‘I have nowhere to go’: B.C. is Canada’s eviction capital, new research shows

Roughly one-in-10 households that rent in B.C. say they were forced to move during a recent five-year period, a significantly higher eviction rate than any other region in Canada, says a new University of B.C. report.

This province is an outlier in the national data for another reason revealed for the first time: The vast majority of evictions in B.C. — 85 per cent — are deemed to be at “no fault” of the tenants, and that rate is far greater than the national average of 65 per cent.

That means in B.C., compared with other provinces between 2016 and 2021, tenants were far more often asked to move for reasons such as landlords needing to use the property themselves, selling it, or demolishing or renovating it, the report says.

This is in sharp contrast to previous research that showed, between 2004 and 2017, that evictions in B.C. were more commonly due to something the tenant had done, such as failing to pay rent, and very infrequently for reasons such as landlords wanting to move into their units.