UPDATE: Bill 11 passed through Third Reading and received Royal Assent on Thursday April 16, 2026.

This means that BC's Residential Tenancy Act has now been amended to:

• Expand landlords' power to order arbitrary evictions, including for the possession of a "weapon" (which could include anything from a kitchen knife to a screwdriver);
• Allow landlords to lock tenants out of their homes as they await eviction hearings, with no obligation to find alternative accommodation for tenants during the "cooling off" period;
• Assign the Ministry unchecked power to make further changes to the RTA - including the power to rollback further rights for tenants in supportive housing - without those changes proceeding through the ordinary legislative process.

The Bill did not pass without scrutiny: one member of the House asked Minister of Housing Christine Boyle how the Ministry "expects safety to improve if the legislation focuses on controlling tenants rather than addressing the causes of harm within supportive housing." This member also rightly observed that the ultimate outcome of this law "is that tenants in supportive housing will have fewer protections than other tenants in British Columbia."

Confronted with these truths, the Ministry can no longer claim that it is choosing anything other than surveillance, control, and carcerality. The record now shows that the outcome of these amendments - displacement, homelessness, and in some cases death - were entirely foreseeable from the outset.

Pivot and CLAS wholly condemn the ongoing attack against the rights and dignity of tenants living in supportive housing, and continue to call for housing that prioritizes care, community, and that treats tenants as experts in their own lives and their own safety.

End of update

March 6th, 2026, Statement

The Province’s announcement on March 4th, 2026, proposes to further rollback legal protections for people living in supportive and social housing is neither a safety plan nor a housing solution. Instead, it is the latest iteration of a political campaign to erode the rights of low-income tenants in BC, further entrenching the reality that tenants must surrender legal rights in exchange for shelter.

In 2024, the Province amended the Residential Tenancy Regulation to strip supportive housing tenants of several core protections available to tenants across BC. Yesterday’s proposed legislation escalates that project under the guise of addressing “safety concerns” in supportive housing – despite legal organizations’ predicted outcomes of just the opposite.

Removing legal protections for tenants is antithetical to the purposes of the Residential Tenancy Act and actually undermines the safety of tenants. This is a cynical move to consolidate political power and further erode tenant rights.

Caitlin Shane, Pivot Legal Society Staff Lawyer.

The proposed legislation empowers government to include “prescribed” terms, purposes, times, and exceptions to the rights and protections available to supportive housing tenants. That is, it assigns Cabinet and the Minister of Housing wide-ranging, open-ended discretion to decide, by regulation, what rights apply, when, and to whom. This architecture sets the stage for ongoing rights rollbacks, with fewer democratic guardrails and less accountability.

One of the central consequences of this “prescribed” power concerns a tenant’s right of access to their own home and personal property. The proposed amendments expand the power to restrict tenants’ access to their homes through broad, regulation-based exceptions. That shifts decisions about who can return home and when, empowering housing providers with authority that properly belongs to judicial decision-makers. For example, a housing provider may choose to block a tenant’s access to their unit even after a criminal court, weighing the evidence, has issued an order that a person return home. Housing providers’ ability to make decisions that directly contradict court orders not only undermines judicial authority, but also sets up tenants to directly breach court-ordered release conditions and risk re-criminalization. The predictable result is not “safety or comfort” as the government pronounces. Instead, it is exposure, displacement, criminalization, and, in the worst cases, death.

The proposed changes also significantly lower the bar for evictions. In particular, the Province has widened certain “for cause” evictions by extending them beyond landlords and other tenants to capture almost anyone permitted on the property. This lowers the threshold for eviction, expands the grounds for removal based on conflict involving staff, visitors, or other third parties, and increases liability for guest-related conduct and speculative “risk” claims.

At the same time, the proposed legislation expands landlord powers inside the home. It enables regulations that allow landlords to evade guardrails that limit seizing or interfering with tenant property, opening a legal pathway to seize or restrict access to peoples’ belongings.

Perhaps most alarmingly, the legislation includes a catch-all eviction clause that permits evictions on the basis that a tenant or their guest has ever possessed a “weapon” on the premises – an as-yet undefined term during an unspecified timeframe that could presumably include tools, cooking utensils, or everyday items other tenants and homeowners possess freely. These provisions further turn housing into a site of policing and carceral control. Combined with broader powers to enter units with fewer safeguards, these measures incentivize surveillance: more entries, more inspections, and the normalization of searching personal space under the banner of safety. This will not be applied evenly – instead, it will predictably fall hardest on tenants who are Indigenous, racialized, criminalized, disabled, and/or already treated as disposable.

This isn’t safety, it’s control and surveillance. When you give housing providers the power to exclude someone from their home, and the power to enter their unit with fewer safeguards, you create the conditions for abuse. You create a pipeline to homelessness.

Danielle Sabelli, Lawyer at Community Legal Assistance Society (CLAS)

Ultimately, the Province’s proposed legislation vests virtually unfettered decision-making power and control in the hands of partisan politicians and their contracted housing providers, fundamentally undermining the legislative process. Meanwhile, the Province erroneously claims to have consulted “people with lived experience” on these reforms, which effectively treat low-income tenants’ rights and lives as disposable.

The erosion of rights is never inevitable, and it is always a political choice. If the government removes more protections, it is choosing oppression.