B.C.’s housing minister is vowing to continue forcing local approval of new housing projects, even after a surprising loss in the province’s top court.
Ravi Kahlon said he’s frustrated by a BC Court of Appeal decision that ruled provincial legislation was unconstitutional when it tried to override a judicial challenge to a 12-storey supportive housing project in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood.
“I think this is a symbol of why it’s so hard to get housing built,” Kahlon said in an interview.
“Engagement on this project starts in March 2021, and here we are in 2025 still trying to figure out if we can get this housing built.
“Meanwhile you’ve got people who are in that neighbourhood sleeping in parks, sleeping in tents. Unfortunately, I’m sure some people have passed away waiting for housing to be built, and we’re still here trying to figure out if we can actually build something for these vulnerable people.”
However, the Kitsilano Coalition for Children & Family Safety, a neighbourhood group that challenged the province in court, celebrated the win.
“The 7th/8th & Arbutus project, as proposed, would have placed 129 units of low-barrier supportive housing, including an in-house drug consumption room, a mere 17 metres from an elementary school with 450 children, a successful women's recovery home, and a toddler park,” it said in a release.
“This is simply not a recipe for success.”
The court loss is highly technical — and while limited in scope, it does carry with it wider political implications as well.
The three appeals court justices said their decision was not about whether the Kits project was appropriate for the neighbourhood. Instead, it was a rebuke of the government’s overstep in using legislation to quash a judicial challenge by the coalition on the fairness of the City of Vancouver’s rezoning process and public hearing. By trying to end-run the judicial review, the government infringed on the court’s constitutional authority.
“They just got cocky really,” said Peter Gall, the coalition’s lawyer. “They just thought they could run roughshod over the rule of law. It truly is a significant decision because the court of appeal said you can’t do that.”
The province could simply have waited for the judicial review, and saved itself the headache, said Gall. Or it could pass legislation to ban public hearings on rezonings altogether, he said. But instead, the NDP panicked and drafted their own new law to fast-track the Arbutus project.
“In their zeal to get this project moving quickly, they just took away the role of the court entirely on ruling on validity,” Gall said in an interview
Local councils and mayors who oppose the government’s aggressive housing policies will be scouring the ruling to see if it gives them ammunition in future clashes with the Eby government. But the narrow scope of the judgement appears, at first glance, to offer little to those hoping to strike down the NDP’s other housing policies, like quad-plexes on single family lots, mandatory density near transit hubs, restrictions to short-term rentals, or provincial penalties to municipalities that can’t meet housing targets.
New Democrats, meanwhile, are dismissing the court case as a one-off; an inconsequential bump in the road that does not negate its larger housing strategies.
Yet, the Arbutus project contains many red flags a government could learn from, if it wanted.
There’s the way the City of Vancouver seemed to deem some topics off limits in its rezoning process, frustrating local residents looking for information and ultimately fuelling their opposition.
There’s the way BC Housing refused to give clear answers to key questions like whether there would be supervised consumption of drugs on site, before then-CEO Shayne Ramsey went public to accuse neighbourhood critics of being driven by “fear, ignorance and discrimination.”
There’s the way then-housing minister David Eby used the full might of his office in 2022 to exert public pressure to approve the development — but refused to make public the details in his memorandum of understanding with the city and BC Housing, even as that MOU was being talked about in open council meetings (residents had to FOI the document themselves to read it).
Kahlon didn't accept any of those criticisms when I put them to him on Thursday.
“I would flip that back and say, would any type of housing for vulnerable people be accepted by groups in the neighbourhood?” he asked.
That question, though, begs another: Which came first, the outraged neighbours or the public approval process that outraged them?
“The majority of the people who spoke to me said they don’t like this,” said Opposition Conservative critic Dallas Brodie, who is also the MLA for nearby Vancouver-Quilchena.
“It’s not just this act, regarding this project, it’s also bills 45, 46 and 47, which have the effect of moving all of this municipal planning over to Victoria. This is making people very nervous.”
Brodie urged the government not to appeal the decision all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.
“That certainly will be an option,” said Kahlon, who, alongside Attorney General Niki Sharma, is waiting for an internal legal analysis of the ruling to be completed before making any decisions.
No matter what happens, Kahlon said the province won’t back down on building supportive housing in that area of Kitsilano.
“There’s going to be some form of supportive housing in that community,” he said.
Meaning, this is not the end of either the Arbutus project fight or the ongoing pushback against the NDP government’s housing policies.
Rob Shaw has spent more than 17 years covering B.C. politics, now reporting for CHEK News and writing for Glacier Media. He is the co-author of the national bestselling book A Matter of Confidence, host of the weekly podcast Political Capital, and a regular guest on CBC Radio.
