FLETCHER: Tenants’ rights out of control, police can’t intervene

Tom Fletcher grew up in the Peace River region and has covered B.C. politics and business as a journalist since 1984. He lives in VictoriaRepresentatives of B.C.’s growing network of “supportive housing” facilities formed an association last week to go public with an urgent plea for Premier David Eby: let us regain control by giving us authority to ban weapons from housing units and evict people who are dangerous to staff and residents.The common public reaction to this was, what? They can’t do that now? Can’t they just call the cops?In many cases, no, they can’t. And now there’s been an apparent murder in a converted old motel in Victoria, one of many incidents where criminal intruders gain access to housing and use it as a base for drug dealing and associated violence..I first heard of this issue in 2016, after B.C. Liberal housing minister Rich Coleman started buying up single-room occupancy hotels in East Vancouver, then old motels and rest homes in other urban areas to get hard-core street people out of tents.This was years before the COVID-19 pandemic, when shelter restrictions spurred more growth of tent camps. Times were tough in NDP Alberta, and B.C. had become the destination for down-and-outers that some locals took to calling “Alberians.” I asked Coleman if a converted nursing home in my neighbourhood, bought to house people from a sprawling tent camp on the provincial courthouse lawn, would ban the drug trafficking and consumption that were wreaking havoc at the camp. We can’t do that, he replied. Tenants have a right to privacy, just like you do at home.Free housing, free food and freedom to use drugs were the formula for success, if you can call it that..The problem mirrors what happens in the tent camps. Criminals find weak, addicted residents and set up shop. The deal is simple; I supply you with drugs and I come and go as I please, protected by your privacy rights.At a May 8 news conference, Carolina Ibarra, CEO of Pacifica Housing, described one scene in the Victoria motel where staff were called to deal with a resident who had overdosed. They found multiple non-residents in the room, and a gun on the bed.“We had been struggling to prohibit or enforce the prohibition of the firearm, so we gathered our evidence, we went to the Residential Tenancy Branch, and we lost,” Ibarra explained.An arbitrator ruled that the presence of an illegal weapon was not enough to waive the Residential Tenancy Act’s requirement to notify residents in advance of entering the room. This was the same motel where a man was found dead on April 26. Police are investigating it as a homicide..This happens in conventional rental housing as well. A year ago I spoke with the owner of a Victoria house who had moved to Vancouver for work. His tenant struggled with addiction, lost her business and eventually allowed one or more drug dealers to move in.A few months later, the owner found the house was trashed, with broken walls, doors and furniture, needles and condoms amid the filth. People came and went at all hours, with neighbours horrified at the fights and disruptions outside. Police wouldn’t respond to a tenant dispute, so the owner spent months navigating the residential tenancy bureaucracy to get hearings and finally give notice of inspection and eviction, while paying private security to protect the neighbours and what was left of the house.Only then could police intervene. Eventually the owner found what appeared to be a cache of crack cocaine and fentanyl in the house..The guiding principles of this 'tenants’ rights' movement have been received wisdom for as long as I can remember. Landlords are greedy and wealthy; tenants are poor and exploited.Media reports almost always follow this rule. A new media word, 'renoviction,' has been invented to describe any effort by a property owner to upgrade an old building that requires it to be vacated. Governments, not just those of the NDP variety, place strict limits on rent increases and establish residential tenancy regulations and offices to defend against intrusions by landlords. The narrative of greedy capitalist landlord and exploited victim tenant is a direct application of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, published in Germany in the mid-19th century: “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed….”The modern results of this Marxist choke-hold on property rights are all around us. Rental properties are chronically in short supply, often run down, and those that are built as market housing tend to be for higher-income tenants. When tenants can’t be evicted or controlled, horror stories are the result, as recent cases in B.C. have shown.Tom Fletcher grew up in the Peace River region and has covered B.C. politics and business as a journalist since 1984. He lives in Victoria.tomfletcherbc@gmail.com X:@tomfletcherbc

FLETCHER: Tenants’ rights out of control, police can’t intervene

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