Resident vows to continue fight against ‘slumlords’
Jack Gates has vowed to keep fighting.
Gates, the Downtown Eastside resident behind a legal battle seeking compensation from slumlords on behalf of other tenants, said after a legal setback Thursday that he wants to take the fight to the country’s highest court.
On Thursday morning, the B.C. Court of Appeal ruled Gates’ proposed class-action lawsuit against the Sahota family, owner of several notorious single-resident occupancy hotels, couldn’t proceed as proposed.
But by Thursday afternoon, Gates said he’d already instructed his lawyer he wants to seek leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.
“It’s not over till it’s over,” Gates said. “We want to make sure all these slumlords in this area know that we’re not giving up.”
Meanwhile, Gates’ lawyer, Jason Gratl, said Thursday’s ruling highlights a “jurisdictional gap,” and called on the B.C. government to close what he called “the slumlord loophole” in the province’s tenant protection legislation.
Gates filed the suit in 2016 when he lived at the Regent Hotel, an SRO owned by the Sahotas and described by city officials as one of the worst buildings of its kind in Vancouver. The lawsuit seeks damages and an injunction ordering repairs.
Gates and Gratl sought to have the suit certified as a class action, so that other tenants of both the Regent and the Balmoral, another Sahota-owned SRO, could also seek damages from the landlords.
Legal observers said the proposed class action, believed to be the first of its kind in B.C., could have major implications for tenants trying to resolve grievances against landlords of problem buildings. Members of Vancouver’s Sahota family and their companies, who own a real estate empire worth more than $200 million, are named as defendants.
The Sahotas’ lawyer appealed last year, arguing the B.C. Supreme Court doesn’t have jurisdiction to allow a Residential Tenancy Act dispute to proceed as a class action, and the B.C. Court of Appeal granted the appeal Thursday.
Gratl said Thursday’s decision highlights the “jurisdictional gap in the Residential Tenancy Act that allows egregious mass claims to slip through the cracks.”
“In fact, it looks like the Sahotas’ business model is predicated on the existence of that gap,” Gratl said.
In December, Gratl sent a letter to B.C.’s attorney general and minister of housing, proposing an amendment to the RTA that would allow for class-action proceedings in B.C. Supreme Court for tenants seeking compensation for unacceptable living conditions.
Although the proposed class action wasn’t allowed to proceed, Gates’ personal civil suit against the Sahotas is before the B.C. Supreme Court. But, said Gates: “That’s not good enough . ... It’s not about me, it’s about everybody that’s suffered in these buildings. Everybody that went through hell in the Regent and the Balmoral and other buildings. I just can’t give up.”
Asked if he was discouraged by Thursday’s decision, Gates said: “No. In fact, it makes me want to press even harder. We’re all still in this together, no matter what.”
Late Vancouver Province reporter John Colebourn investigated the plight of the Regent’s tenants and landlords two years ago. Then last year, Vancouver Sun reporter Denise Ryan won an Amnesty International award for exposing the horrific conditions faced by Balmoral tenants.
In the two years since Gates filed his suit, the City of Vancouver has closed both the Balmoral and the Regent, forcing 300 low-income tenants to be relocated to new homes. In July of this year, the city took the rare step of filing an expropriation notice, seeking to wrest control of both hotels from the Sahotas.
In an emailed statement Thursday, City of Vancouver spokesman Jag Sandhu wrote: “Counsel for the owners of the Regent and the Balmoral hotels notified the city of their request for an inquiry into the expropriation in late August. The attorney general’s office appointed an inquiry officer in late September.”
The timeline for the start of the inquiry is yet to be determined, Sandhu said.
Gates said he thought his legal efforts helped put a spotlight on the Balmoral, the Regent, and the Sahotas, and pressured the city to act, but, he added: “To me, it’s so little, too late ... The city should have cracked down on them years and years ago, but they just let it keep sliding and sliding.”
He was out campaigning Thursday at Main and Hastings streets, volunteering for the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE), and trying to get tenants-rights advocates elected to city hall in next week’s municipal election.
COPE, the long-standing leftwing party, issued its own statement after Thursday’s court decision, in which council candidate Jean Swanson said: “It’s more necessary than ever that the city steps in to protect tenants when the courts fail.
“Landlords have a lot more power than tenants, and this case proves it,” Swanson said. “Virtually no one in the city believes that tenants should have to put up with the conditions at the Regent Hotel, yet no level of government or the court is willing to step in and protect them.”