that they couldn’t. The court said: “No, that’s not going to work.” That’s why government is coming in with this legislation, to allow that to happen.

I want to talk a little bit…. We’re going to talk a bit about vacancy controls here, but I want to take this opportunity to talk about SROs. I’ve brought this up with the minister in estimates, and we’ve had some conversations about SROs.

SROs are really the housing of last resort for people who are about to face homelessness, who are on the verge of facing homelessness. They should be one of the most important options for housing that we can offer, and they should have true and real support so people can live there in dignity.

I have, in the past four years and prior to that with some of the work I did before, gone through a lot of these SROs in the Downtown Eastside and other places. Buildings are bug-infested, have rodent infestations, bad plumbing, bathrooms that don’t work, windowless rooms and are just generally undesirable — and, I’d say, aberrant living conditions.

[2:10 p.m.]

There’s a lot of research that’s been done about people’s surroundings and what impact that has on them emotionally, physically, on their health. If we allow and create a system where people who are vulnerable have to live in such horrible, horrific surroundings, how are they ever going to feel good about themselves? Because you look around that room and you say, “Is this what I deserve? Is this all that I deserve as a person, as a human?”

That is the message that we are giving to people — and it is the message that we’re giving to people — that we don’t care about you enough to make sure that you’ve got plumbing that works. We don’t care about you enough to make sure you’ve got heating in the winter, that you don’t have rodents running through your room, that you don’t have bed bugs.

There are SROs where people have had their windows missing through the wintertime. And then what happens is that people bring propane tanks in. They’re trying to fix the windows themselves because they’re not getting any support, and people die because of this, because we’re putting them at risk.

Although this is addressing an issue within SROs, there’s a systemic issue here. We’re addressing an issue so that we can keep people housed in places that they should never be housed in. And if you wonder why there are many people in encampments who don’t want to go into SROs, it is because they are often more dangerous — particularly for women — than somebody living in a tent with a group of people who have become their community.

Until we can actually create housing that will lift people up, will provide services and supports that the most vulnerable need, then I’m hoping that we’re not going to continue to have conversations and patchwork legislation dealing with SROs, because we shouldn’t have them. And there better be a plan. There’s been promises by government that there’s going to be a plan. We’ve got to do better.

The minister says many, many times…. The minister knows I hold him in high regard, but I have a very difficult time taking the word that there are adequate supports in SROs for people. You can’t say that when you’ve got somebody who is vulnerable, when you’ve got somebody in active addiction, that the supports, the overnight supports, you’ve got somebody, a security guard….

Interjection.

K. Kirkpatrick: That is another issue with our conversation. The minister has just said I’m talking about suppor­tive housing and not SROs. There are only slight differences at some points, in terms of what those two things are. But maybe we do need to look at that. If there are SROs, we do need to have those supports in place.

I heard the minister just moments ago, when he was talking about this legislation, talking about all of the supports that have been provided in downtown for people who are living in SROs. Well, if they are there, there are not enough of them, because we’re seeing that this…. It’s a very, very difficult thing to see.

Most people in British Columbia have not had that opportunity to visit an SRO or to visit supportive housing, which I will also say is, if I can say the term, godawful for most of the places I’ve looked at in terms of that same thing about making people feel good about themselves and worthy and supported.

You can say, “Well, it was these guys that did it.” You know, it’s today that we’re dealing with, and we’re dealing with a housing crisis and vulnerable people. This is worse than it’s ever been. We have to deal with what’s happening today, not what happened 16 years ago — what’s hap­pening today, and how are we going to resolve it and make it better.

Okay. We are talking…. With this legislation, as well, I’m very mindful we are talking about the city’s poorest and most vulnerable people. Many of these buildings are over 100 years old, tiny 100-square-foot rooms, shared bathrooms, shared kitchens and frequent deaths within these SROs.

[2:15 p.m.]

There is research that shows us that poor-quality housing is associated with stress, anxiety, depression and emotional and behavioural problems. And if you’ve got young people…. I mean, academic performance, their ability to go to school…. Even harsh lighting, sounds and those kinds of things can lead to anxiety.

You’ve got a lot of vulnerable people in SROs that already have PTSD. They’ve gone through very traumatic events in their life, or their lives themselves have been very traumatic, so the condition of these SROs actually can contribute to being re-traumatized, to anxiety, to agitation. There’s a whole number of things that…. When we talk about SROs, we have to really think of the big picture in terms of: what are we doing with SROs as part of our system?

I mentioned to the minister in estimates a concern that’s been raised with me, and I hadn’t been mindful of it. It’s that, when you have people who are so vulnerable…. And, often, mental health issues, addiction issues, lack of access to computers, sometimes an inability to fill out an application…. They are really at a disadvantage when they go to the residential tenancy branch. The inability for residents in SROs to actually have advocacy groups that can help them with the residential tenancy branch, I think, is something that should be looked at.

I know there’s a number of supportive housing providers who have actually asked for SROs, supportive housing, to be removed from the RTA. I know there are strong feelings on both sides of that argument. But the way the system is right now, residents in SROs are very vulnerable to what we’re talking about here, which is evictions and raised rents. It’s very difficult for them to actually come and deal with the RTA.

Let’s talk about what vacancy control is. I just want to be really mindful again. I know that we’re dealing with vulnerable people here, and this is a specific situation that is going to deal with, I believe, 3,600 very specific units. Vacancy control is a concern in terms of whether this is a slippery slope or not. I will say that we agree that this is something that’s important, what we’re talking about in this bill today. But we have to be mindful this isn’t the first of government coming in and allowing vacancy control in a number of different kinds of buildings and a number of different kinds of communities.

I know my colleague the Leader of the Third Party and I agree on many things. I suspect we disagree on this one issue. But vacancy controls and the ability not to raise rents between tenancies…. There’s a lot of research out there that shows that it’s actually bad for the housing market. It has….

Especially people with secondary suites will remove their rental suites. Particularly when you’re in a time of high inflation where costs for those building owners and the secondary landlords are also increasing, it can be very challenging. So we really have to look at that as not being a solution to the housing crisis and be very mindful that this is focused very, very specifically, in a unique situation, in the city of Vancouver in SROs that are downtown.

The core issue here is the unaffordability and the lack of housing supply across the spectrum of housing. The NDP, as we know, has only opened 16 percent of the 114,000 units that they promised in the 2017 provincial election. I don’t even hear them speak about those units anymore. I think that’s fallen off the back burner, and now it’s being replaced with a bunch of bright, glossy other housing programs.

Again, a concern that vacancy control would further deter the creation of affordable housing units…. Studies have shown that it could actually leave to the cancellation of tens of thousands of proposed housing projects, which would damage affordability. I do know…. I’ve spoken to developers who actually had their financial backer pull out of a project, even with the rent controls. So we just have to be mindful when we start to manipulate the market, and I don’t think government has been.

[2:20 p.m.]

This government has been particularly good at looking at the bigger picture in terms of, “If you do this, five other things are going to be impacted.” We have seen that with Bill 44.

Some of the challenges that municipalities are having right now is that the intent of the legislation was good, but the way that it was implemented and how municipalities are struggling with this right now…. It’s a piece of legislation that wasn’t well-researched enough to realize that it could actually have impacts that would be worse than the problem that was trying to be resolved.

We need to be very mindful of that and also remember that the NDP’s own task force agreed that vacancy control was not going to be an effective way to help this housing crisis and focus on affordability for renters. It is time for the NDP to provide real solutions to rising unaffordability, prioritize an increase in supply, help it to be less expensive and faster to actually get housing to the market.

Eighteen months ago we heard our Premier make bold promises to clean up the Downtown Eastside when there was the displacement of those who were living in the Downtown Eastside, the tent cities. The Premier said he was going to appoint a czar — I think that was the reference — for the area and was going to phase out SROs. Here we are 18 months later, and we haven’t seen those SROs phased out. I haven’t seen a lot of work done at all in order to be able to strategize how we’re going to be able to do that. So unsurprisingly, none of these promises have been fulfilled.

Today there remains chaos and disorder on the streets. It’s worse than ever, and it is exacerbated by seven years under this NDP government’s leadership. There is certainly a point for greater provincial interventions in these SROs and a need for investment to convert this stock to safe and secure housing.

The Balmoral and the Regent, I think, are good ex­amples. They were expropriated by the city in concert with the province. We are four years later, and they are both shuttered and empty. If we really are going to be focusing on how we make things better, starting something and then being held up by the province and having these two buildings shuttered and empty four years after the announcement that this was going to be done is just another example of the failure on this provincial government.

Now, while this legislation applies to limited vacancy control, it is ultimately a half-measure, and we do have to fix all of these other issues that we’ve got. The Premier needs to answer for his broken promises and provide British Columbians with a firm date for the phase out of SROs and for the solution for that kind of supported phase of housing that people need. It’s not an option between an SRO or homelessness. We’ve got to be able to do better for people.

B.C. Housing. There have been so many issues in the last four years, just since I’ve been here, that are really unfortunate. Dealing with SROs, and even a lot of the supportive housing, really does feel like it’s warehousing people because we’re not sure what to do with them. That is not a strategy. Warehousing people is not a strategy.

The personal accounts from tenants and the tragic outcomes witnessed are a stark reminder of this government’s inability to provide effective leadership in housing. Placing people in unsafe conditions without proper supports, lacking accountability and transparency is simply unacceptable.

I was speaking to a friend who is a housing provider in the Downtown Eastside just recently, and she was telling me about how unsafe women are. Women have always been more vulnerable than men in the Downtown Eastside — or anywhere, really. But the assaults against women, the assaults in the SROs, the assaults in the supportive housing, she said, are just devastating. That has been increasing, and women have never been less safe in that surrounding. That just is another example of how SROs and our current model for supportive housing is just failing people. It does really trouble me.

[2:25 p.m.]

As we debate the bill, we do have to consider its implications on our most vulnerable in the housing market. We know that one of the challenges that’s happening right now is that the owners of the SROs are increasing the rents between vacancies to a point that is in excess of the welfare rates that recipients actually have available to them. So it is actually opening a door to homelessness, with the inability for people to be able to pay rent in these SROs.

B.C. United is committed to genuine reforms to ensure safety, support and sustainability in housing. We will scrutinize this bill carefully to make sure that…. Although many things on the surface look like they’re one thing, once you start to ask questions, and you have the opportunity to dive a bit deeper…. We want to make sure that this legislation is what’s in the best interest of the city of Vancouver, of the residents that it’s going to impact and of all British Columbians, moving forward.

I thank you, Madam Chair, for the opportunity to speak.

Deputy Speaker: I’m going to recognize the member for Vancouver-Kensington, as I see her guests leaving.

M. Elmore: Yeah, I seek leave to make an introduction.

Leave granted.

Introductions by Members

M. Elmore: I’ve got members from John Oliver Secon­dary School here, from the music program. They were here. The concert band, the choir and the jazz band gave a performance on the front steps. Really awesome.

I want to recognize their music teacher, C.J. Kumar; Justin Lau, their teacher candidate; Ethan Tong; Debbie Klassen; vision teacher Judy Sandhu; Soreya Utokaparch; and Michelle McNaughton. They’re going to be performing here in Victoria at Hillcrest Elementary School and also UVic.

I ask everyone to please give them a warm welcome.

Debate Continued

S. Furstenau: I’m standing up to speak to the bill that we are debating right now, the Municipalities Enabling and Validating (No. 5) Amendment Act, 2024. This act has been opened quite a few times.

Deputy Speaker: I’m wondering if I could ask you to adjourn debate so that the committee can report out.

S. Furstenau: I will move to adjourn debate and reserve my right to carry on.

S. Furstenau moved adjournment of debate.

Motion approved.

Committee of Supply (Section C), having reported resolution, was granted leave to sit again.

Hon. R. Kahlon: In the main chamber, we call Bill 27, Municipalities Enabling and Validating Amendment Act.

Second Reading of Bills

BILL 27 — MUNICIPALITIES ENABLING
AND VALIDATING (No. 5)
AMENDMENT ACT, 2024

(continued)

S. Furstenau: I am so delighted to stand up again to speak to this bill. We’re debating a bill that was introduced yesterday, the Municipalities Enabling and Validating (No. 5) Amendment Act, which really is a bill that is designed to validate the city of Vancouver’s bylaws to protect the residents of 3,600 units in SROs, in Vancouver — to apply a form of vacancy control so that the amount of rent being charged is not increasing significantly between residents.

[2:30 p.m.]

I appreciate the member for West Vancouver–Capi­lano’s comments, and I think it’s really important to start with the context of the role that single-room occupancy housing has played, particularly in Vancouver, for a very long time.

I think when we trace back the history of this province, the need for these single-room-occupancy housing units connects in a large way to the history of this province as a kind of resource extraction company town — that people have had to live in different places for temporary times while they get work in whatever company town they are working in.

The expectation that people wouldn’t be permanently living there was because…. The expectation was that the companies would come in, following the boom-and-bust model of economics that has so dominated this province. They would come in, they would do their extracting, take their wealth and they would go. Then the people that were doing the work for them would also go.

SROs in Vancouver have now become associated with the images of deep poverty and despair of the Downtown Eastside and described as, I’ve heard a couple times today, housing of last resort for very low-income residents.

Let’s be clear. When we talk about very low-income residents, we’re generally talking about people who are existing on social support of some kind or another, including disability supports. We’ve talked at length in this chamber about the absolute inadequate supports that exist for people with disabilities — that in this province and in this country, people with disabilities are highly likely to be living in poverty, to not having their basic needs met. Privately run SROs have recently become increasingly unaffordable to those on income assistance.

[S. Chandra Herbert in the chair.]

I think there’s also some context to be considering here. The owners of these SROs would know that if they hike the rent up beyond what is even imaginable for people who are on very limited and very low incomes, people aren’t going to come and live in these SROs. They’ll be empty.

This is part of the problem that we’re facing, that there’s a drive to move people out of housing so that housing can be removed itself and turned into much more expensive forms of housing. We have seen this growing, slow-moving emergency that is resulting in the absolute tragedy of homelessness in this province.

This legislation has been introduced in order to en­sure that where people are living now in these places, these housing units of last resort, that at the very least, their rent can’t be raised so much that they can no longer afford to live there.

But the issue isn’t limited to the Downtown Eastside. We are seeing people being forced out of housing over and over again everywhere in this province.

Advocates and experts have been clear, and increasingly loud, that unless this government builds and saves housing that low-income people can truly afford and that is housing that provides dignity…. To do this, implementing provincewide vacancy control is an important step. Be­cause if we don’t, we will continue to see the pattern that we’re seeing right now, which is a growing number of people slipping into homelessness.

People following the news conferences and photo op­portunities in the province could be forgiven for thinking that there are thousands of new units being opened every month. I noted the minister’s comments; he said there are 662 new and 588 net new by 2025.

[2:35 p.m.]

“Net new” is a little worrying signal to me because that means there may be a huge number of new units, but how many have we lost in the meantime? I’ll get to that.

This government tends to announce the same affordable homes several times over at different media events, but it’s far less common to hold a press conference to announce how many affordable homes have been lost. Between 2016 and 2021, B.C. lost nearly 100,000 rental units that were priced below $1,000 a month — 100,000 in five years. For every new affordable rental home built in B.C., four are lost to investors, conversions, demolition and rent increases.

Metro Vancouver’s housing data book for December 2023 provides a snapshot of current housing stock, construction and housing needs. It shows some distressing signs for the future of affordable housing in Metro Vancouver. Homelessness is up 33 percent since 2020 and 122 percent since 2005, even as more supportive housing is being built.

B.C. Housing’s wait-list grew 27 percent since 2022 in the region, in Vancouver. The number of local households on the wait-list for social housing has grown by 74 percent in Coquitlam. Rent has more than doubled since 2002, including a 30 percent jump in median rental rates in the last five years. The city of Vancouver can’t afford to lose any more affordable housing units. I would argue that nowhere in B.C. can afford to lose any more affordable housing units. They do need to do more to protect existing stock.

One such example is temporary modular housing. There are 144 units of nice modular homes that are boarded up and over 700 temporary modular housing units whose leases will expire in coming years. People across the city are at risk of being homeless if permanent sites aren’t found. What is the province doing to protect this valuable housing stock and ensure that more residents are not forced into homelessness?

The minister has stated that his ministry is working to fix up SRO units that are not adequate and to upgrade or tear down and rebuild SRO stock. The tri-level SRO revitalization strategy aims to address this, yet it’s not clear if the three levels of government will actually provide the funds necessary to do this work, if the resulting housing will be affordable to low-income Downtown Eastside residents and where those displaced from SROs will go while projects are under construction.

Protecting SROs is important, yes, but the province could do much more to protect other vulnerable members of our communities. The province could take measures to lower rents, reduce the number of renovictions and free up affordable housing across the province by bringing in provincewide vacancy control. The province could also look to expanding projects like we have in Duncan, the Village site, built working with the community that will be housed.

The consequences of housing unaffordability and homelessness are dire. People who are unhoused have about half the life expectancy of people who are housed. I think we have to ask ourselves: is that the outcome this province wants for people who are unhoused?

Poverty is the biggest cause of homelessness and could be significantly reduced if social assistance rates were in­creased and vacancy control was implemented. Average rents for vacant bachelor apartments in Vancouver are over $2,000 a month, yet social assistance and disability rates for a single person provide only $500 a month for shelter.

About 30 percent of seniors in B.C. are on the guaranteed income supplement. That means they have an income below $26,000 a year, with no way to increase their income. For seniors who’ve been living for decades in the same apartment, an eviction is devastating, because the new market rates and competition to find a new place make it almost impossible to find affordable housing. As a result, more and more seniors are living in vehicles and tents.

[2:40 p.m.]

Just yesterday tenant advocates once again called for the province to take steps to address the rising number of no-fault evictions as an elderly couple in their sixties with health issues faces eviction from their Surrey apartment.

Data from UBC’s housing research unit shows that B.C. had the highest rate of no-fault evictions in the country, at 85.4 percent between 2016 and 2021, the highest rate of no-fault evictions in the country. The national average was 64.7 percent.

Landlords’ own use of the property was the second most common reason given in the report for evictions, at 23.5 percent. “These kinds of evictions are what’s driving the eviction crisis,” stated residential tenancy branch legal advocate Robert Patterson.

More than a third of B.C. residents rent, and over half of Vancouver’s population rents. Without vacancy control, we risk losing up to 6,000 affordable housing units in Vancouver every year. According to a 2021 city of Vancouver report, vacancy controls had no discernible impacts in Vancouver on disinvestment and deterioration of the rental stock.

When asked about vacancy control in question period earlier this session, the Minister of Housing stated: “We exactly are listening to the experts. What the experts have told us is when you’re in an environment where you have a limited housing supply and you’re seeing an increase in population coming to your community, putting a vacancy control by unit into place will limit the new supply coming into the market.”

The B.C. General Employees Union released a report recently stating that vacancy control is an effective tool for addressing the extreme housing unaffordability crisis that B.C. renters face. The report examined vacancy control policies in B.C., Ontario, Manitoba and P.E.I. from the 1970s onward and found no evidence that tying rents to units had significant negative impacts on new rental housing supply.

A recent poll by the B.C. General Employees Union found that half of renters and homeowners are spending more than 30 percent of their income on shelter. This number is up 11 percent from 2022, a rising tide that’s stratifying communities by wealth. Twenty-seven percent of renters say they were forced to move out of their areas in the past five years because they could not afford to stay, and only 17 percent of renters say they could afford rent for a comparable home in their community if they had to end their current tenancy today.

In response, BCGEU reiterated their call for province­wide vacancy control. The recent BCGEU poll found that 61 percent of people in British Columbia support the policy of vacancy control. The minister continues to point to the B.C. housing task force as a reason not to implement provincewide vacancy control, yet the task force has not studied the issue since its 2018 report — a time, I think we can all agree, that was a very different time than the one we are in today.

The average asking price for a vacant greater Victoria rental was $39 more than that of an occupied unit in 2014. By 2020, that gap had grown to $356, almost a tenfold increase. It’s clear that government’s current approach of addressing the housing crisis by building more rental housing is not enough. The price of rent continues to soar in Victoria and Vancouver, despite record amounts of new rentals.

I applaud the minister’s efforts to protect some residents in SROs in Vancouver from renovictions and unfair rent increases. That’s a step in the right direction, and ultimately an admission that vacancy control works and has a role to play. The government could do the right thing to protect all vulnerable communities across British Columbia. They could implement provincewide vacancy control.

D. Ashton: It gives me great pleasure to stand up to speak to Bill 27, a bill that none of us was anticipating would come in this quickly.

[2:45 p.m.]

One part of me says that I understand why it’s come forward and why it’s been put to members of the House at this point in time, but the other part of me says that this seems to be a rather expedient way to get this in, especially with the short number of days that are left in the session. I would have thought that the city of Vancouver threw out what you’re asking, and the province would have taken a look at this and tried to get this in a little bit earlier for us to really take a hard look at this.

One of the issues previous, from my two peers that have been talking before me about this, is what not only the tenants are facing; but also, I want to touch a little bit on the landlords. Please, these are my thoughts at this point in time.

I want to give you an analogy, where I’m renting here in Victoria, about the individual that owns the property. The government has specific terms of increases that are allowed. I just look at the costs that he is continually facing, with taxes going up, with all the utility costs going up, with issues around the stratas and what government is requiring now for stratas to do, what his costs are in a particular building for general upkeep and everything else and the challenges that are being faced by owners.

We all have to realize that if people are not making a living by having these rentals, they themselves are going to start to question it. We want these people to be…. They don’t need to be successful, but they need to be able to cover their costs, which seem to be continually rising every which way they turn. I can only think of some of the issues that they face.

As a kid growing up, single room occupancies…. I worked in Calgary when I was a lot younger and left school. It was a boarding house, and that was the name that I grew up with. I’m assuming that that’s one of the things that falls underneath this. Costs these days are going through the roof. I really think that we have to be a bit careful in this.

Again, these are my opinions, but I grew up in a family where my dad had a thundering velvet hand. You paid attention. He gave you the opportunity of a direction, with some rules and some boundaries put into it. I think, personally, that when we start dabbling into controls, and controls over what a person can charge for an entity that is providing a roof over somebody’s head, we still have to think far enough into the future that there has to be some form of cost recovery.

If the owners of these particular units are not able to recover their expenses, the days will be limited, going into the future, as the previous speaker has said, where there will be changes coming forward, where there will be changes to the location. Something else will be built, or it will be locked up.

I really think that there is an opportunity for where we could get together. I say “we.” We’re part of the Legislature, the governing part of British Columbia. But the government, specifically, instead of coming in with what I think is a little bit more of a heavy-handed approach to ensure that costs to the tenants are going to be held within a fair and equitable part for them…. We also have to think about what is going to be transpiring with the owners.

I mean, there is not only this legislation that’s being brought in with only 2½ days left, but there’s another piece.

[2:50 p.m.]

I really think this requires some deliberate and investigative debate on how we can help to ensure that those who are challenged are going to continue to have not only a roof over their head but also an opportunity to have a place that they call home and to ensure that we work collectively to do everything possible to ensure that these individuals have a place that is safe, have a place that is comfortable, have a place that will give them an opportunity of time and also to ensure that the owners of the property are compensated in some form of fair and equitable way.

I really have a bit of trouble with how this legislation has come forward. It just seems to be whether or not we are able to give this the proper scrutiny and the rigorous debate that should be encouraged for any bill that comes through here. I know that things are progressing and getting tighter and tighter here before…. I mean, an opportunity, maybe, is that the government has to take a look at some of these important bills that they’ve brought forward, and we actually take a look at extending the session. I’m not talking about evenings. I’m talking about stepping forward and going back to the time frames that existed before, where we were here to ensure, at those points in time, that everything got done.

I’m not really sure how effective these control measures are going to be. They really are going to be between the tenants and the owners of the building. There’s a validation, as we all know, that is going to have to take place. It’s my understanding that at some point in time there was a strike-down by the courts of Vancouver’s bylaws, and now Vancouver has tentatively come to the government. By changing the legislation on this, it would make that opportunity more effective in Vancouver.

This problem I don’t think just exists in Vancouver. I think this is a challenge, especially as we turn the corner on the economy. Let’s mark my words. We’re all seeing it. It’s actually happening. It’s been a long run for a lot of people in a strong economy, with governments printing money and everything else, but they’re running out of options these days.

There are going to be challenges, probably more and more coming forward, that are going to have to have some real deliberation and some real thoughts put in process, because those challenges are going to affect everybody in this province.

I really think that vacancy control, in my opinion, is a real short-term fix that is going to affect the overall rental market. There is a lack of supply. We know that. I’ve heard in discussion in this wonderful chamber about the number of people that are coming to British Columbia.

We know that housing costs are incredibly expensive these days, to build rooms not only for personal residences but for apartments, condominiums, townhouses. Whether we’re building facilities for those that are living on a fixed income that we can hopefully get them into…. The costs of construction these days are exorbitant. But also, as we know, government has done their best to try to facilitate with municipalities to ensure that the rules and the regulations that they have can be adopted to be put in place to facilitate the quicker expansion of residences.

But there’s still a cost. There’s still a cost to the municipalities, and there’s a cost to the owners-developers of these particular properties. In my opinion, coming from retail, this is one of the things that you want to do. If you can control the costs — get the costs down — hopefully…. When I say this, it’s kind of like the Wal-Mart situation, where you have the mass to go forward, the super number of stores, the ability to dictate to your suppliers costing on that. We have an opportunity ourselves to take a look at this with municipalities and help them along and try to get more and more construction.

I take a look at some of the rules and regulations that the current government has brought into place. I’m fortunate. Yes, I own my own home. Yes, it’s on the lot. Yes, it’s in an area where there’s sewer — questionable whether other utilities are on it. But according to the government now, I could put four accommodation units on that particular property.

[2:55 p.m.]

Well, this doesn’t fit into the neighbourhood, not in the sense of people accepting it. It’s difficult with the transportation routes. It’s difficult with the utilities that are there, whether it’s electrical, water and/or sewer. Also, it’s the transportation issues for those that maybe don’t have a car.

When I look at the vacancy controls that are trying to be brought in, I really think there is a flag on the field for how this is being brought forward at this time of the legislative session. I have to question, also, why it was being brought forward. I do have a note here that vacancy control was also rejected by the current government’s rental housing task force. Now they have another party that is asking for it, and now it’s before the House.

I say this. I know that there are the best intentions of all in this incredible place, the Legislature and the place where we work, to try and do things that are different, to try and move forward, to try and make changes, but I really think some of these things need a lot more thought than what’s going into it.

Yes, I only see the side of it when the legislation comes forward to us. But for those that have put this legislation together, for those that have requested this legislation be put forward on it, I think we need some real secondary thought on this and to really think this through. Is this the right direction, or is this a band-aid on something that needs a heck of a lot more than just a band-aid?

I would really like to see, when government asks the people to believe them that we are going to do this, that you step forward. The proof is in the pudding. I’ve been around here for 11 years and had the experience of being on both sides of the House. I always want to see that we, as elected officials, when we say we’re going to do something, we do something.

I understand and I’m prepared to accept that there are challenges that have been brought forward, but if we say that we’re going to build X amount of housing in British Columbia or we’re going to work with others to build the housing, then we actually accomplish that.

When we do facilitate the expansion of housing units, we want to put it in the appropriate areas. We want to look after the people that are in there to the best of our ability. We want to provide them with easy access whether they have a vehicle or not. We want to make sure that transit routes are available. But when these things don’t happen, then we find ourselves being stuck back into some very quick and, maybe, not so thought-through situations.

Again, I come from a family that had business through­out the southern part of British Columbia. I have had the opportunity to be part of a business that was in the Lower Mainland, in retail. I know from my experiences of seeing the challenges that face residential tenancies in the Lower Mainland…. It’s like our home. We only have so much room to work with. We have to densify. Densification brings in a whole bunch of other issues. But we have to really think this through: how we’re trying to make these changes and why we’re trying to make these changes.

Unfortunately, when there are issues that arrive on the government’s lap through unfortunate circumstances and/or, I’m going to say, mismanagement on it, we have to address that collectively. Not only government, but we here in this Legislature have to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

Those that are responsible for that have to be held ac­countable. It’s not just government that has to be held accountable. It’s the people down below that are not exercising the proper autonomy on what they’ve been asked to do by government — well, they need to be held accountable. I really think there have been some real failures in regards to the operation of some of the buildings that we are discussing here today. I don’t want to see anybody stuck in an unsafe situation.

[3:00 p.m.]

I don’t want to see anybody stuck where there is a lack of supports or accountability or transparency on how business is being conducted to actually house people, and have them have the ability to get out of a situation that probably isn’t safe and get them into a place where they have a bed and have the ability for food preparation, a kitchen, and have a proper washroom and have the security in it.

We need to ensure that that is transpiring, and I don’t think that’s happening here. I think there’s a real push in here to say: “Okay. Well, this is what we need here. We need to hold these costs down here.” But again, it relates back to: if this isn’t going to happen and be accountable on both sides, there are going to be changes and, unfortunately, the people that own some of these entities are going to have to take a look at being brought some changes forward.

Again, there are situations that have incurred over the last couple of years where entities have been bought by government and/or entities outside, and being now managed by those and/or overlooked at by the government, that are probably not appropriate for people to actually be living in. They may be a hotel room with an entity of a washroom but no place to cook their meals, all things that have to be considered.

I just want to see that we, collectively in this House, ensure that when we make these decisions, we make these decisions that are the best for the people that we’re trying to look after. That’s what we have to do. Whether or not that’s happening on a continual basis…. I’m going to say it hasn’t happened.

Some people say it’s a stopgap solution. Really, we need more comprehensive and effective housing reform. I think we all know that. But how do we get that? Well, to be frank, I don’t think we get that at 2½ days before the session ends. We can do this properly, to take a look at what is actually being proposed by an entity — i.e., Vancouver — that has lost their chance, it appears to me, in a court, and now is all of a sudden turning to another entity to start changing rules and regulations provincially that will allow them to do the enforcement.

The vulnerable populations in this province — there isn’t anyone here that wants to not see them be able to get ahead in their lives, to be able to change their lives, to be able to make a difference not only to themselves but to their families and to ensure that as they are there, maybe as a single mom or a single dad or a family as we know it, but challenged by the costs on a continual basis…. We need somehow to be able to support them to ensure that safety, to show that there is some sustainability for them, some form of a future where they can look ahead, not a temporary fix.

As we know, some of the root problems in this province, especially in the Lower Mainland and some of our bigger cities, municipalities — I’ll speak to one that I represent, Penticton — is to ensure that we have housing for these individuals. Because it does make a difference on a continual basis. It makes a difference where that safety is there. It keeps them off the street. It keeps them from getting into mischief, in a lot of ways.

I really think that we should maybe sit back on this a little tiny bit, try and work with the city of Vancouver, try and work with other municipalities that I’m sure are going to be faced with the same issues, or hearing about the same issues, from those that are providing accommodation in the respective municipalities and/or townships in this province. But to just come in….

As I said, I don’t think this is a thundering-velvet-hand bill. I think this is a bill that is probably going to have some repercussions in the future that we haven’t had the opportunity to think through. And I would just ask that the Minister of Housing today — that he maybe think this one through a little bit more than just to have to bring this one in.

I’m only hearing one side of the story at this point in time, but as we know, we’ve all heard accounts by some of the tenants. We’ve seen some of the issues that have occurred and some of the tragic outcomes.

[3:05 p.m.]

I can’t help but think back to just recently, in my mind, that terrible fire from a short-term-residency occupation in Vancouver — I think it was on Hastings; I can’t remember — in the downtown core, by the waterfront. I think there were two lives lost in it. Those people needed the opportunity to be able to live somewhere, but they needed to be able to live somewhere where they were looked after properly and the building was kept in proper maintenance and order.

Again, it’s a cause and effect. By capping everything, landlords unfortunately sometimes choose to start cutting back. Sometimes they can’t afford not to be able to cut back.

We need to ensure that these people are looked after. I don’t want to see this problem get worse. I think we’re on a bit of a slippery slope here that it is going to get worse by bringing in this bill and allowing the city of Vancouver to address something that they couldn’t address through a court challenge. They’ve asked the province to address it through a bill.

It’s going to revert back. There are going to be issues caused by it, and there are going to be consequences. I’ve always said that choices have consequences. We are going to be making a choice in this House today or tomorrow or the next day at the latest. There may be consequences, and consequences that we have not thought through.

Mr. Chair, I want to thank you for the opportunity. Again, I want to thank everybody in this House for having a hard look at this. But let’s not rush into this. Let’s make sure we look at this properly, we examine this totally, and we are sure we are heading in the right direction, because this involves people’s lives, their livelihood and, as important, their opportunity for the future. I think that’s what British Columbia really needs.

P. Milobar: I rise to speak to Bill 27.

There’s a very concerning pattern with this government that seems to actually be accelerating. Not only are they accelerating how fast they want to pass legislation now after it’s been introduced in this chamber, but it’s an accelerating pace over these last couple of years, particularly under this new Premier’s watch, of controlling everything out of the Premier’s office, rushing things through, not wanting proper debate and discussion on bills.

We had the Attorney General yesterday and the Minister of Indigenous Relations the day before repeatedly referring to how long we were taking on their bills, to the hour, to the minute. The Indigenous Relations Minister was eight hours and 22 minutes, was what he said when we were starting debate again on committee stage of reviewing the Haida agreement, a very important piece of legislation that deserves full scrutiny. Yet it seemed to be an inconvenience to the minister that the opposition was daring to invest a few hours of debate.

No wonder the government pushes these bills off to the very end, because they don’t actually want that debate to happen. Yesterday we heard the same thing on Bill 21, with the Attorney General talking about eight hours of debate and we were still only into a couple of clauses on Bill 21 with 310 more clauses to go, with only a couple of days of debate left.

We saw that on Bill 36 with the Health Professions Act, where we had almost 400 clauses of that bill not canvassed, not discussed, not questioned, a refusal by the government to relook at that, to at least allow for a venue for those questions to be asked, even though the bill had already been passed and made into law. No willingness to have any oversight on that.

We had one occasion where we had two forestry bills, at the end of a session, being debated at the same time, in two different chambers, one at second reading, one at committee stage. The Forests Minister of the time couldn’t have possibly been in two rooms at once, and time allocation got brought in on both bills. They both got wrapped up without proper debate or discussion on two very meaty bills around the forest industry. And we see the mess the forest industry is in right now under this government’s watch.

You can see why there’s an importance in trying to understand what the pieces of legislation being brought in do or don’t contain and how they are going to affect the forest industry, moving forward. But those two bills never actually had any proper scrutiny either. They’ve been law for a couple of years, and now we have mills closing, saying we’re the most expensive, bureaucratic jurisdiction in North America for forestry.

[3:10 p.m.]

That’s the attitude this government has on all their bills at this point. Bill 26 was just introduced yesterday, has already had second reading and, in fact, the government said debate shall stop by 3:30 today. It wrapped up anyways, through its natural course. Bill 27 — we’ve already been told we’ll be done with this bill at 6:15 tonight.

Why that’s egregious is that 87 of us were elected to come to this chamber and speak on any piece of legislation we choose to speak on. It shouldn’t be up to the government to decide how many members feel a piece of legislation is important enough for that member to speak to it, or not, and how long that member should speak to it, or not.

I understand and accept that the Government House Leader and the government Whip may be able to tell their members on the government side that they are or aren’t speaking to a piece of legislation. But the arrogance of this government to, repeatedly now, by both their actual words, in terms of noting to the minute how long a certain bill has been debated or not, and by their actions on how late into a legislative session they’re willing to continue to introduce legislation….

Legislation, by the way…. There was no heads-up that this was coming — none.

It just speaks to an arrogance of: “How dare the opposition want to speak to a bill? In fact, we’ll tell them how long they’re allowed to speak to a bill. We’re government. We know best. We’ll tell them they’re only allowed a couple of hours on a bill, and that should be good enough. That should be good enough for the constituents in various areas of the province. We don’t need to explain the ramifications of a bill that might spill over outside of Vancouver area” — in this case, because that’s a very specific bill to Vancouver.

There’s no need, in the government’s mind, for duly elected members of this Legislature to actually do their job. Because it’s an inconvenience to the government.

Probably the most egregious piece of Bill 27…. This is where the arrogance has just gotten taken to a whole new level with this government. Usually it’s bad enough that we have bills that are all left to regulation — regulation we don’t see at the time of debate.

I remember debating a housing bill, and the Minister of Housing said he couldn’t share the regulations with the House because they weren’t developed yet. About a week later, a 57-page document of regulations was presented publicly. But apparently when we were debating that bill, they weren’t ready to be released. They couldn’t be talked about. They were still under development — 57 pages, and that was only the first document. I believe there was another 200 pages that came out about a few days later.

That’s not even the worst example. FOI legislation…. When we asked about the simple factor on how much the cost was going to be assigned to file an FOI request, the minister spent days dodging that question. “Oh, it will be developed with consultation. We need to go and consult. We need to find out what the best price will be.” Twenty minutes after that bill became law, the order-in-council to set the fee at $10 was signed in the corridor.

That’s the arrogance that this government continues to show with their legislation. Why it is taken to a whole new level on Bill 27…. As I say, most commencement clauses in a bill are…. They take commencement by way of regulation and order-in-council — which, under this government’s watch, seems to happen really fast a lot of times, but it’s not unusual wording — or royal assent, when the Lieutenant-Governor comes in and nods her head when the bills get read out, as is the process, and they become law. We’ll see the Lieutenant-Governor do that on Thursday again.

I want to read, for the public, the commencement. Now, this is only a four-clause bill. Clause 4, commencement: “This Act comes into force on the day after the date it receives First Reading in the Legislative Assembly.” This bill received first reading yesterday. This bill is already law.

[3:15 p.m.]

Talk about arrogance of a government. Yes, they have a majority. Yes, they’re going to pass whatever they want in this place. They don’t even want to have any debate anymore. It doesn’t really matter what questions the opposition might have on behalf of people when it comes to Bill 27.

This act comes into force on the day after the date it receives first reading in the Legislative Assembly. It’s already law. It doesn’t need the Lieutenant-Governor to show up on Thursday. It doesn’t need to wait for any orders-in-council to be signed off in the hallway a few minutes after we close off committee stage and third reading. It’s law before we even started to debate it on the floor of this chamber today.

The government wonders why the public starts to think that they’re being pretty arrogant with how they conduct business in this chamber, how they feel it’s their right to just pick and choose how long opposition deals with a bill or not. Well, they’ve already decided on Bill 27. Frankly, most of this is now just performative. It has been rendered performative strictly because of clause 4, on the commencement date.

The government is not willing, by virtue of that commencement, to entertain any amendments — not even go through the motions of having opposition be able to present some concepts or ideas by way of an amendment in Bill 27 to make the legislation better, because government knows best. That’s the mantra this NDP government has been employing for the last seven years, and they have just taken it to new levels.

Government knows best. Well, 18 months ago, the Premier said he knew best, and he said he was going to clean up the Downtown Eastside, and he was going to clean up the SRO problem. It’s actually gotten worse. Apparently, the Premier didn’t know best how to clean up SROs.

Instead, we get dropped a piece of legislation with no warning in the final days of a legislative sitting that has already been deemed to be law as of today, and we haven’t actually finished second reading. But we know — the government has told us — that we have to be done second reading in three hours, literally. It’s now 3:16. This has to be closed off at 6:15.

For those watching at home, if I were standing up right now, one minute ago the Chair would’ve had no choice but to cut me off and force the vote, even though I still have 19 minutes, even, on my speaking time. That’s what will happen three hours from now — well, three hours less a minute and a half.

Eighteen months ago the Premier comes in, in his new role, and promises results people will be able to touch, feel and see and promises he’s going to clean up the Downtown Eastside, and he appoints a czar for the area to phase out SROs. Now, this wasn’t a Premier coming in that didn’t understand the complexities of the Downtown Eastside. Our Premier has done a lot of work down there, long before he was a politician. I acknowledge that. So he does understand the area.

He was also an Attorney General for 5½ years for B.C. before he became the Premier. He was also Housing Minister right before he became the Premier, for a couple of years. Surely, when he makes promises he’s going to clean up SROs, he knew what he was promising. But instead of doing the job that he told the public he was going to do and making those SROs safer for people that live in them or giving them better options to live in, they’ve had to introduce, at the last minute, a piece of legislation that is already law, as I stand, that will override the courts.

It’s interesting. They have no problem overriding the courts when it comes to housing in Vancouver. They did it once before on a different chunk of property.

They sure don’t want to try to change anything when it comes to catch and release and dangerous criminals out on our streets and the chaos that’s being created. No attempts then to try to actually bring meaningful change to people in their neighbourhoods across this province.

[3:20 p.m.]

Then they don’t want to interfere with the courts. They don’t want to interfere with the system. They can’t do this, they can’t do that, but when it comes to trying to basically shield themselves from their failures on the housing file, they will interfere with the courts.

They’ll not interfere with the courts when it comes to crime and community safety, but they’ll interfere with the courts when it comes to housing, to hide the government’s own failure that in 2017, it promised 114,000 units built by 2027, in ten years.

It would have gone a long way to solving the SRO problem, getting people out of those run-down SROs. Lots are without windows, as in no actual opening to the outside whatsoever, and others are without windows, with just open air flowing through, even through the middle of winter. If they had stuck to actually delivering a result for once, we wouldn’t be needing this bill right now. Instead, after only building around 7,000 units in the first seven years, they’ve abandoned the 114,000. You don’t even hear them talk about it.

In 2017, when they came in, they were talking about their 30-point action plan for housing. They don’t talk about that anymore either. It has failed. The Premier has failed on SROs — full stop. It was his promise, his commitment, based on his background — not just as a Housing Minister, not just as an Attorney General but also as an advocate for the Downtown Eastside for years, when he made that promise and that commitment 18 months ago. He failed — period.

This means we have 3,600 SROs that are not exactly great living conditions for most people. It doesn’t help people, who are already struggling with mental health and addictions issues, to live in those conditions. It would be a grind on anybody’s mental health to live in those conditions, let alone if you’re already facing challenges.

The government’s solution with this bill is to cap the rents but not to address the repair, maintenance and condition of the housing. You have old housing stock that’s already run down and beat to all heck, with even less accessibility to make repair and maintenance on it now with this bill, which will lead to even further deterioration of people’s living conditions. That’s the extent of cleaning up the SRO problem that this Premier can deliver — after 18 months of promises that he will clean it up.

M. Elmore: I seek leave to make an introduction.

Leave granted.

Deputy Speaker: Please proceed.

Introductions by Members

M. Elmore: We’ve got, here in the House, some very special guests. If you were in the front of the Legislature at noon, you would have heard a great performance by a local band, the John Oliver music program. They delivered a terrific performance on the front steps. They’ve got their concert band, their jazz band and the choir, for the first time since I’ve been here, to really have a great performance.

They’re here with their teacher C.J. Kumar; teacher candidate Justin Lau; Ethan Tong, also a teacher candidate; Debbie Klassen; vision teacher Judy Sandhu; Soreya Uto­kaparch; and regrets from Michelle McNaughton. They’re going to be performing here for a few days at Hillcrest Elementary School, at UVic. I just please ask everybody to give them a very warm welcome.

They’re also active in Lapu-Lapu Day — a lot of folks participating in that. John Oliver is an awesome school.

Welcome to the precinct. Everybody please give them a warm welcome.

I’ve got another special friend here too, Sean Saweko, who also is very active. He’s in the Legislature for a tour, very active for Lapu-Lapu Day.

A very warm welcome to him.

I ask everybody to please give him a warm welcome.

[3:25 p.m.]

Deputy Speaker: Welcome to the guests.

Debate Continued

P. Milobar: As I was saying, the problem with 27…. I understand why the city of Vancouver is seeking this. What we haven’t heard from this government — other than 18 months ago, with a commitment by the Premier that he was going to clean up SROs on the Downtown Eastside — is any tangible action from the government to do anything to make people’s living conditions better in those SROs.

That’s the core issue, and the core failure by this Premier and this government, when it comes to housing — all talk, no action, no deliverables. So 3,600 units. You would think — on the heels of the tragic Winters Hotel fire where lives were lost and those SRO units gone, this government would have finally taken some action. What action did they take?

They finally audited Atira and found massive problems with Atira and their handling of SROs. Then we hear nothing until Bill 27, no meaningful action taken by this government whatsoever to improve people’s living conditions in those SROs. Their answer now is to say to those people living in those 3,600 units: “We’re going to make sure that the landlord doesn’t change the rent significantly between tenants.” That is understandable, but we’re not, at the same time, announcing any plan to make those buildings safer, more habitable, less pest- and rodent-infested.

In fact, we’re going to make sure that because of those rent freezes, the landlord, in the case of privately held SROs, won’t actually be able to do that repair and maintenance. Admittedly, they haven’t done a great job of it to this point, but I haven’t seen the government use any legislative tools to try to change the laws to force that to happen.

What we have is Bill 27, which will commit those 3,600 units, SROs, to effectively stay the same as they are — in fact, get worse. This is not a bill that comes with any type of actioning by this government to overlay the intent, of making sure the rents don’t change between tenants, with a program and a plan to make sure that those same SROs are habitable and safe for people to live in.

If the government is going to use their legislative ability to do one-half of the equation, they should do the other half of the equation, but they’re not. Some of the oldest housing stock, the smallest housing stock and the most run-down housing stock that Vancouver has is what’s actually affected by Bill 27.

Now, 18 months after the Premier promised improvements, we see no improvements. We see a rushed piece of legislation to circumvent the courts, which is already law, as we speak. It’s questionable if it will have the desired effect. It’s questionable based on those factors that I talked about.

[3:30 p.m.]

[J. Tegart in the chair.]

I get that it can be a sensitive way to talk about it, but at the end of the day, even if it’s your own personal house, there’s an economic factor to housing. There just is. Repair and maintenance of housing, regardless of its type, is real. Landlords — be it for-profit or non-profit landlords, for that matter — have a duty to keep their properties habitable and safe. But there is a cost to that. There’s no magical way for a non-profit or a for-profit landlord to replace a leaking roof without it costing them money.

If the government’s intention is to make sure that there’s rent control in Bill 27, which is understandable for those on the lowest end of our economic spectrum in B.C., it’s incumbent on the government to, at the same time, say, “But we’re also going to make sure you’re living in a safe place. We’ve got a program to work with the landlord to make sure that the buildings are actually habitable, the fire systems are actually working properly,” unlike what we saw in the Winters Hotel tragedy. No lessons learned from the government on that.

They’re a government great for saying that they’re looking out for those that are disadvantaged, but they don’t actually action that. If you dare point out the obvious to them, well, you must be against the poor, or you must be this, or you must be that. No, it’s an actual, very simple, basic, literally economic equation when it comes to housing. Plumbing does not fix itself.

It’s kind of like that movie The Money Pit. Tom Hanks and Shelley Long move into the old house. They phone the plumber, and the plumber gives them a price over the phone. They say: “Well, how do you know it’s $40,000? You haven’t even come to the house yet.” The plumber says: “I gave a price two years ago. Nothing’s been done. Do you think the pipes got better with age?”

Does the government think that run-down SROs that have questionable wiring, questionable plumbing, leaking roofs, windows that are problematic, some that don’t have doors that lock properly…. Do they think that that is all going to just magically cure itself if they freeze the rents? If it’s not happening right now, under the existing rent system…. Yes, landlords need to be brought to heel, but I don’t see anything in 27 that does that. I don’t see a government program making that happen. I saw a Premier promising it 18 months ago and zero action on it. That’s what I’ve seen.

Again, a government that likes to talk but not actually deliver on any of the programs they put out there. In fact, they seem to think the bigger the price tag, the more effective a program is they’ve announced. They never want to actually talk about the deliverable or lack thereof. Housing is a great example, but you can go down the list. Health care. It’s in shambles. Oh, but they put more money in it. It must be getting better. Well, it’s not.

Affordability’s in the tank. It must be getting better, but it’s not. Government will say it’s a global inflationary problem. They’re absolutely right. There’s global inflation. Yet B.C. is one of the worst in Canada, if not North America, when it comes to lack of affordability. It’s always interesting when a government wants to use comparables from other jurisdictions and doesn’t want to use comparables. When­ever it’s a negative, they somehow skate past it, and it becomes a global issue, not just a Canadian issue.

Worst results in cancer care in Canada now, to the point we have to send people to a private U.S. hospital in Bellingham for cancer care. This government will skate past that and say: “Don’t look there. It’s really not that bad, people.”

[3:35 p.m.]

In this case, you have 3,600 people living in SROs that are being left to fend for themselves, between them and their landlord, in already run-down living conditions. When this bill is done being debated…. It’s already law, I guess, which is always an interesting wrinkle. It has said: “Your landlord will have, for the few and little repairs they’ve been doing, even less money to do repairs in your building now. We have no plan or program to backstop to make sure that those repairs actually happen. We have no meaningful replacement program in place.”

This is a government who bought a building in my riding for three times over assessed value that was supposed to have people living in it last September, 42 units that have been sitting empty for two years because of a fire. They haven’t even been able to renovate the building to get the people back in to actually start living in those units.

It’ll be, maybe, sometime next year, because as it was sitting empty through the winter, they let the pipes all freeze and cause even further damage in it. So 60-year-old housing stock that they paid almost $350,000 a unit for now is going to need extensive repairs just to get people living in that building again.

They can’t even deliver that program, and for the last 18 months, the Premier has failed to deliver anything of meaningful consequence to SRO occupants. Yet the government says they are succeeding with housing. They simply aren’t. They have failed miserably.

Again, this is a Premier that was the Housing Minister, with a Premier’s office that likes to control everything to levels we have never seen before. The lack of action on his own promises from 18 months ago is shocking, and they’re leaving people behind. They’re leaving people, those 3,600 people that live in those SROs, behind.

The temporary relief those people will understandably feel by knowing that their rents won’t get jacked up if they move out and someone else moves in will soon be offset by the realization that repairs aren’t going to keep happening, what few repairs were happening.

I really wish that the government had taken their time to address that side of the SRO problem, because the Premier told us 18 months ago he had a plan, and he was going to fix it. You could feel it. You could touch it. It would be better.

That’s the problem we have with Bill 27. It simply doesn’t cut it. It won’t provide real relief for those 3,600 people in terms of their living conditions. It will provide some economic relief for them, but the government could have found ways to provide economic relief for them, as well, without overriding the courts, kind of like walking and chewing gum at the same time, and actually make sure that those SROs were in a condition any one of those members would have wanted to actually, potentially, live in, if circumstances necessitated.

Should be a good rule of thumb if you’re the government. Would you be willing to live in an SRO? If not, maybe you should actually bring the standard of that SRO up. That, right there, speaks volumes.

We’re going to keep doing our job as an opposition, even if it offends the government that we have the temerity to actually speak to bills and ask questions about their legislation. Unfortunately, the government is going to continue doing what they do best, which is invoke closure and shut down debate on bill after bill after bill.

E. Ross: I’m pretty sure that this is going to be my last debate, I think, and it’s going to be Bill 27, a municipalities enabling bill.

[3:40 p.m.]

In terms of the speech I gave today, my farewell speech, I talked about this institution and its processes and how I truly admire it. I respect it. It’s what I expected out of a professional institution that’s trying to uphold the principles of democracy.

When I was trying to bring the Haisla Nation Council into a period of wealth and progress, I studied governance models all around the world. The one I concluded was the best one was the B.C. Legislature, not only because of the processes I read about, but also because the staff and the administration were separate from the politics, to a certain extent. I still believe it’s a good model. The Westminster model is a good model, in terms of checks and balances, of how a government can govern.

Mind you, there is something I’ve got to say about it in terms of the model being good. It is only good in terms of how you utilize it. As MLAs, we all have a duty to our constituencies, which are 87 across B.C. Individually…. I know there are parties in this House. I think there are four officially recognized parties. But that comes secondary. Our first duty is to the people who elected us to come in here and do a job, whether it’s government or whether it’s the official opposition, like what we’re doing here as the official opposition.

It’s a tough job. It’s a really tough job. Nobody can say that they’re 100 percent clear on all the bills that have passed through this place in the last seven years. Nobody can say that. I’m very familiar with a lot of the bills that come through in terms of issues. But there are a lot of bills that I rely on for my colleagues to fill in the blanks. When we’re in here debating Bill 27, for example, I really rely on people that were landlords, that were mayors and on councils that worked for an administration for a municipality or even RCMP officers. I really rely on that.

When we’re doing these debates, the debates are important, whether we’re in estimates or we’re in first reading, second reading, committee stage. They’re important. I know the general public has no idea what I’m talking about. But if there’s ever a place to learn the details of a bill and how it’s going to affect average people, this is definitely the process.

For example, it’s not Bill 27 per se, but it is Bill 17, the Police Amendment Act 2024. I’ve got a binder here. It’s full of bills that us, as the official opposition, have to review. We’ve got to send it down to our staff, get some summaries out of it. We’ve got to send it to our critics, get them to summarize it for us. What comes out is a good, logical, well-thought-out argument in terms of what is right and what is wrong with these bills.

Bill 17, the Police Amendment Act, is 177 sections and 64 pages. The average person walking off the street is not going to understand this, let alone care. Unless you’re in Surrey, where it’s very relevant, where if it continues to go down the road it’s going right now in terms of the political path, taxes are going to have to be increased for the people of Surrey. That’s what comes out of what we’re doing, right here, right now, in terms of Bill 27.

We all have a chance, right now, to speak to it, at least for a half an hour. Every MLA in this place has a right to speak to it, 87 MLAs, and then we go to the real work in terms of breaking down every single clause and every single word in each section, if we get to that point.

[3:45 p.m.]

We’ve seen this before in terms of the debate or estimates, or anything else for that matter that comes through this House, being shut down prematurely when we haven’t really done the work as MLAs, or even as the official opposition, to go through a bill to the fullest extent.

We saw Bill 36 a couple of years ago, the Health Professions Act. The member for Prince George–Valemount…. I think she got halfway through it, and the government shut down debate — called closure. I understand why it was…. I mean, time ran out. You have a certain time period that’s set, in terms of how long we come down here in Victoria to debate bills in the spring and the fall.

But it’s supposed to be managed in a way that the substance of the work can get done, so that we as official opposition can actually try and attempt to make sure the government is as open and transparent as possible. We can’t do that if debate is shut down. The main reason for shutting down debate is because the most important bills, the most complicated bills, the biggest bills, are left until near the end of the session. Then time becomes crunched.

Just recently, just this past week, two more bills were put in this House. We can’t even get through the bills that were originally proposed. We’re not going to get through them. I heard the complaints from the Indigenous Relations Minister talking about how much time has been spent on Indigenous issues — Aboriginal issues — and, really, talking in the context of Haida recognition, that eight hours at a minimum seems excessive.

Aboriginal rights and title have been in the courts for the last 40 years. There have been court cases won and lost to define what Aboriginal rights and title is and isn’t. It’s in the Constitution of Canada. We’re one of the only countries around the world that recognizes that Aboriginal rights and title do indeed exist in Canada. The constitution doesn’t define it, but the case law did.

In my mind, eight hours isn’t enough. Ten hours isn’t enough. If we wanted to get through it, the Haida recognition bill should have been brought in at the beginning of the session, so we wouldn’t have to rush it. The member for Vancouver-Langara, the Indigenous Relations critic for the B.C. United, who’s a lawyer, is trying to do his job in an open, transparent manner but really can’t get answers.

I was in those estimates, both for Indigenous estimates as well as the Haida recognition act, and I’m not too clear on where we’re going to end up. That’s how important this work is. So just to shut down debate, whether it’s intentional or non-intentional, because of the lack of time…. That’s a time management problem. That’s a priority problem.

All of these issues are important. I agree, and every single MLA is going to get up and talk about why they think a certain bill is important and takes precedence over another bill. In today’s day and age, health is important. I don’t believe the Health Professions Act, Bill 36, should have gotten shut down. I think eight hours for Indigenous estimates or the Haida recognition act…. Eight hours isn’t even enough.

In terms of what we’re talking about here, Bill 27…. When we have a housing crisis in B.C. and we have a substance abuse issue in B.C., why are we only just at second reading? We’ve still got committee stage to go. And this place is going to shut down in two days — two days’ time.

[3:50 p.m.]

There are already questions of whether or not this is the right bill, regardless of the promises that were made. The political promise by this NDP government was that they were going to build 114,000 units, which they failed at.

Now, Bill 27 is going to be talking about, amongst other things, helping clean up the Downtown Eastside, which was promised 18 months ago. And it’s not just the Downtown Eastside. The Downtown Eastside is symbolic of what’s happening in Prince George and in Terrace.

We’ve talked about the housing issue, since I’ve been here, as a crisis, from 2017 to today. Really, all we have gotten are political promises with no real substance behind them. It is a pattern. I agree with our colleagues. If this was such a big issue, why wasn’t this brought in at the beginning of this session? If it’s such a good model, we should be able to duplicate this in Prince George and Terrace.

We’ve also talked about how housing is just one component of the issues that we see facing our most vulnerable people in B.C., especially low income. Just providing a roof over somebody’s head in the Downtown Eastside is not going to fix what’s happening in the Downtown Eastside. It’s not going to fix what’s happening in Prince George. It’s not going to fix what’s happening in Terrace.

There has to be a robust system to deal with all the different aspects of what goes on in our streets. It’s not just a roof over their head. If that was the case, we would have solved this a long time ago.

Five years ago, when we started to see the low-income housing pop up across different parts of the province, including Terrace…. Not long after the low-income housing was built in Terrace, I was told that the activities, in terms of the people that have substance abuse issues, were still happening. Yes, they were not allowed to do it indoors in their new-found accommodations. They were still doing it in the streets and the alleys of the downtown core of Terrace. They were also doing it in the trails up behind the low-income housing.

I walked through it, like I have done many times. I have walked through the rail tracks, from the Walmart to downtown. I have walked along the river where all the encampments were and still are when the warm season hits us. I found out. Yes, the activities are still happening. There were no services provided to help those people that were in the low-income housing. Shelter isn’t the only problem.

A couple of years ago I was…. I think I’ve mentioned this to the House. If you hadn’t known, I ran for the leader of the B.C. Liberals at the time.

No? Nobody is aware of that. Okay.

Anyway, I was toured on the Downtown Eastside. I’ve done it many times before on my own, when I was a councillor for the Haisla Nation. I was chief councillor for the Haisla Nation Council. I didn’t tour it per se, but I went and walked around down there. I know a lot of those people. They’re my friends and family.

There are a few people I know on the streets of Prince George, and I definitely know a lot of the people on the streets of Terrace. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for me to go down there and talk to people and find out what was going on long before I became an MLA.

I was being toured around by a representative of the RCMP, and they were telling me about how the measures that were put in place actually weren’t even working. I went to Strathcona Park. I went to Oppenheimer Park. I went to all those different areas that were key areas in terms of what was happening on our streets.

[3:55 p.m.]

I was shown low-income housing, brand-new, brand-spanking-new. From the outside, I was pretty impressed. But then they showed me, along the street, a block away, all the RVs that were parked.

All the RVs were housing families who did not want to move into low-income housing. The families were not suffering from substance abuse. They were just down on their luck. They didn’t want to move into low-income housing, because that’s where the drugs were. That’s where the drug dealers were. There was still violence happening there. These families had children. This is happening in Terrace, too, by the way. I get the same complaint.

It’s not just a simple issue of putting a roof over somebody’s head. It’s not going to be solved with Bill 27. It’s good dressing on the outside to say that a promise made 18 months ago will be enacted by Bill 27. But that’s not the case.

As many people have talked about already, being a landlord in today’s day and age is expensive. The landlords in Terrace, especially, come to my office and say…. Once they get rid of the issues, once their issues are resolved, in terms of the occupancy of their buildings, they’re getting out of the landlord business. They can’t afford it. There’s a lot of maintenance, not only with wear and tear but also with holes in the walls. It’s a delicate balance between tenants and landlords.

What’s happening in the Downtown Eastside, with Bill 27…. It hasn’t really been addressed in terms of how safe these SROs are in the first place. We’ve had buildings burn down, people losing lives in the SROs in the Downtown Eastside. There’s no mention of this.

Landlords will be expected to bear the cost of Bill 27. How are they supposed to do it when they are already stretched for maintenance costs?

I think we’d all like to see more fire protection, more fire warning, more fire extinguishers, up-to-date fire extinguishers in these SROs. Bill 27 is not going to talk about it. It’s not going to resolve it.

I do have a bit of experience in terms of being a landlord, in a roundabout way. We had the same problem in terms of maintenance costs.

Under the Indian Act, First Nations get a certain amount of money to provide housing for those on social assistance. It’s called social housing. The problem for us, even though it was a pretty good model…. I thought it was a pretty good model.

We agreed that the rent for these houses would go into a pot, and then that pot would pay for the maintenance and the repairs of all these houses. In theory, that works, except the tenant has to pay the rent bill, which they weren’t.

When I got into council in 2003, our housing deficit, in terms of social housing, was $400,000. We don’t have the luxury of the B.C. government in terms of a deficit or accounts payable like that. When our tenants didn’t pay their rent bill, the band council had to pay it, and it wasn’t voluntary.

[4:00 p.m.]

The people in Ottawa, the bureaucrat in Ottawa, would just take away the yearly payment that was due and subtract it from our funding agreement. So we’d look at our new funding agreement each year, and we’d find out that we were actually missing a lot of money. We were told: “Well, because your housing bill needs paying.” And we couldn’t recover it because we did not have the political will to kick people out of their house. We didn’t have it.

We came up with all kinds of measures to get that money back, but we couldn’t. And the result was that we had less money for other programs in our village. It’s not like the provincial government. It can still keep operating with deficit. But sooner or later, somebody’s going to have to pay off that debt. It’s going to contribute to inflation. It’s going to contribute to the next generation trying to figure out how to pay off that debt. But First Nations did not have that luxury.

That’s why it was good that LNG came along, and we had our own resources where we could start building our own apartments and even buying apartments in the city of Kitimat. But the cooperation with the B.C. government to provide housing on reserve was actually welcomed, because it wasn’t on the same terms as the Indian Act. And it was welcomed. I welcomed it. It was less stringent than dealing with Ottawa. It was better dealing with Victoria.

The first ones to do that were actually the B.C. Liberals under Christy Clark, Rich Coleman with Lax Kw’ala­ams. Under their announcement of affordable housing, $500 million…. I think Lax Kw’alaams was the first one to participate in that. They got $4½ million for affordable housing on the reserve. The first time it had ever been done, a provincial government going on to reserve and saying, “Yes, we’re going to help you with housing.”

It helped, because it took a lot of the Lax Kw’alaams people out of the housing market, out of Prince Rupert and elsewhere, and brought them onto reserve and brought their people home. We did the same thing in Kitimat.

But in terms of Bill 27, it’s not quite the same thing. I think you’ve got to address some of the larger issues that are facing those people down in the Downtown Eastside. It’s not just a roof over their heads. The Winters Hotel that burned down, killing two occupants — this is going to keep happening if we don’t address the condition of these SROs.

I, for one, would love to see some supports going in to help those SROs to kind of bring them up to standards, the minimum standards to at least ensure some level of safety until we can figure out, for the long term, a solution.

Why I’m saying that is because this topic is relevant to a lot of communities around B.C. In Terrace, I was notified a couple of years ago about Coachman Apartments. I had no idea that the Coachman Apartments, up in the bench in Terrace, had such big issues. It was low income, but it was privately owned. The owner lived in Miami. Nobody had even heard of this guy. He never even showed up, never did any maintenance, did nothing. Then we found out he passed away.

The people living up there were basically living in mould. I was asked by the mayor to go up there and take a look and take a walk through it, and I was pretty shocked because the outside didn’t show, really, what the inside looked like.

I know what mould looks like. Every First Nation leader will tell you what mould smells like and looks like. We had a mould crisis back in the mid-2000s on reserves all across Canada, which I was a part of as well, trying to address that. But when we walked through the building, there was….

[4:05 p.m.]

Whoever the last tenant was in some room got evicted, which was surprising, because a lot of those people didn’t pay their rent anyway. But before they left, they turned a tap on in a sink — flooded two floors. Electricity didn’t work. Doors were kicked in, garbage all over the place.

There was a retired woman who had just lost her husband who locked herself in her apartment every day. There were people living in there, some of whom I knew, who were living with mental issues. They were living there. It took a lot of work to get them out.

We actually brought it here. The Housing Minister basically found and bought a motel along the highway and housed more than half those people. I thought the issue was done. I thought it was over.

Just this past winter I was told there were still people living there, so I went back. There was no electricity, but they have running water. There are still people living there. Can’t get them out. I even talked to a few of them and told them that they can come with us, and we can call government, and we can find a way. “We can find accommodations, but you can’t keep living here. This is dangerous.” Nope. Couldn’t remove them — some because they had mental health issues, but some because they didn’t feel safe in low-income housing. They felt safer in this condemned building.

I asked, and I recommended, that government use all its powers — every tool in the toolbox, as they say — to expropriate these lands, because the owner is deceased. Expropriate the property. Invest $20 million in it. Turn it over to B.C. Housing, and build truly safe low-income housing.

By the way, if you guys don’t know, I was government as well. I was government for 18 days. I was Housing Minister. One of the things that…. One of the files that I reviewed was the policy that was implemented under Rich Coleman.

I actually went to visit one of these buildings that he helped build down here in Victoria, and I liked the model. It was a desegregated model. It was a partnership with the private sector, basically saying: “Look, we can cooperate. We can partner on this property. We can partner on building housing, but you’ve got to desegregate it. You have to have low-income, middle-income and high-income earners in the same building.” I thought that was a great model. I’m not a fan of segregated housing. I don’t think people should be just put in a certain section by themselves based on their wealth or lack of wealth or because of their issues.

I’ve seen this kind of housing before. I’ve heard about it in places like Kamloops and Kelowna. We’ve got it in Terrace. So I thought the model of desegregated housing was actually a really good model. It made best use of provincial government assets and provincial government money, and I don’t think Rich Coleman gets enough credit for that.

I think we should bring it back, especially for those families and those people with disabilities that don’t have substance abuse issues that are living in RVs in our parking lots, on our streets and even in the parking lot of my colleague from Surrey — Surrey South or North or whatever it is. He’s got a woman that parks in his parking spot outside his MLA offices, because she’s afraid of low-income housing. She feels safe in the MLA’s parking spot in Surrey.

It has been an honour to represent Skeena in talking to Bill 27, and I will now take my seat.

Deputy Speaker: Recognizing the member for Columbia River–Revelstoke.

D. Clovechok: Well, thank you very much, Madam Speaker. Always nice to see you.

Today it gives me a great deal of pleasure to rise in this House to speak to Bill 27. It’s a bill, as we examine, as a piece of legislation that was brought forward yesterday by the current NDP government, that basically validates the city of Vancouver’s bylaws, which imposed vacancy control on about 3,600 specific SROs.

[4:10 p.m.]

When you look at these SROs…. I have had an opportunity to have a tour. I would challenge any of the members across if they would spend a night in one of those SROs on the east side, if they would venture to try to do that. I’m thinking that’s not the case. I don’t think it would happen. Yet we expect these other people to stay in this squalor, which basically is poverty and despair. They are slums, yet they propose this legislation to keep that in place.

To a large extent, this is kind of pathological for this government. They promise otherwise, but here they’ve introduced this legislation with mere days left in the session. And again yesterday. It’s a pattern. It’s a deliberate pattern that this government has had on many, many bills. It’s a deliberate tactic, I think, to undermine the democratic process and prevent thorough examination of potential impacts on the consequences of these legislative measures.

Now, when we stand up here and debate bills, it’s an important process of the democratic process. But this isn’t a debate. This is a monologue, because none of the people on the other side have the courage to stand and speak to this bill, their own bill that they introduced yesterday. Otherwise, they would be on their feet, one after us, every time. They don’t have the courage to speak to it. That’s a shame because you’re dealing with people’s lives. You’re dealing with people’s lives.

Overall, what does this bill mean? What does it do? It effectively enacts the vacancy control measure that limits rent increases not only during the tenure of a single tenant but also between tenants. Control. They don’t like to hear about it, but it’s socialistic control. The more you control, the more freedom goes.

By validating these bylaws, the government invalidates the need for a court case that had been previously struck down with similar measures implemented by the city of Vancouver. So what does that say? Court rules it out of order, and this government comes along and decides they are no better than the courts. Well, I guarantee you, as many other issues before the courts today are, this will be challenged, and the people of British Columbia will pay for this in court, with that challenge. And this government knows that.

I think that it’s a perfect example of where government expands their focus of control, liberty contracts. The more and more that I’ve seen in the seven years that I’ve been here, this government removes the liberties of people by doing such things as introducing these bills at the last minute.

Vacancy control is a short-term fix. What I have seen and am critical of this government for is that this is going to cause long-term damage to the rental market. They don’t have a plan. It’s always the short-term fixes.

The core issue of the housing crisis is the lack of housing supply across a spectrum of housing. They don’t get that. The NDP has opened…. I chuckle about this. I remember back in 2017, when the election was going on and my counterpart who was running for the NDP expounded that they were going to build 114,000 new properties. That was attractive to people. I thought, geez, that’s pretty good. Got to give you credit.

Well, 16 percent of that has been built, and some of that 16 percent was what we had started beforehand. It’s a failure. It’s an abject failure. Yet we have this legislation in front of us today.

[4:15 p.m.]

Vacancy control would further deter the creation of affordable housing units, and studies have shown, research has shown, that it could only lead to the cancellation of tens of thousands of proposed housing projects. And this damages affordability.

These are the folks from across the aisle that are constantly telling us how affordable they are making the lives of British Columbians. Affordability, when the gas prices are higher than anywhere else, rent is higher than anywhere else. You can’t buy food. People are doing things that they normally wouldn’t do in their lives because there’s no affordability. They’re being squeezed constantly, and this is another example.

Vacancy control was rejected by the NDP’s Rental Housing Task Force — even their own task force. But here we are. I think it’s time for the NDP to provide real solutions when it comes to affordability: prioritize and increase in supply, and get soaring house prices under control. But you need a long-term plan. Short-term planning doesn’t work. You’re dealing with people’s lives, and these are vulnerable people. These are folks that are the most vulnerable in our society, yet they’re being discounted.

You know, 18 months ago this Premier stood, chest puffed out, and told British Columbians: “We’re going to produce results that you can feel, that you can touch, that you can see, that will impact your life.” He made the bold promise to clean up the Downtown Eastside. But he didn’t make any mention of downtown Cranbrook, which is suffering the same and similar issues, or downtown Prince George. No plan for the province.

He appointed what my colleague called a czar. I thought that was a good one. He appointed a czar for the area to phase out the SROs. This is a government that operates on a ready-fire-aim agenda. They operate on rhetoric, not results. It’s okay, if you’re the Premier, to stand and make promises. But the difference between this Premier and the leader of the party that I am proud to be involved with, the B.C. United, is that we stand on results, not rhetoric.

Unsurprisingly, none of these promises have been fulfilled, and today we see chaos and disorder in our streets, in the Downtown Eastside or wherever. It’s getting worse. It’s exacerbated by seven years under this NDP leadership. This legislation, while it applies to limited vacancy controls, is ultimately a half-measure design to buy time be­fore the next election. People see through it.

I watched on Global the other day…. I’m not a big Glo­bal fan, but one of the announcers in the morning had two political pundits talking about some of the policies of the New Democratic Party in British Columbia. They weren’t kind about those rhetorics. They were talking about the things that were going on: why this is failing, why affordability, why crime, housing. The broadcaster — sometimes I’ve seen her be very gentle with the members across — looked at the camera and said: “We’re watching. We’re watching.” So I think your time is coming to an end. I think your time is coming to an end.

In any event, this bill raises significant concerns about the potential expansion of such controls, which is shown to deter home-building activity and exacerbate the housing crisis.

The Premier needs to answer for his broken promises. When you are the leader and you make a promise, you keep your promise. He needs to answer for those and provide British Columbians with a firm date for the phase-out of SROs.

[4:20 p.m.]

The people of this province deserve more than the stopgap solutions. They need comprehensive and effective housing reform. Where’s the plan? Where’s the overall plan for British Columbia? There is no plan. It’s ready, fire, aim with these guys.

Then there’s the situation with Atira and B.C. Housing. It highlights a pattern of mismanagement under the Premier’s watch when he served as Housing Minister. He has a record of this. He has a record of mismanagement. He has a record of failure. People are watching. This mismanagement has often led to warehousing vulnerable individuals without necessary supports, often compromising their safety and well-being.

I had the opportunity to be at an event with the then — at that time, prior to the last Alberta election — Minister of Mental Health and Addictions from Alberta and the gentleman that was his right-hand man, who had been an addict on the east side. It was amazing what Alberta was doing with this file, the success that they have with this file.

I remember that gentleman, who had been an addict on the east side, saying to us that SROs won’t work. You can’t warehouse individuals. They’re not safe. That’s why people go into encampments, and people don’t want to be alone. Human beings don’t like being alone, but you’re trying to shove people into boxes that don’t work without the necessary supports.

Personal accounts from tenants and the tragic outcomes witnessed are a stark reminder of the failure to avoid effective leadership in housing. Failure. People are watching.

The NDP’s approach of placing people in unsafe conditions without those proper supports…. You can’t just give people drugs and expect them to figure it out. You have got to surround them with the supports that they need. We’ve gone from decrim back to recrim, but there are no supports.

Instead of phasing out SROs, the Premier brought in hotel rooms that worsened the problem. These hotels are in shambles. They’re not built for supporting housing, and the results we see are dangerous. That includes deadly fires that killed two people. How many more people have to die under this Premier’s watch?

As we continue to debate this bill — and again, this is a monologue; it’s not a debate because no one over there is willing to stand up and talk about it; it’s a courage issue, as I’ve already mentioned — we must consider its implications on the most vulnerable populations and the housing market.

B.C. United is committed to genuine reforms that en­sure safety, support and sustainability in housing, rather than temporary fixes that fail to address the root cause of our housing crisis. Because there are root causes.

Kevin Falcon has a vision, and it is a vision that’s going to work.

Deputy Speaker: I’d remind the member that we don’t use names.

D. Clovechok: The Leader of the Official Opposition.

The official opposition will scrutinize this bill closely when we have time, from the time it’s being forced to closure. Of course that, in itself, is an affront to the democratic process. These guys have got the numbers, and they know it. They know what they can do. But let me remind you: people are watching. People see this. Global sees this.

With that, I’ll take my seat, and thank you very much for the opportunity.

R. Merrifield: I rise today to speak to Bill 27, which really is a significant piece of legislation. It’s the first time that we have, in this House, discussed something of this nature, something that could change the way that rentals are done in B.C. Not necessarily just with this bill, because this bill is very specific in what it addresses, but having said that, it opens a door, perhaps a window, for something that could potentially really have unintended negative consequences in the future.

[4:25 p.m.]

I do understand that this bill aims to validate the city of Vancouver’s bylaws, which impose vacancy controls on 3,600 specific single-room-occupancy units.

While I am a little bit concerned about how this House is used to get things done that are declared unconstitutional or illegal within a justice system, I do understand what they’re attempting to do in this particular situation. But despite the promises made by this government, we are in a situation where this bill is introduced in the final days of the session.

We don’t have a lot of time to discuss. We don’t have a lot of time to debate. We don’t have the necessary space to actually make sure that this bill does what it is supposed to do and intended to do and that we get the reassurance of government that this is a one-time and only introduction of such nature. The tactic of this pushing through legislation in the final hours really undermines the democratic process, and it prevents thorough examination that these bills require.

I don’t know if this government just sees this process as a rubber stamp, if they don’t care about what happens in the debate of these bills. But for whatever reason, here we are with literally 2½ days left trying to get through a bill that, I believe, could have really negative unintended consequences. I think that we owe it to our constituents to really scrutinize the potential impacts and these consequences of these legislative measures fully.

Bill 27 enacts vacancy control measures that limit rent increases not only during the tenure of a single tenant but also between tenants. By validating these bylaws, the government negates the need for the court case that previously struck down similar vacancy control measures implemented by the city of Vancouver.

I recognize that vacancy control really is attractive as a short-term fix. We all know how difficult it is right now to find rentals. We know how the rental costs have skyrocketed under this NDP government. But rent control — vacancy control, as it’s deemed in this bill — causes long-term damage to the rental market. It does nothing to actually address the core issue of our housing crisis.

The core issue of our housing crisis is the lack of supply across the entire housing spectrum — full stop. But this NDP government spent the first five years trying to convince British Columbians that if we just put enough quell on demand, if we just really stopped the market, then suddenly we would have enough supply.

When that didn’t work, suddenly, with a new Housing Minister, a new board on B.C. Housing, well, then we were going to come out with a beautiful new plan that would actually address the true issue, which is supply. Well, that plan was an utter failure. Although the NDP government promised 114,000 units, which they no longer talk about whatsoever, they’ve only opened up 16 percent of those units.

But I can tell, and I want to be on record saying this, that vacancy control is going to further deter the creation of affordable housing units. Studies have shown that it can actually lead to the cancellation of tens of thousands of proposed housing projects and really, truly damages and can damage affordability in perpetuity.

The government should know this. The NDP commissioned their own report, called the Rental Housing Task Force report, that rejected vacancy control. This was back in 2018. It rejected it because it concluded that it would have unintended consequences such as reducing the affordable rental stock and lowering investment into necessary repairs.

[4:30 p.m.]

Why does it do this? Well, rent control reduces the incentive for landlords to invest in and maintain their properties. We’re not talking about full-scale gentrification here. We’re actually talking about maintenance. If a landlord doesn’t have enough money to maintain the property, they cannot perform those upgrades. What happens to those buildings? What happens to those units? What happens to anything that was damaged or needs to be updated, upgraded or upkept? It deteriorates. This is evidenced already in the SROs.

I would challenge any member of this House to do a tour of the SROs, as many as you can get through, in the Downtown Eastside, and see how people live. Recently, a medical team that was assigned to the Downtown Eastside had such serious concerns about their own health and safety that they could not continue to go into those units. With tears streaming down their face, one told me about the absolute squalor that these individuals are subjected to. He said: “We treat our animals better than how these people are treated.”

This rent control, this vacancy control, is only going to serve to continue this downward spiral. It doesn’t allow a reset from a landlord. It doesn’t provide a landlord with the necessary income to repair and replace, and it’s getting more expensive to do so. We’ve seen construction prices skyrocket 300 percent. Construction prices aren’t just new builds. That’s all the repairs as well.

Another aspect of this is that by artificially lowering rents, rent control can really distort market signals that drive investment into new housing, which leads to a reduced supply of rental properties over time. If the average lowers, new rental builds cannot take place. There are formulas that banks, financial institutions and CMHC utilize to make sure that rental buildings can operate. It’s how they’re funded. Artificially lowering even 3,600 of 6,000 units can artificially lower the entirety of a city’s rental stock.

Then who wants to invest? Who can invest when that takes place? If you don’t have new rental stock, it leads to a decrease in the supply of rental housing overall. Developers may be less likely to build new rental units if they anticipate that future vacancy control or rent control measures will limit their return on investment. They simply can’t. It introduces risk measures into the system that cannot be overcome and that must be overcome for a bank or for CMHC to backstop these investments.

The other unintended consequence is that it can lead to mismatches in housing allocation, where people who can afford higher rents occupy less expensive ones, while those who need the affordable housing units struggle to find it.

There is a whole gamification of the system where rent control or vacancy control currently exists. There are apartments in New York City that have vacancy control where they have been sublet for decades — where they have been occupied by 20, 30 different individuals, with the original renter making money off of those units, or just by someone who really likes inexpensive rent.

[4:35 p.m.]

Maybe it was someone who required that hand up at one point but no longer requires it and just wants to stay in that unit because it is far less expensive than ever getting into the rental market at market rents.

These rent controls can create black markets for rental housing, where tenants illegally sublet their rent-controlled apartments at higher rates. It can create inefficiencies in allocation, where people stay in units for longer. It also can create a lack of movement, where tenants in rent-controlled apartments may be less likely to move, even if their housing needs change, leading to inefficiencies in the housing market.

Some 18 months ago, the Premier made a bold promise to clean up the Downtown Eastside. He was going to phase out SROs to do it, but unsurprisingly, none of his promises of 18 months ago have been fulfilled. Today, chaos and disorder on our streets are worse than ever, exacerbated by seven years under this NDP government.

This legislation, while applying limited vacancy control, is ultimately a half-measure designed to buy time before the next election. It raises significant concerns about the potential expansion of such controls — which, history has shown, can deter home-building activity and exacerbate housing crises.

The Premier needs to answer for his broken promises and provide British Columbians with a firm date for the phase-out of the SROs. Instead, here we are trying to hurriedly debate vacancy control on a small section in the Downtown Eastside. The people of B.C. deserve far more than stopgap solutions. They need comprehensive and effective housing reform.

We’ve seen the damage this NDP government has created in housing. We’ve seen the disaster that B.C. Housing has become under this government’s governance. The situation with Atira and B.C. Housing highlights a pattern of mismanagement, under the Premier’s watch when he served as Housing Minister. This mismanagement has led to the situation that I described earlier, where the SROs are in absolute disrepair, where we are actually warehousing vulnerable individuals without the necessary supports, often compromising their safety and their well-being.

In getting ready for second reading, I was googling. Some of the news stories about individuals’ safety and how they feared for their lives, living in the SROs, would give me such pause, yet this government is attempting to further push them into disrepair and push pause on any sort of maintenance or any sort of upgrades that could possibly happen. The personal accounts from the tenants, as well as the tragic outcomes that we’ve all talked about in this House, are a stark reminder of the failure to provide effective leadership in housing.

The NDP’s approach of placing people in unsafe conditions without proper supports, lacking accountability and transparency, is simply unacceptable. Instead of phasing out SROs, the Premier has bought hotel rooms and worsened the problem. These hotels are not purpose-built for supportive housing, and the results we see are dangerous, including deadly fires like the Winters Hotel that burned down, killing two occupants.

What really needs to change? If this is just a stopgap measure, what is the core issue? There are better ways to address housing affordability — such as increasing the housing supply, not introducing further measures that will quell it; encouraging the construction of more housing units to help meet demand and lower prices naturally; and looking at targeted subsidies.

[4:40 p.m.]

The Leader of the Third Party eloquently described how badly this government has performed on social supports. We need to look at providing subsidies or vouchers to low-income residents to help them afford housing without distorting the entire rental market.

The core issue is that this government has failed, failed in social supports, failed in delivering units required for B.C. CMHC indicates that B.C. needs 700,000 units. This government wants to freeze 3,600 of them. The government promised 114,000 but really has only delivered about 16,000 keys. That’s abysmal. That is an utter failure after seven years of government.

Let me tell you what happened when we were in government, because this NDP government likes to refer to the 16 years, “where there was just nothing done.” Let me talk about that, actually, because I was a builder back then. When the B.C. United was in government, we invested $4 billion to provide affordable housing for low-income individuals, seniors and families. When we left government, 6 percent of the total housing stock in B.C. was government-assisted housing with various levels of support. From 2001 to 2017, we completed close to 24,000 new units of affordable housing.

This government has only completed 16,000, and it’s not even all affordable. We even gave them a head start, because when we left government in 2017, more than 2,000 units were in development or under construction when we left office. I’ve even counted that number in the 16,000. We created more than 12,319 new units of housing for seniors and people with special needs across the province. Our government developed or preserved more than 6,900 housing units for the homeless or those at risk of homelessness.

We also developed and preserved more than 3,000 units of housing in the Downtown Eastside, probably some of the ones that we’re talking about right now. The number of provincially subsidized housing units within the Downtown Eastside in this very area that we are addressing was increased by our government by 68 percent. That’s what we did. That’s how we responded.

Instead, this government is putting short-term, stopgap measures in place that could potentially have negative, unintended consequences for much longer terms. As we debate this bill, we have to consider these implications on our most vulnerable populations in the housing market.

B.C. United, we are committed to genuine reforms that ensure safety, support and sustainability in housing, rather than these temporary fixes that fail to address the root causes of our housing crisis. We are going to scrutinize this bill closely and hold this NDP government accountable for their continued mismanagement of housing in B.C.

Above all, if I could just urge this government: focus on increased housing supply. We have to. We must prioritize increasing the supply of affordable housing units across the province. It means incentivizing developers to build more units, reducing red tape and providing subsidies for the construction of affordable housing.

It also should focus on supportive housing. We need units that are purpose-built with necessary supports in place. SROs are not appropriate. They’re not designed, they’re not built to meet the complex demands of those that are using them today. This includes mental health services, addiction treatments, job training programs to help individuals regain their independence.

[4:45 p.m.]

We also need to focus on transparent management. The mismanagement issues seen with Atira and B.C. Housing have to be addressed. B.C. Housing needs a tremendous overhaul. We need greater transparency and accountability in how housing funds are spent. We need some form of audit to actually understand why B.C. Housing builds the most expensive housing in our province.

We also need community involvement. We need to understand their specific needs and their concerns, rather than imposing one-size-fits-all and shoving housing down their throats. This would ensure that housing solutions are tailored to the new, unique challenges of each and every community.

I’m going to echo what my colleague from Revelstoke was just talking through, and that is that we need long-term planning. We right now have a suite of housing bills and legislation that has come through in an almost chaotic format, throwing most municipalities into a blur, not addressing the cities with the very greatest issues.

In fact, the city of Vancouver was patting themselves on the back, saying what a great job they’re doing. According to their housing needs assessment and the six-month review, they’re doing a skookum job, yet here we sit talking about a very dramatic measure because they don’t have enough housing.

We need a long-term strategic plan where we can actually see where the units are going to come from, where we can plan for every aspect of our housing needs within our province, a strategic plan that goes way beyond election cycles and far beyond trite promises that are broken time and time again by this government. The plan should include clear targets, timelines, accountability measures and support for municipalities to actually deliver.

Above all, this government needs to make friends with the private sector. Partnering with the private sector can bring in the expertise and efficiency needed to tackle the housing crisis. Those in the construction industry actually refer to the B.C. Housing architectural guidelines book as a “buck a page” because they will take whatever they can build another square foot for in another building. And if it’s a B.C. Housing project with the architectural guidelines supplied, they add a buck a page for that book.

Now, I haven’t seen the book lately, but the last time I did, it was 347 pages long. An additional $347 for every square foot that this government builds through B.C. Housing. That is ridiculous. We can have two-to-one units for every single dollar spent, instead of what this government is doing.

We have a housing crisis. Our housing crisis in B.C. requires a multifaceted approach to actually address its complexity. Rather than a multifaceted approach that is actually part of a comprehensive long-term strategic plan, all we have is a shotgun approach of a variety of different chaotic measures that don’t actually have any level of cohesion. Bill 27 is just another one of those. Bill 27 is trying to address an aspect of this crisis, absolutely. But it falls short of providing anything in terms of our comprehensive solutions that are needed.

As elected officials, it is our duty to advocate for policies that truly address not the symptom but the root cause of our housing challenges. I urge this House to work together to create a future where all British Columbians will have access to safe, affordable and appropriate housing.

[4:50 p.m.]

B. Stewart: It’s a pleasure to stand here and speak on Bill 27. I have to commend the last speaker, who just talked about the whole business about getting supply and all the barriers and stuff like that.

When I look at what’s intended here in Bill 27, it’s another one of — I know the words have been used a lot — stopgap, knee-jerk reactions, etc. We’re not fixing the housing supply by bringing in another set of rules. I think that one of the things that we talk about…. When I look back at the years of promises and accomplishments that the government is currently talking about, I think of the fact that in most cases, they bring out the rule book rather than the playbook. We’re not getting to the point where….

The playbook that we need is the one where we actually incentify the people that are involved in not only building but owning properties, having existing ones. Bill 27 here again speaks to the whole issue about the fact that we’re going to put another set of rules on SROs and these 3,600 units that are part of the supply. Albeit I would say that….

Certainly, I think that the Winters Hotel fire put a spotlight on the inadequacy of that type of accommodation for those people that are most vulnerable. And I don’t think that we should be trying to resist the idea that what we’re trying to do is…. We need to create and live up to the plans that have been promised by the government.

You know, I look back at a plan that was originally delivered in February of 2018. It was the government’s 30-point plan for a fairer housing market. Now, fairer — I mean, let’s just talk about what’s fairer. I think that when I’m thinking about…. Regardless of whether we’re talking about SROs, in general, in the overall housing complex….

I just look at Vancouver, and I see that in 2023, they raised taxes by 10.7 percent. The year before it was slightly less at 6.35, and over 5 percent in 2022. I don’t think that there’s anybody here that doesn’t appreciate the fact that there is increased cost all across the board. So owning a piece of property isn’t any different than having a business where there are increased costs that are coming into the equation. And they do need to be, kind of, considered.

When I read the 30-point plan for a fairer housing market, what I see is 30 points, of which many — I’ll read them to you in a second here — are highly punitive. They’re about people that have been in the minds of the Housing Ministers. We’re now on our third Housing Minister in seven years. I think the situation is that these people, as the Premier said — that there are certain ethnic groups that are buying up the stock. They’re taking over the housing market.

We have a diverse range of people that live here in British Columbia. If we want to put controls, which actually have been implemented…. We have it federally as well. But I just think that we’re not really doing the right things. What are we doing with all of the billions of dollars that we promised British Columbians we were going to invest and create 114,000 new units of affordable housing with? That’s across the whole spectrum. So when I think about the lack of the results, I mean, it’s staggering.

I mean, I have a business, and if I spend money without that and just continue to make costs go up and stuff like that, pretty soon people aren’t going to be able to afford the product that I produce. And when I look at Bill 27, it’s another one of those punitive or knee-jerk kinds of reactions to what it is that….

Government really does want to achieve this, but I think the point that we’re really trying to get to is: why do we keep coming up with these approaches? They’re not working. We’re seven years into this, and I’m sure that with all the data that’s there and all the things that have been talked about….

We could talk about how many houses for seniors and affordable housing, etc. But at the end of the day, the job of government is to make certain that people operate within certain boundaries, that they do a good job and that we create the incentive for them to do the things that we want them to do. All I can see when I read this 30-point plan is things that are the disincentives.

[4:55 p.m.]

We’re not getting to the point about helping the development community, because they must be seen to be something like the ethnic groups that were criticized in the 2017 election, that they controlled the real estate market. We’ve subsequently found out it was a very poor, unfair amount of data that was put out there by one particular researcher in one of the institutions.

When it comes to the results that we’re talking about, I think that people are expecting that this isn’t going to get better housing. It’s not going to make the people that are staying…. Bill 27 is not going to help the people in SROs. It’s not going to make the buildings get better. The pipes, as the member for Kamloops–North Thompson was talking about…. He was talking about the fact that the plumbing job that he got a quote on two years ago doesn’t get better with age. Albeit there are some things that we produce in the province that do get better with age.

I just think that the point about this is that what we’re really trying to do, and what we should be doing, is coming together on this. So how is it that here we are, three days from the end of this particular session in the afternoon, the dying moments of this, and we’ve got a bill that could have easily been introduced…? I’m sure that it wasn’t new information to the Minister of Housing that there was going to be a need for support to maybe limit.

Where’s the incentive? There’s no incentive here. This is just more about the rule book, not the playbook. What are we doing to get those SROs either up to standard or quality?

That was the promise after the Winters Hotel fire. The alarm system, the sprinkler system, wasn’t working, and two people passed away unnecessarily because of the fact that the operations were not necessarily doing what they should have been doing in terms of the oversight and the responsibility. They’re renting out places run by one of the government-funded agencies. They should be expected to have responsibility. I know that that’s subject to other audits and things like that.

Okay, so this 30-point plan delivered in February of 2018 talked about making the housing market fairer. As I’ve said, out of those 30 points, most of them are punitive. Let’s just talk about taxing speculators who are driving up housing costs. Well, we’ve certainly done that, and housing costs have gone down, haven’t they? Is that not the…? Oh, sorry, maybe that hasn’t happened.

Increasing the foreign buyers tax to 20 percent. Oh, that’s another thing that’s increased housing supply. Ex­panding the foreign buyers tax on areas outside of Metro Vancouver. We certainly have seen that that’s been expanded to many areas in the province.

Increasing the property transfer tax on the value of homes over $3 million. Well, I think $3 million is now becoming kind of an everyday cost in Vancouver. Three million dollars isn’t luxurious, to be honest. I know that there are homes that are under that, but $3 million…. I’m sure that that’s not the threshold that it should be at.

Where are the things that keep things in balance, moderate with the rising assessed values, shortages in housing?

Increasing the school tax on the value of homes over $3 million. Another punitive…. What did that do? The people that have homes over $3 million now have to pay additional school taxes? What about the people that don’t send their kids to the public school system or don’t have kids at all?

The bottom line is that it’s not meant to be a punitive system based on how much the value of your property is.

Anyway, it goes on about closing down tax fraud and closing loopholes, moving to stop tax evasion in pre-sale condo reassignments, taking action to end hidden owner­ship, including a new beneficial ownership registry, strengthening provincial auditing and enforcement pow­ers. Well, hopefully, that’s being used. We’re now seven years into this, and I haven’t seen the results of these audits showing incredible improvements, etc.

Based on the Premier’s comments about SROs, I don’t think that any one of us would really want to be living in those conditions. Maybe we should be looking at how we replace them. Maybe they don’t meet the minimum standard for people to actually stay in them.

Another one is moving to close property tax loopholes in the ALR. Well, that certainly has freed up a lot of accommodation and expanded housing.

Expanding information collection and information sharing with the federal government to prevent tax evasion. I’m sure that the Minister of Finance has taken that to heart and made certain that that’s being done.

[5:00 p.m.]

Seeking permanent provincial-federal action to combat money laundering, tax evasion and avoidance. Building the homes that people need, making over $6 billion plus investment in affordable housing. That $6 billion — has it led to any portion of those 114,000 homes that were promised in this document?

Anyways, it goes on about security for renters, expanding and increased benefits to seniors living independently, expanding and increasing the rental assistance program to help working parents, strengthening protections for renters and manufactured home owners.

It just happens that I have a manufactured home park in my riding that actually has been bought by a development company, and everybody has been given notice to move. They are getting a small token amount, but less than $100,000, and they are going to lose their homes where they have lived for over 27 or more years. Those people are essentially being constructively evicted, and it’s going to be warehousing; that’s what the plan is. There is no security for those people.

And extending the life, quality and affordability of existing affordable housing. I’m not certain what I’ve seen done on that, but I know that there are a lot of improvements that could be made.

Supporting partners to build and preserve affordable housing, creating HousingHub, building partnerships, building homes. Certainly, I do see the signs, and I know in my own riding that I can attest to the fact that New Opportunities for Women built a new facility that is up and operating. As a matter of fact, it is different. It is actually a co-ed facility, which is new and different because they are taking into account men that are in the same situation as women that are estranged.

Empowering local governments, expanding the use of MRDT revenues for affordable housing. Now, that was an interesting one when that came out.

The MRDT was originally about promoting commun­ities where there was tourism, and this was supposed to promote communities. I know that in some cases that money has been clawed back. But think about what it does in Whistler or Smithers, for that matter, or in many of the other resort municipalities that have MRDT, which in­cludes even the community that I represent in Kelowna.

Encouraging more rentals via property tax exemptions, empowering homeowners in stratas to deal with short-term rentals, which I think that that’s certainly taken effect in the last few weeks. But we’ll see what that’s created.

The last one is expanding transit and building communities. Those are part of the February 2018 Homes for B.C. plan.

Let’s talk a little bit more about what was supposed to have been provided. I think I mentioned the $6.6 billion in over ten years of investment. We’re over two-thirds of the way, so I’m assuming that out of that $6.6 billion, there’s probably $4½ billion that should have been spent by now, accomplishing the goal.

It says through partnerships. Partnerships. That’s not what we’re finding here with Bill 27. What we’re finding is another rule in the rule book that basically says: “We don’t want a partnership with you. You’re a problem, and we need to bring in rules to help make certain that we can control what it is you’re doing.”

[S. Chandra Herbert in the chair.]

As I mentioned, those people that are owning those buildings, regardless of whether they’re…. I mean, there is an expectation and an obligation that people that are renting have to maintain a certain level of standards.

I know that I enjoyed the two-minute statement the Speaker did this morning that was talking about his particular area. The Downtown Eastside happens to be a little bit removed from his riding, but needless to say, more importantly, there is an expectation through increased valuations of the property, increased values, that there is reinvestment happening. I know in the Speaker’s own riding, many of those buildings were created in the ’60s and probably need significant improvements. We wouldn’t want to see them deteriorate to the level of the SROs.

[5:05 p.m.]

I don’t disagree that these SROs may be a problem, but I certainly don’t think Bill 27…. Even though the city of Vancouver has asked for this in trying to control rents and who’s moving and stuff like that, I don’t see that this is really incentivizing the owners to do a better job.

What part of that rent control…? What’s going back to help that person that owns an older hotel that needs to reinvest in it? That hasn’t been found.

All we’ve come up with are lots of rules. We’ve come up with penalties. We’ve come up with the whole thing about the fact that if you’re not doing the right things like short-term rentals, etc…. We’ve put penalties in place because we’re trying to create that. But it’s not necessarily creating the capacity that we really need.

I know that the Premier and I, a few months ago, talked about the immigration and the pressures on British Columbia. I don’t disagree with him that there is pressure. We do need to, somehow, make certain that we are keeping up with that. We can’t just have unchecked immigration without having the capacity for these people to live here.

It shouldn’t be in a disrespectful way. I don’t think SROs are where immigrants are landing. However, if we had new…. If you wanted to call those 3,600, and we had dozens more like that, that type of accommodation would certainly accommodate some of those people that are moving in as immigrants here.

I like to think that what we should be doing is we should be looking at more of an incentive system that would create better quality of accommodation and not necessarily just a penalty. This is a penalty.

Mr. Speaker, before you stepped into the chair, I was talking about the rent increases in Vancouver that anybody that has property would have to cover — 10.7 percent last year, 6.35 percent the year before, over 5 percent the year before that. Those are staggering numbers of increases in property taxes. I understand the reasons why. They’re dealing with increased wage pressures and all of those things, but doesn’t that tell you something, that the SROs are under the same pressure?

If we want them to fail, well, then, maybe that’s what this bill is about, making the SROs so that they disappear. It doesn’t say that in there, but I think that the whole point about it is…. What we’re really looking for is we need to have more housing, and this is not the ideal type of housing that we need to have.

This document here was the…. February of 2018, that was the Housing docket. Now, let’s talk a little bit about: what did we know in September of 2020? We’re three years into the mandate. There’s a snap election called, and we’re talking about making housing more affordable and available.

It doesn’t actually talk about the supply, the numbers. How close did we get to that 114,000? We were dealing with much more “less inflationary pressure, lower inter­est rate” times. We had opportunities then that we clearly didn’t take advantage, or full advantage, of. Now we see the result of some of these projects that are coming out way over cost.

I had the Housing file for a short period of time. Honestly, there’s a place right here in west Victoria, or Vic West, as it’s called. They bought a warehouse, of all places, and the assessed value was about $3 million. That particular property traded, with B.C. Housing buying, for over $9 million before improvements. Well, I don’t know how that makes…. I just can’t square the math on that, but it was done. It’s been renovated.

The bottom line is that we’ve got to make certain that taxpayers get good value too. It’s not like…. I know that people are looking for more affordability when it comes to their grocery bill and things like that.

Unfortunately, this part in Bill 27 talks about limiting increases or giving the city of Vancouver, through their Community Charter, the right to being able to regulate rents on those 3,600 units. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to get any better. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to be controlled by somebody that is a caring landlord. Where is it that we’re going in the right direction to help make these people that are living in those 3,600 units become even more, I don’t know, satisfied with the living conditions that they’ve been dealt with?

[5:10 p.m.]

The highlights in this particular campaign document…. You don’t mind if I read out of that. Freezing rents to the end of 2021, and capping increases after that. Providing a renter’s rebate. I don’t think we’ve ever seen the renter’s rebate. I know it’s been talked about — $400, right? Maybe that’s those B.C. Hydro $100 cheques that everybody keeps getting, and they need to rethink that that’s a renters rebate.

Reducing construction costs to make homes more affordable. Well, we saw that with the closing at Canfor up in Houston, or the reduction. I mean, that’s bound to reduce costs in construction. I don’t know what’s done about the CleanBC plan and adding to the cost of concrete and other things like that.

What about the employer health tax? What have we done? All I can see is that we haven’t done anything to address this particular campaign promise that was promised in September of 2020.

Interjection.

B. Stewart: That’s right. More.

Controlling the rising cost of strata insurance. Well, I don’t know how that’s going, but I know that it is a concern. We do need to have exceptionally good plans around how we work with stratas and insurers to make certain that the risks that insurance companies faced are managed risks. But maybe we’re going to start putting rules in to control insurance, and then, soon, we’re going to have the insurance companies vacate the market because the fact is that the rule book says: “You know what? You can’t charge more than 2 or 3 percent increase in insurance.” And that’s not the way the insurance market works.

Continuing to deliver a steady supply of new, affordable homes. Providing more homes for Indigenous peo­ple in B.C. Getting more affordable housing built through HousingHub partnerships. I don’t know how that’s worked out.

I’d like to think that those HousingHub partnerships with Bill 27 would go back to the SROs, and we’d actually be talking about the new SROs in the Downtown Eastside but, more importantly across the Lower Mainland and throughout communities where they make sense. The HousingHub idea is great, because of the partnership. But what we haven’t seen is that we’re essentially still dealing with more rules in Bill 27 than we are actually about how we incentivize people, like the HousingHub partnerships, about getting real things built and developed in our communities.

Building more supportive housing. New rent supplements for the people moving from supportive housing. Those are some of the things that were promises back in that document, and I couldn’t help but look at the second Housing Minister.

Looking at some of his objectives written by then Premier John Horgan and talking about the objectives, on page 3 of his direction letter, and what the minister was facing was to make life more affordable for renters, particularly during the hardship caused by COVID-19. Deliver a freeze on rent increases, which I think we know that that’s happened, until the end of 2021.

I think that there was another rent freeze if I’m not mistaken. There was a cap put on it this year, because inflation got in the way of these rent increases. All of a sudden, instead of being, like, 4 percent — whatever the CPI is, or whatever — you can only get 2 percent or whatever the number is.

I think that this is where I go back to the rule book not necessarily incentivizing the people that invest. They’re not the government. They’re investing their own private capital. As these SROs that are being talked about in Bill 27…. So what we are really looking at is…. It says further in this letter of direction: “Then make permanent the actions our government took to limit rent increases to the rate of inflation.”

Well, I think that there was a tie-in to that. But when it started to get uncomfortable and people were saying, “Well, hey, listen. Inflation’s too high,” then the government is stepping in and interfering again.

Leading work to continue delivering on government’s ten-year housing plan. This letter was written November 26, 2020, over 3½ years ago. It talks about the affordable housing it’s bringing to tens of thousands of British Columbians, including working in partnership to create that elusive 114,000 affordable homes.

[5:15 p.m.]

Lead governments’ efforts to address homelessness by implementing a homelessness strategy: deliver more af­ford­able housing through the housing partnerships, which we’ve talked about as being something good, but providing additional low-interest loans; expanding partnerships with non-profit and co-op housing providers to acquire and preserve existing rental housing; and tasking the Hub with identifying new pathways to home ownership through a rent-to-own or other equity-building programs.

Jeez, that sounds familiar to the B.C. United plan, the rent-to-own plan that we rolled out.

Anyways, I don’t imagine that anybody that’s covered in Bill 27 with the SROs would be quite in that rent-to-own program. But I think we could do better with the SROs, and we could work to incentivize them, through partnerships, in uplifting the quality of the living experience for the people that are forced to live in those.

There’s not enough. I think that it’s government’s own admission. Here, after seven years, the actual results are far less than what they set out to. A lot of what we’re seeing here is we’re still reacting to issues that are coming up.

I mentioned the inflationary pressures. We’re talking about the same thing, the inflationary pressures, that peo­ple that own those SROs…. Whether they’re doing a good job or not, repairing or maintaining them or whatever, they still face the same pressures that anybody that owns a home in the city of Vancouver would be facing, where it’s over almost an 11 percent increase last year and over the two previous years before that over almost 12 percent. I think that that’s important.

What I really wanted to talk about was: where are the solutions in this bill? Is the solution to create more rules? That’s what I kind of really cringe at, when I don’t see solutions that are coming forward as part of legislation.

I mean this bill, Bill 27, is to deal with a particular problem. It’s dealing with the fact that there are owners of SROs, when there’s a tenant change, increasing the rents, and this is to basically prevent that from happening. Why would that be happening? Well, because of the fact that they probably have the same cap on rental increases as all the other rental communities that have been suffering for many years and complaining about, because they can’t recapture the cost of inflation.

What do they do? They cut costs. They don’t necessarily fix things in a timely manner. Any of the members that are on the opposite side of the House, even this side, that live in stratas know that it’s a requirement under the Strata Act to essentially have some sort of depreciation report that talks about the entire building. Whether it’s elevators, certain facilities, etc., you need to make certain that those facilities, that report, is built into your plan. That’s part of how your strata costs, etc., are to be collected, to make certain that you deal with it in a timely manner.

Same thing with that insurance model that we were talking about a minute ago. If you don’t address these things that are going to be a problem…. What’s the lifespan of certain elements, the roof, things around the foundation, etc.

I think that the thing about it is that it’s very important that you can’t take the costs of owning something out of the equation by just limiting it. This Bill 27 is another control put in. We’ve already seen, year after year, controls that are put in to try to make things more affordable. It doesn’t work. That’s the rule book working against you.

Bring out the playbook. Let’s talk about: let the development community build the accommodation for what it costs. Innovate, look at ways to reduce the cost of what it is that drives the costs up.

I mean, we already know…. I’m sure the members on all sides of this House have heard about the step code charges and things that we’re bringing in. They’re for good reasons. I mean, don’t think that anybody is against the idea of having better glazing on windows and better installation and things like that, but we have to be realistic.

When we talk about the playbook, let’s make it so that it’s an incentive to do better not to make it so that it’s an impediment and some sort of club or bludgeon. That everybody that owns a piece of property, whether it’s rental, stuff that’s being built for people to live in or buy, maybe, under that talked about rent-to-own program that I haven’t heard about currently by the government….

[5:20 p.m.]

Anyways, as we conclude talking about this particular bill, Bill 27, I just want to consider its implications on the most vulnerable populations and the housing market.

The B.C. United is committed to genuine reforms to ensure safety, support and sustainability in housing, rather than temporary fixes. I look forward to us scrutinizing this bill in the committee stage.

M. Bernier: I want to thank the speaker before me for his commentary. I wish I had his optimism that we would get to scrutinize this in committee stage. I’m afraid we probably won’t get there. The Minister of Housing says we’ll get there, but with all due respect to the minister….

I want to take this into a couple of different places.

I really have to start by saying that one of the more offensive pieces of this piece of legislation is not so much the words that are in it, and I’ll get to some of the commentary on the actual piece of legislation, but the fact that we are two days away from the end of a session.

Typically, there’s an unwritten rule of respect and decorum in this House and in this Legislature that the government understands the role of opposition. I know they do. They spent 16 years over here. I get to use the 16 years in a positive way for myself on that one.

One of the things, though, that’s frustrating, and I’m surprised that the government doesn’t want to acknowledge or recognize it, is the fact that the role of opposition is to hold government accountable, to scrutinize legislation, to make sure that the legislation that is being brought forward is the best piece of legislation to help people. There are times when we will recognize that and all agree in this House, nemine contradicente, that it’s the right thing to do. I stole some words from the Clerk there that I never get to actually say.

But there are times like today that I find it quite offensive. Let me say a couple of reasons why. Again, we’re at the very end of a session, and this government, for some reason, has decided to bring forward Bill 27 with no notice, for starters. Typically, at least, there’s time given for the opposition to determine what timelines they would like to have to debate, discuss, scrutinize, try to modify, if possible, a piece of legislation.

Not only do we have a short timeline to do that, but the minister today then puts a motion forward saying that we have to have everything finished by 6:15. Looking at the clock here, if I’m understanding the motion the minister put forward, we only have about 45 minutes left to discuss this bill.

I’m not sure if people, especially the government members, caught this, but the most offensive piece is that we can’t even debate this bill. We can talk about it as opposition. But why I say “debate” is because…. I went through the 27 bills that have been presented in this parliamentary session. Every single bill has had an opportunity to be discussed, to be debated. We have some in the House right now that we almost certainly are going to have to have closure on, because there are such large bills being discussed at the end of the legislation.

But every single bill that has been brought forward so far comes into effect — commencement of that bill — on royal assent or, in some cases, a combination of royal assent and some portions of that piece of legislation during regulation, OIC or Lieutenant-Governor approval. But not this one. I’ve never seen this before.

In all of my time in this House, I have never seen a piece of legislation that has been presented that basically says: “Don’t bother talking about it anymore. It’s already passed.” In fact, the commencement of this bill that this Housing Minister put forward says: “This Act comes into force on the day after the date it receives First Reading.”

[5:25 p.m.]

First reading was yesterday. If I’m understanding that, this has come into effect now. Today. I don’t know how that’s democratic, first of all. I don’t know how that’s proper. I don’t know how that meets the standing orders of how we present bills in this House. That’s an argument, obviously, for another day.

The fact that we have 26 pieces of legislation that re­spectfully go through a process of debate, discussion, scrutiny, then a vote…. If I’m reading this properly, it really doesn’t matter. The minister is basically saying: “Go ahead and talk for a little while. It really doesn’t matter what you say. You could bring forward valuable pieces or amendments. Doesn’t matter. It’s already passed.”

I’m not trying to put Mr. Speaker on the spot here. He’s been here as long as I have. A bit longer, I believe. I have never seen a piece of legislation put on this floor that says: “Don’t worry. It’s already passed. It doesn’t matter what you say or do.” I was wondering why none of the government members or the NDP were standing up to speak to this. But it wasn’t until I read the fourth section there, where it says it doesn’t matter if they speak to it or not…. It’s already going through the commencement process.

I am hard-pressed to understand the urgency, not only to bring this piece of legislation forward at the, I’d like to say, eleventh hour — but it’s even past that — but the fact that it also, like I just articulated, says the act comes into force on the date after it was read at first reading in the Legislative Assembly. You want to talk about a misuse of power. You want to talk about throwing democracy out the window. That basically explains it right there.

We know that the Premier, 18 months ago, promised to clean up the Downtown Eastside. He said he was going to do some stuff. Nothing’s really materialized. It’s only gotten worse. It’s my understanding, when I read this bill and some of the bill notes, that this actually invalidates the need for a court case. This is an interesting piece here, because when you look at — there’s already been a court case, is my understanding — this piece of legislation, it is government’s way of trying to make things retroactive, to validate things that have already taken place, right or wrong.

I’m not completely going to start debating the decisions or the merits of what the city of Vancouver is doing, other than to say the urgency that I can see is the fact that now government is trying to fix yet another problem. When I read clause 3 on this bill, because there are only four clauses, the entire bill, basically, is about validating the bylaws, as it says, and making things effective the day after first reading to help the city of Vancouver.

It goes right into the bill, saying that: “The Vancouver council is conclusively deemed, now, to have had the authority as of December 8, 2021.” So this bill is trying to say that for the last three years, if I’m understanding that…. I’d love to ask the questions in committee stage to get clarity. I won’t, obviously, have that opportunity because of the way government is not only ramming this through, but the decision-making process for debate.

What does that mean? Does that mean for the last three years, this government can just say: “By the way, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done the last three years, right or wrong. We’re putting a piece of legislation now saying it was right. It doesn’t matter how the courts ruled. The courts ruled you didn’t have the authority to do something, so we’re going to change the law retroactively to say that as of three years ago technically, you could have, should have, would have had the authority if this legislation was in place. So we’ll just put this legislation forward now, retroactively, for three years, 2½.”

[5:30 p.m.]

And the last part of the bill: “This entire section is retroactive to the extent necessary to give full force and effect” to the bill. Again, this government is trying to make Bill 27, I guess, fix an issue of what? Maybe a court case that somebody lost. Again, I have to speculate because we don’t get to have those discussions with the minister, at least in any detail. The minister says we can. I’m looking forward to that, if that actually takes place.

Mr. Speaker, I think you and I…. We can all agree that when it comes to SROs, or when it just comes to housing in general, we need to do better.

I grew up in Vancouver. I’ve seen the changes over my lifetime, which, when I look in the mirror, seems like it’s a lot longer than I want to admit. But there have been a lot of changes, whether it’s the Downtown Eastside…. And it has spread to other parts of Vancouver. I think one of the challenges when we talk about this is it has now spread to other communities.

I now live in, and have for 30 years, and represent Peace River South. I live in the city of Dawson Creek. I’ve never seen it as bad as it is right now, with people on the street with inadequate housing, where a modular SRO unit, if you want to call it that, was brought in with inadequate supports, inadequate funding. To see the way people are living is atrocious. I think we can all agree that in a society and in a country like Canada that we all want to be so proud of, to see how some people live, to see how some people are on the streets….

I have been to some of these SROs, and without sounding too negative, or flippant even, on it, it’s no wonder that many people choose to live in tents or live on the streets. Whether they’re private or government…. I know we’ve talked about upkeep. We’ve talked about maintenance. In fact, a lot of my colleagues have talked about the lack of maintenance and the effects that that has had on people who live in some of these places.

We need to remember a lot of these now called SROs weren’t necessarily intentionally built for that, whether it’s hotels…. I’ve seen some of these hotels that probably, realistically, should have been condemned, probably should have been torn down. But in somebody’s almighty wisdom, it was, “Let’s pay a bunch of money and house people in them,” in conditions that are deplorable in many cases.

That, in itself, was a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that, for years now, this government is saying that they would build 114,000 affordable housing units. We know that only 16 percent of those have been built. We know that people are struggling right now because we have the highest rents in the country, the most unaffordable houses in the country.

We always talk about the need…. At least in my experience, and I think we could all agree. We all talk about the need for diversity in our housing stock. Some people are lucky to get into a single detached home, the old topic of getting a white-picket-fence house. Some people aren’t able to. Some people choose not to, which is why you look at the variables around row housing, townhomes, condos. Then for those that can’t afford to get into those, sometimes there are now the rental options, if they can’t purchase, and the variety of rental options.

[5:35 p.m.]

Then if we go even further, there are those that struggle with the high rents that are now on the streets. There are many on our streets, as we all can acknowledge, that are struggling with mental health issues, addiction issues, a combination of both, in some cases, as well, who require a different kind of support, a different kind of housing. Where the topic and consideration of SROs came in was for some of those people.

Now, there are some SROs or hotels or units that were built to help for students that were coming into Vancouver from places like Dawson Creek that maybe couldn’t get on campus. So they were going into units like this, short-term rentals as we call them, in some ways, but while they’re going to school. I guess some would call it, maybe, a little bit more glorified hostel setting, and that’s how some of these were designed and set up.

But what we’re seeing through this piece of legislation, and what I’m hearing from some, is the thought that this is another way of government trying to devalue these places — obviously the privately owned ones.

You put more restrictions in place. It makes it harder for these people to invest to make them more livable. Costs have gone up, as we talked about, whether it’s for repairs or taxes or all of the other things, for these private people that run these facilities, or, in some places, companies. Is this a way for government to once again try to…? We know government doesn’t like private builders or investors.

With these regulations coming in, it’s now going to put even more pressure on these facilities where they’re not going to be worth as much. When we talk about unintended consequences…. If somebody owns one of these facilities, and it gets to the point where, because of government strangulation over top of them with the regulations, they get to the point where…. Some people just walk away from their investment, or they’ll shut it down completely because of the land value.

You know, there are different things depending on the class, depending on how they’re rated through the city of Vancouver, in this case. There are a whole bunch of different facets that come into how the people are taxed, what they can do with the property. I think we don’t need to get into all that today. But it’s the fact that this legislation, on the surface, does not seem to be doing anything to help the people — the people that are running SROs, the people who live in SROs.

We have 3,600 that this is going to be affecting — 3,600 units. We look at the concerns…. I don’t think it’s intentional, but the concerns for a lot of people, when I say…. When they get nickel-and-dimed to the point where they can barely keep the doors open on the privately operated ones, no wonder they have to pull back on renovations or maintenance.

I wish it was just private, but we’re seeing this happen all across the province with government-funded, with B.C. Housing. First of all, you look at the one housing unit that was in North Vancouver a couple of years ago that unfortunately burnt down, killing a few people. In that case, they found out that maintenance hadn’t been done, even though there had been requests to B.C. Housing for operational maintenance funding. Nothing happened. People died. We’ve got the Winters Hotel that burnt down, with lives lost there.

These should be warning signs, unfortunately, when people have lost their lives, that we need to be doing the proper investments and the proper supports in the areas where government has that responsibility.

[5:40 p.m.]

I also say that government has to figure out how to get out of the way for the private sector that’s trying to actually build housing in other areas, whether it’s affordable housing or single-family. We’ve heard all of the challenges. We’ve debated — almost to nausea, through this session — some of the challenges in the housing crisis.

I want to go back for a moment. Not only is Bill 27 being forced through at the very end, but it’s not really helping the people. That’s where my concern is. I see firsthand, when I’m visiting family in Vancouver, that people are struggling. I see it when I’m at home in Dawson Creek, the people that are struggling. Sometimes it’s not just putting in a modular or buying a hotel, calling it an SRO and saying: “Look at us. We’ve helped people.” That’s not the end of the job for us here.

If we don’t have the supports for people that are struggling with addictions or for people that are struggling with mental health when we have some of these SROs and we just say, “There you go. You have got a roof over your head….” I’ve toured some of these. It’s somewhat of an exaggeration, but they don’t feel much bigger than my desk, some of these rooms, and we’re asking people to stay in there, get off the streets. Out of sight, out of mind, maybe, some people think — which isn’t the way, as a compassionate society, that we should be dealing with this.

I would have hoped, in the very least…. I know this is trying to help a specific issue, I guess, for Vancouver, but the challenge is not a Vancouver-only problem. I almost regret saying this, but just in the last, I think, six months alone, I’ve had eight people die in Dawson Creek who were part of the B.C. Housing SRO unit there.

Some of them, who didn’t want to stay in their room, went outside and succumbed to the elements. Of course, sometimes — I also hate saying it — it gets to minus 30, minus 40 up in my region. It’s a false sense of security in some ways, too, when we have these but we don’t have the supports for the people around the province.

On the surface, when we talk about vacancy control, some would say…. There are always debates around that. There are merits, in some ways, to looking at vacancy control, in some circumstances, as a short-term fix, but as we’ve heard from some other people today talking about this: where’s the long-term plan? Coming out and doing a flashy announcement that we’re going to build 114,000 in ten years…. We’re now in year 7, and 16 percent have been done. It’s no wonder that government no longer talks about that promise.

We are going into an election. It’s at that point now where we all, in different ways, get to be held accountable for what we’ve said in this House. what we’ve promised outside of this House. Then, as we always say, the voters will decide; the public will decide.

I always try to remind the public when I have the opportunity…. When we look at the democratic system, as I started off with, we have a process here now with the official opposition, the B.C. United and two other parties as well, but with us, specifically, as the majority here, as the opposition. It’s our job to look at these bills, to talk about them — to, as I said, bring scrutiny to them. The fact that the government is not open to even having those discussions really….

[5:45 p.m.]

I’ll put it this way. I ran to have a seat in here to represent not only the people of my region, obviously, but to try to support good governance, to support, promote and keep a well-run, functioning democratic system. That’s what we should all be doing. That’s, at the end of the day, I thought, why we’re here. We will, of course, have differences of opinion on some things. It’s also fair to say there are many times, as I said, that we’ve stood in this House and agreed. We probably do that more often than not.

That’s why it’s troubling when we get towards the end of a session and we can’t have those frank, democratic discussions in a responsible, respectful way to follow the process that I think we all ran on to be in here in this building to support our constituents and to support the people of British Columbia.

We have some people in this House right now that aren’t running again. I know that they talk about the amazing respect we have for this establishment in this facility and cherish the moments that we have in here. Do we have frustrating moments like today? I’m sure we’ll have more. When the NDP get to experience opposition again, they’ll understand what I’m talking about. Hopefully, we won’t put them in this position.

All joking aside, it is important, when we’re looking at pieces of legislation like this, that they not just get rammed through and forced through, like I’m afraid we’re going to have other ones in the next day or two, especially on the heels of an election. The public deserves better, the voters and the people of British Columbia deserve better, but the establishment deserves better.

There might be some in here that want to burn down the establishment. I know that’s not the official opposition. We respect the role of government and of opposition. We’re just asking government to also respect the role of opposition and what we have to do when we’re scrutinizing and talking about pieces of legislation like this.

With that, I’ll take my seat and look forward to some more discussion.

T. Wat: This is my second time that I am talking to you, Mr. Speaker, and that I stand in this House, with an extremely heavy heart and extreme disappointment, to comment on this piece of legislation, Bill 27, Municipalities Enabling and Validating (No. 5) Amendment Act, 2024. It was put forward by the NDP government and validates the city of Vancouver’s bylaw, which imposes vacancy control on 3,600 specific single-room-occupancy units.

Since I became an elected official, an MLA for my riding — at that time, it was called Richmond Centre — for the past more than a decade, every time I stand in the House, particularly when I’m debating in second reading of any bill, I feel such a great privilege and such a great honour.

I normally would consult my constituents and my community about that particular piece of legislation to get their voices, their concerns, their thoughts, and bring them back to this House, with the hope that the government, the minister, will listen to the voices of my constituents, the same as for my other colleagues’ constituents, so that they can make amendments accordingly.

[5:50 p.m.]

Why did I say that I stood up with such an extremely heavy heart this time? It’s because when I got a copy of Bill 27 — my colleague from Peace River South already mentioned it — it was so shocking to see this particular last sentence, saying: “This Act comes into force on the day after the date it receives First Reading in the Legislative Assembly.”

As an immigrant woman in politics…. My family and I immigrated to this beautiful province in 1989. I’ve been here for almost 35 years. I got into politics because I really wanted to raise awareness for all immigrants about the beauty and the value of full democracy. My journey has been filled by a deep desire to empower my fellow immigrants to engage in the political process and have their voices heard by the government.

When I saw this particular commencement clause, I almost fainted. I thought under our democracy, our western democratic system…. When a bill is introduced and is presented to the Legislative Assembly, we always follow….

The introduction is the first reading. The second reading is for both sides of the House, the MLAs from the governing party and the opposition — now we have three opposition parties; we are the official opposition — to come and debate in a respectable and a constructive way so that we can bring the voices of all different constituents into this chamber. After this second reading, then we can have, really, the more interactive debate in the committee stage.

Then this government, in the last week of this final session before the October election, introduced two significant pieces of legislation on Monday — today is Tuesday — almost towards the end. Again, it really shocked me that the Government House Leader introduced a motion that will end our debate at 6:15. I won’t have my full 30 minutes to express my thoughts about this bill.

What democracy is this? I honestly fail to understand. God only knows whether we will have the second reading. He said that the act comes into force…. I mean, we are doing second reading now. My apologies, Mr. Speaker.

I don’t even know whether we will have the committee stage so that we can engage our Housing shadow minister. Several colleagues in my B.C. United party are so proficient at the housing file. They have come up with all kinds of ideas on how to solve the current housing crisis in B.C. It affects so many people.

I totally cannot understand why this government, why this minister, why all the ministers in the government don’t seem to hear the concern from B.C. United MLAs. We keep telling the government. Please listen to the voices of our concern. Don’t impose closure on any bill. This is not the spirit of a democratic system, and time and time again, this happens.

[5:55 p.m.]

What’s the point of us coming from all over the province to have this kind of debate? I don’t see the need to come here if the government keeps imposing closure, keeps saying that this act is coming into force on the day after the date it receives first reading in the Legislative Assembly. What happened to the second reading, to the committee stage that we have? In all the more than ten years that I’ve been here….

I don’t know how to go back to my constituency after this week and explain to them why I got into politics. I told them they should get involved in politics. They should cast their vote and, if they feel that they can do it even more constructively and take more of their time out of their careers, get into politics.

I firmly believe that democracy only thrives when every individual, regardless of their background, has the opportunity to participate in the legislative process and express their opinions freely. And here we are. We are all elected officials, yet we are not given the opportunity to participate fully in this legislative process and express our opinions. I am given a timeline. I have to finish by 6:15.

It is really regrettable that since the NDP took office, transparency and the democratic principle have been sorely lacking in the governance of our province. This NDP administration, unfortunately, has failed to uphold the values of openness and inclusivity, leaving many of us in the B.C. United, many of my constituents and, I’m sure, many British Columbians feeling disillusioned and disempowered.

Plus, this NDP government, all the ministers, also exhibits the arrogance of not listening. The lack of transparency, and the tendency to introduce legislation at the last minute of the legislative session in the past few years, exhibited by this NDP government not only undermines public trust but also hampers the ability of all our elected members to have sufficient time to consult our constituents.

I want to go and talk to my constituents. What do they think about Bill 27? Without any notice…. This was introduced yesterday. How do they expect us, as elected representatives, to have time to talk to our constituents? Is this what democracy is about? Without access to meaningful engagement opportunities, many individuals, many of my constituents, many members of my community are left on the sidelines.

I hope that members from the other side can stand up and speak on this bill. But unfortunately, after the Housing Minister spoke on it in the second reading…. None of the other side have come up and spoken on it, because they cannot. It’s clearly stated here that after its first reading…. That means it comes into force. So members across the aisle don’t even bother.

Why do we get into our elected official mission? If you are not representing your constituents, why, especially when we are talking about SROs?

[6:00 p.m.]

My colleague the member for West Vancouver–Capi­lano, the shadow minister for Housing, said she had been to the SROs in the Downtown Eastside and other places. Buildings are bug-infested, rodent infestations, bad plumb­ing, bathrooms that don’t work, windowless rooms and just generally undesirable. She said: “Aberrant living conditions.”

A lot of research has been done about people’s surroundings and what impact it has on them emotionally, physically, on their health. If we allow and create a system where people who are vulnerable have to live in such horrible, horrific surroundings, how are they ever going to feel good about themselves?

My colleague from West Vancouver–Capilano — let me quote her. She said: “Because you look around that room and you say, ‘Is this what I deserve? Is this all that I deserve as a person, as a human?’”

Instead of trying to get to the root of the housing problem, this is totally a stopgap measure — totally. Because for this Premier and this Housing Minister and the other side, their whole goal is the October election. They just want to show British Columbians that they are solving the problem and hoping that there’s no time for opposition members to bring up all the issues.

As I said, by introducing two significant pieces of legislation in the last week, without even any courtesy of notifying our House Leader in the B.C. United, we are so shocked. I thought that I didn’t have to speak up on another bill, because we were told that there are no more bills coming. All of a sudden we were told that there are two more pieces, yesterday, and this is already very shocking. What’s even shocking is what I keep repeating, this particular clause 4.

This really follows a troubling pattern for this NDP government of ramming through legislation in the final days of the session — not only this session; the last session also — avoiding proper scrutiny and vigorous debate. I feel as if my voice is being silenced. Such tactics really undermine the democratic process and prevent thorough examination of the potential impact and consequences of these legislative measures.

This bill effectively enacts vacancy control measures that limit rent increases not only during the tenure of a single tenant but also between tenants. By validating this bylaw, the NDP government invalidated the need for a court case that had previously struck down similar vacancy control measures implemented by the city of Vancouver.

Even the city of Vancouver mayor said that this is a temporary solution. The city needs senior levels of government to provide more affordable housing to keep people out of homelessness.

[6:05 p.m.]

I don’t know whether the Housing Minister is running out of ideas or he totally doesn’t understand this housing crisis. Vacancy control is a short-term fix that causes long-term damage to the rental market.

My colleague from Kelowna-Mission has so many ideas about how to solve this housing crisis. The Housing Minister has listened to the idea coming from this side and stolen the idea and worked to the benefit of all of British Columbia. We don’t mind our idea being stolen.

The core issue of this housing crisis is the lack of housing supply across the spectrum of housing. The NDP has only opened 16 percent of the 114,000 units they promised in the 2017 provincial election. Just now my colleague from Kelowna West already cited a series of broken promises from the 2020 and 2017 elections.

Vacancy control would further deter the creation of affordable housing units. Studies have shown that it could lead to the cancellation of tens of thousands of proposed housing projects. This would damage affordability even further. In fact, vacancy control was rejected by the NDP’s own Rental Housing Task Force.

The NDP Rental Housing Task Force rejected vacancy control in its 2018 report. That report, that NDP Rental Housing Task Force report, concluded that it would have unintended consequences such as reducing the affordable rental stock or lowering investment into needed repairs.

The Housing Minister and the NDP don’t have to listen to B.C. United members. But they should listen to their own NDP Rental Housing Task Force. That was six years ago, 2018, and now it’s 2024. They did not pay attention to their own report, and they have come up with this Bill 27. It’s time for this NDP government to provide real solutions to rising unaffordability, prioritize an increase in supply and get soaring housing prices under control.

Eighteen months ago the Premier made a bold promise to clean up the Downtown Eastside when there was the displacement of those who were living in Downtown Eastside tent cities. The Premier said that he was going to appoint a czar for the area and phase out SROs. Surprisingly, none of these promises have been fulfilled, and today chaos and disorder are on the streets. It’s worse than ever, exacerbated by the seven years under this NDP leadership.

The Housing Minister, when he introduced this bill on Monday, said: “The province remains committed to phasing out SROs and replacing them with dignified housing.” I have two comments on this particular sentence that I quote.

[6:10 p.m.]

First of all, how can the Housing Minister…? How can British Columbians believe what he’s saying, that his government remains committed to phasing out SROs, when the Premier, 18 months ago, already said that? If the Premier has not carried through with his promise, how could the Housing Minister have done that?

The second comment I’m going to talk about is that the Housing Minister said he will replace them with dignified housing. That means that even the Housing Minister agrees that SROs are not dignified housing. So do something about it instead of coming up with this kind of stopgap measure.

This legislation, while it applies limited vacancy control, is ultimately a half measure designed to buy time before the next election. As I said earlier, everything this government is doing is just for the election; it’s not for the benefit, the interest of British Columbians.

It raises significant concern about the potential expansion of such controls, which history has shown can deter home-building activity and even further exacerbate the housing crisis. Already we have the most unaffordable rentals in Canada, the most unaffordable housing in Can­ada and in North America.

The Premier needs to answer for his broken promises and provide British Columbians with a firm date for the phase-out of the SROs. Instead of saying every time, “We are committed to phasing out,” how about giving us a firm date? The people of this province — my constituents, my community — deserve more than stopgap solutions. They need comprehensive and effective housing reforms.

The situation of Atira and B.C. Housing highlights a pattern of mismanagement under the Premier’s watch when he served as the Housing Minister. This mismanagement has often led to warehousing vulnerable individuals with­out the necessary support, often compromising their safety and well-being. The personal accounts from tenants and the tragic outcomes we witness are a stark reminder of the failure to provide effective leadership in housing.

The NDP’s approach of placing people in unsafe conditions without proper supports, lacking accountability and transparency, is simply unacceptable. Instead of phasing out SROs, the Premier bought hotel rooms and worsened the problem. These hotels were not purposely built for supportive housing, and the results we see are dangerous. That includes deadly fires like the Winters Hotel that burned down, killing two occupants.

As we debate this bill, we must consider its implications on our most vulnerable populations and the housing market. The official opposition party, B.C. United, is committed to genuine reforms that ensure safety, support and sustainability in housing, rather than temporary fixes that fail to address the root causes of our housing crisis.

[6:15 p.m.]

Deputy Speaker: Pursuant to the time allocation motion adopted earlier today, it is my responsibility to note the hour that is now 6:15 p.m. Consequently, debate on second reading of Bill 27 is now complete. I will put the question on second reading.

Motion approved.

Hon. R. Kahlon: I move the bill be committed to a Committee of the Whole House to be considered at the next sitting of the House after today.

Bill 27, Municipalities Enabling and Validating (No. 5) Amendment Act, 2024, read a second time and referred to a Committee of the Whole House for consideration at the next sitting of the House after today.

[The Speaker in the chair.]

Reporting of Bills

BILL 25 — HAIDA NATION RECOGNITION
AMENDMENT ACT, 2024

Bill 25, Haida Nation Recognition Amendment Act, reported complete without amendment to be considered at the next sitting of the House after today.

Standing Order 81.1

ADOPTION OF GOVERNMENT
BUSINESS SCHEDULE

Hon. R. Kahlon: Mr. Speaker, I wish to advise the House that an agreement could not be reached with all opposition caucuses on the allocation of time for consideration of the government’s legislative agenda. I do want the record to show that we tried.

I appreciate the official opposition is not particularly supportive of the use of time allocation in any situation. But I think it’s important to note that with the time that we had, we tried our best to work with the opposition to adjust the committee schedules in accordance to where some priorities lie for the opposition and where they would like to ask a particular question.

As such, I move:

[That, pursuant to Standing Order 81.1 (2):

1. All remaining stages of consideration of Bill (No. 27) intituled Municipalities Enabling and Validating (No. 5) Amendment Act, 2024, be disposed of by 6.15 p.m. on Wednesday, May 15, 2024.

a. If at 6.10 p.m., the bill is still being considered at committee stage, the Chair shall forthwith put any remaining question to complete the consideration of the bill, without further amendment or debate, which shall be deemed passed and which shall not be subject to a formal division call, but which may be taken in accordance with Practice Recommendation No. 1.

b. Once the title of the bill has passed, the committee shall rise and report the bill complete with or without amendment, as the case may be, to the House.

c. Immediately thereafter, notwithstanding Standing Order 80, Standing Order 81, or any Standing Order or Sessional Order relating to the times and days of the sittings of the House, the question on all remaining stages of consideration the bill shall be put forthwith without amendment or debate.

d. If a division is called on the motion for third reading of the bill, the division shall proceed forthwith in accordance with Standing Order 16 (2).

2. All remaining stages of consideration of Bill (No. 26) intituled Name Amendment Act (No. 2), 2024, be disposed of by 8.30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 15, 2024.

a. If at 8.25 p.m., the bill is still being considered at committee stage, the Chair shall forthwith put any remaining question to complete the consideration of the bill, without further amendment or debate, which shall be deemed passed and which shall not be subject to a formal division call, but which may be taken in accordance with Practice Recommendation No. 1.

b. Once the title of the bill has passed, the committee shall rise and report the bill complete with or without amendment, as the case may be, to the House.

c. Immediately thereafter, notwithstanding Standing Order 80, Standing Order 81, or any Standing Order or Sessional Order relating to the times and days of the sittings of the House, the question on all remaining stages of consideration the bill shall be put forthwith without amendment or debate.

d. If a division is called on the motion for third reading of the bill, the division shall proceed forthwith in accordance with Standing Order 16 (2).

3. All remaining stages of consideration of Bill (No. 21) intituled Legal Professions Act be disposed of by 8.30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 15, 2024.

a. If at 8.25 p.m., the bill is still being considered at committee stage, the Chair shall forthwith put any remaining question to complete the consideration of the bill, without further amendment or debate, which shall be deemed passed and which shall not be subject to a formal division call, but which may be taken in accordance with Practice Recommendation No. 1.

b. That, notwithstanding section 3 (a), if at 8.25 p.m., the committee has not considered the amendment to the bill standing on the Order Paper in the name of the Attorney General, the amendment to clause 78 shall be deemed to have passed, and clause 78, as amended, shall be deemed to have passed.

c. That, notwithstanding section 3 (a), if at 8.25 p.m., the committee has not considered the amendment to the bill standing on the Order Paper in the name of the Attorney General, the amendment to clause 225 shall be deemed to have passed, and clause 225, as amended, shall be deemed to have passed.

[6:20 p.m.]

d. Once the title of the bill has passed, the committee shall rise and report the bill complete with or without amendment, as the case may be, to the House.

e. Immediately thereafter, notwithstanding Standing Order 80, Standing Order 81, or any Standing Order or Sessional Order relating to the times and days of the sittings of the House, the question on all remaining stages of consideration the bill shall be put forthwith without amendment or debate.

f. If a division is called on the motion for third reading of the bill, the division shall proceed forthwith in accordance with Standing Order 16 (2).

And further, that, for greater certainty, a committee considering a bill in Section B may rise and report progress for the purpose of receiving a report from Section A or Section C in accordance with this order.]

The Speaker: Members, the question is adoption of the time allocation motion moved by the Government House Leader.

Motion approved on division.

Hon. R. Kahlon moved adjournment of the House.

Motion approved.

The Speaker: This House stands adjourned until 1:30 p.m. tomorrow.

The House adjourned at 6:21 p.m.