The Leasehold Trap Was Known. The NDP Still Left Residents Waiting.
When homeowners are trapped between private contracts and missing provincial protections, another study is not an answer.
The BC Greens have put a sharp question to David Eby’s government: why were long-term residential leaseholders left waiting after the problem was already documented? In a campaign release, the Greens said people in homes subject to long-term leasehold contracts have been seeking relief from the BC NDP government without results, and they promised legislation to protect residents from unchecked costs, opaque books and unaffordable dispute paths.
The release says an estimated 2,500 B.C. homes, mostly in Victoria and Vancouver’s West End, are held under long-term leaseholds often described as 99-year leases. It also says most participants in the province’s 2024 engagement were seniors on low or fixed incomes, and that some reported neighbours had already been forced to sell. Those are Green claims, and voters should read them as campaign claims. But the legal gap they point to is not invented.
The province’s own strata-leasehold background page explains that long-term leasehold tenures are different from strata leaseholds. Long-term tenures are not governed by the Strata Property Act, may be administered by detailed private contracts, may leave residents without a way to review or approve repair and maintenance costs, and do not fall under the Civil Resolution Tribunal’s strata-dispute jurisdiction. That is the accountability problem in plain language: people can buy what feels like a home and still discover they do not have the standard oversight tools that strata owners expect.
The government’s broader strata-legislation page confirms that the Strata Property Act, regulations, bylaws and related rules form the legal framework under which strata corporations operate, while the province is responsible for creating and updating that legislation. If the legislature controls the framework, the legislature also owns the delay when a known category of residents sits outside it.
The Greens say NDP MLA Spencer Chandra Herbert consulted with leaseholders in 2024 and wrote an extensive report, but that the recommendations have not turned into protections. They also quoted candidate Raj Sahota saying residents later asked local NDP MLA Grace Lore for help and were first offered another study. Those statements should be attributed to the Greens. Still, the political test is straightforward: if the NDP has a different answer, it should point to the law it changed, the dispute forum it opened, the cost caps it enacted and the transparency rights it delivered.
Housing insecurity does not always look like a tent or an eviction notice. Sometimes it looks like a senior holding keys to a leasehold home while maintenance charges, legal costs and expiry dates move faster than government action. The NDP has spent years telling British Columbians it understands housing pressure. Leaseholders now deserve more than sympathy and consultations. They deserve a statute, a forum and a deadline.