The Mainlander sits down with Matt Tarasoff (Our Streets) and Paul Henry (P.O.W.E.R., Our Homes Can’t Wait) to talk about the BC NDP’s Bill 11 – the Residential Tenancy Amendment Act (2026). The Bill, drafted and sponsored by provincial Housing Minister Christine Boyle, is currently before the BC legislature and has passed its second reading. If passed, Bill 11 would substantially change the Residential Tenancy Act (RTA), restricting tenancy rights for residents of supportive housing. In practice, nonprofit landlords often attempt to violate what minimal rights the RTA affords tenants – now, once again, the government is moving the goal posts even further.
In 2024 the provincial government made it easier for private and nonprofit landlords to violate three key tenancy rights for residents of supportive housing, each previously protected by the RTA: the right not to have landlord imposed guest bans; the requirement that landlords give 24 hours’ notice prior to entering a tenant’s unit; and the right to quiet and peaceful enjoyment (which gave tenants recourse to the Residential Tenancy Branch (RTB) for concerns related to noise, accessibility of common spaces, and landlord repairs, among other measures).
Now the province is poised to further scale back the legal rights and protections of supportive housing tenants. This includes consolidating power with the Housing Minister to give supportive housing landlords the right to evict tenants on the spot, punish tenants (including via eviction) for the actions of guests and other non-residents, and implement “cooling off” periods (i.e. short-term immediate evictions for certain tenants).
Bill 11 has been referred to as the ‘summary evictions’ amendment. It stipulates that if a tenant has been in possession of a “weapon” – which the Bill leaves undefined, and which could presumably refer to anything from a kitchen knife to a screwdriver – the tenant could be subject to immediate eviction at the discretion of a landlord.
Bill 11’s proposed amendments to the RTA also include an alarming blanket amendment giving the Housing Minister the ability to make various critical changes to the RTA in the future, skipping the legislative process entirely. This includes the ability to designate supportive housing units or buildings as “transitional housing,” another form of housing that is entirely exempt from RTA protections.
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Nathan Crompton: Can you both tell us about Bill 11, and what it means for residents of supportive housing in BC?
Paul Henry: One thing that really gets me is this weapons thing. How do they define weapons? It’s not defined, maybe that’s on purpose. A tenant has a torch lighter to light their smokes or whatever – does that now become defined as a weapon, which means that you are evicted from your own home?
Matt Tarasoff: There are already protections for tenants, workers, and visitors who are threatened with a weapon. It’s illegal to attack someone with a weapon, whether on the street or in your own apartment building. Yet they are trying to use this idea of weapons as an excuse to roll back the Residential Tenancy Act. It makes no sense.
Nate: Yeah, it’s a total non sequitur.
Matt: This Bill takes away the normal process of getting a fair hearing and no more review, you’re just kicked straight to the curb. They also want to give the Housing Minister undefined new powers to make future changes to the RTA.
Paul: The people that are running these buildings, they have their biases and they have their prejudices. They have stigma against the have nots, and this definitely shapes their take on what is defined as “violence.” I live in supportive housing, and it’s just this sort of stigma and separation that they have against you. But now it’s being cranked up even further, with this new law. It’s a dictatorship, and it’s legalized oppression.
Matt Tarasoff interviewed by CityNews at VANDU (October 9, 2025). Photo NC
Matt: Bill 11 gives more unchecked power to the housing manager who happens to be running the SRO that day. Nonprofit landlords are being given enormous power to determine who stays and who goes – that’s not a good scenario. You might not be the favourite in the building, but you still have rights.
Paul: The people making these policies are making decisions for us, but they know nothing about what it’s like to live in supportive housing. In the eyes of the haves, we’re not seen as people, we’re not seen as human. They’re sitting up in their ivory towers making decisions without even asking tenants for solutions.
In the eyes of the haves, we’re not seen as people, we’re not seen as human. They’re sitting up in their ivory towers making decisions without even asking tenants for solutions.
–Paul Henry
Matt: Yeah, this could all have gone in a completely different direction. They could have looked to communities within supportive housing and empowered them to create elected boards and that sort of thing – democratic structures where people can look into complaints, go through incident reports, and that kind of thing, and handle it themselves as a community. We [at Our Streets and VANDU] are always pushing for that approach: empower people and keep the VPD as far away as possible.
Nate: VANDU’s slogan is “nothing about us without us.” I’m a historian, so I am going to make a detour here, but hopefully you will see why it’s relevant. When the RTA was won in the 1970s, this coincided with a social housing boom in BC. More social housing was built each year than we currently build each decade, if you can believe it. Politicians try to reframe the 1970s as top-down model of state planning, and the associated architecture of Modernism. In reality, all of that social housing had democratic tenant committees. It was illegal for BC Housing to not allow tenant committees.
Tenants did incredible things together, like the Militant Mothers of Raymur. The mothers used direct action to fight for and win a bridge across the railroad tracks so that their kids could safely get to school without being hit by a train. It’s a little-known fact that the Militant Mothers started inside one of these BC Housing tenant committees! Today it’s night and day, everything is turned on its head. People are being treated as disposable, very little new housing is being built, and within those few units of housing, the State has all the power. People are disposable.
There are already protections for tenants, workers, and visitors who are threatened with a weapon. It’s illegal to attack someone with a weapon, whether on the street or in your own apartment building. Yet they are trying to use this idea of weapons as an excuse to roll back the Residential Tenancy Act. It makes no sense.
–Matt Tarasoff
Matt: The thing is, if you’re allowed to remove supportive housing from the RTA, what you’re left with is Nicaragua in the ‘70s and ‘80s [when the Somoza dictatorship targeted and suppressed political opposition and mass organizing]. People are blacklisted or worse.
Paul: Whatever housing organization a person goes to, it comes up in the system – they’re now flagged in the system. Right?
Nate: A.J. Withers actually did a really good job documenting how the system works in their recent report [in collaboration with Our Homes Can’t Wait], which deals with the shelter-industrial complex and the carceral continuum, and specifically the lack of safeguards around information sharing, and also these “roundtables” between nonprofit landlords where they meet to discuss certain tenants, and so on.
Matt: Once somebody’s kicked out of a certain supportive housing unit, are they now blacklisted forever? Will they ever get into other housing, given the immense waitlist and shortage of housing? If all the nonprofits share a list, an eviction means that you have created a permanent class of blacklisted people. It’s very concerning.
Paul: People who live in this housing don’t have the same rights as other tenants. Instead they sign these “program agreements” and are not seen as residents but as “clients” at best, yeah? Which basically, to me, says that we’re not seen as humans.
Matt: And now you’ve just made it arbitrary now for somebody to get kicked out, perhaps permanently, from any kind of supportive housing at all. Yeah, they’re blacklisted. There’s no recourse. Where would you go after that?
Paul Henry at press conference on Bill 11, TRAC office (March 26, 2026). Photo NC
Paul: I remember listening to Mayor Sim on the news some months back, saying that he doesn’t want any supportive housing or BC Housing buildings in the downtown core of Vancouver, and basically saying “you should all move to Surrey.” So what’s that say? Whenever he’s in the media he doesn’t tell the truth, he tries to make us out to be organized criminals, people who don’t deserve housing. What’s his motivation? We’ve got this FIFA thing coming up with the World Cup and he wants to push us out. I think that’s part of the motivation right there.
Nate: Yeah. In 2025 Ken Sim and his ABC council passed an indefinite freeze on supportive housing in Vancouver. Eby and the BC NDP have now followed up with another austerity budget for 2026 that completely freezes supportive housing across the entire province. Eby has refused to reverse Gordon Campbell’s corporate tax cuts. That’s why for things like housing and services, it’s just cuts, cuts, cuts.
Matt: You have to wonder, what’s in it for [Housing Minister] Christine Boyle? She could easily take a different stance on this, a more honorable stance. But she hasn’t. So what’s in it for her?
Paul: Well, there’s money and power – and powers swaying things behind the scenes in ways that we cannot do.
