Cambie merchants near end of lawsuit
Call goes out for previous owners, renters to join class-action claim
Cambie Street merchants, who won a partial court victory against the builders of the Canada Line over the construction that tore up their street for more than three years, are inviting others who fled Cambie during construction to join them as their years-long fight nears the final round.
“A number of merchants are no longer on Cambie and we’re trying to reach them,” said Leonard Schein of the Cambie Village Business Association.
A B.C. Supreme Court decision last November found that the more than 200 merchants couldn’t sue the subway builders for economic compensation, but they could make claims based on the properties having been “injured” during the line’s cut-andcover construction, and thus not worth the rents paid for them. Property owners are also eligible to join the class-action battle.
The court has set a deadline of May 31 for businesses and individuals to file claims in the class-action suit.
“All the existing merchants know, but about 40 of them went out of business and we’ve lost contact with them,” Schein said. “We’re trying to cast a net. We’re hoping some people will realize, ‘Oh I’ve got a claim to make, as a tenant or a property owner during that time period.’ ”
Stein said he’s preparing such a claim for his Park Theatre on Cambie, seeking about $200,000 in compensation.
The case has had a long ride through the courts, with the business association initially filing suit months before the Canada Line even opened in August of 2009. A separate suit filed by merchant Susan Heyes before construction even began finally ran aground in 2011 when B.C.’s Appeal Court ruled that the subway construction was done under the province’s statutory authority, and thus the builders weren’t responsible for nearby business losses.
The association’s partial win last November came through another route, a novel reading of expropriation law that usually allows for compensation due to permanent damage to a piece of land, said lawyer Paul Bennett, acting for the merchants.
The court applied that principle in this case to the temporary damage caused by Canada Line construction, opening the door to claims from both renters and property owners along the former construction site that the properties weren’t worth the rent they paid.
The business association put out an appeal this week seeking those who had left the street. More information on the suit is online.
The Canada Line was built by Canada Line Rapid Transit Inc., a public-private initiative headed by the private-sector SNC-Lavalin Inc. The claimants filed suit against those two, as well as other government and private entities involved in the construction.
What’s next is that both sides will get together in court when all the claims are filed, likely late this year or early in 2017, Bennett said.
He said their position was that the properties were worth nothing during the construction period. “There will still be the issue of how you measure that loss. What the judgment determined was that the claim can go forward.”
The lawyer said the November court decision amounted to a partial victory, ruling out “wide-open” compensation for economic losses, but allowing for more limited claims.
“We’re trying to get people to realize that there is potentially real money here. It may not be the real money that they were hoping for,” Bennett said. “It is a better-than-nothing result ... amounts roughly equivalent to what they would have paid for rent during that time. There are other ways from a property owner’s point of view, of expressing that value as well.”
Meanwhile a spokesman for the Greater Vancouver Mayors Council, currently in the planning stages for a proposed subway to extend the Millennium SkyTrain line under Broadway as far west as Arbutus Street, said the mayors have ruled out using disruptive cut-and-cover construction in favour of a bored tunnel for that project.