Portland Hotel tenants to march on Deloitte office tower in downtown Vancouver on Wednesday

Residents of the Portland Hotel in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside will march on the highrise tower of accounting giant Deloitte on Wednesday, seeking a meeting with the treasurer of the charity that owns the hotel.

According to a statement released on Tuesday afternoon, the demonstrators will present a list of demands to Varun Banthia — which includes a request for compensation for the months in which the nine-storey Portland Hotel was without an elevator.

Banthia was appointed to the board of directors of the PHS Community Services Society in September 2022 and is employed as a policy specialist at Deloitte.

The tenant group — dubbed the Portland Tenants Union — also want residents who were removed from the hotel because the elevator wasn’t working to be allowed to return, now that it has been operational for a month.

The protest is part of a continuing dispute between tenants and the PHS. The Portland Hotel is the centrepiece of PHS’s 30 supportive-housing projects, with 87 self-contained units in a relatively modern building at 20 West Hastings St. It was built wheelchair accessible and around half of the residents have mobility issues.