Updated 26 September 2026
Election signs ARE allowed because both provincial and national laws protect our right as tenants to participate in national, provincial and civic elections. See the page titled Blog.
An eloquent and urgent call for legislation appeared 15 September 2026 in a Victoria Times-Colonist news report. Facing enormous unexpected capital-cost charges, lessee Gail Stenberg says that the Province must regulate the operation of leasehold apartment properties. Only a month earlier the Times-Colonist had reported on a huge landlord’s legal bill and lawsuit demanding payment from lessee Hugh Trenchard. More about the desperate need for government to act is on this page.
Help sought from federal government: Our national goverment has been asked to assist long-term residential lessees who face bankrupting capital costs imposed by their lessor landlords. The initiative comes from Orchard House lessee Hugh Trenchard, who has written this letter to Gregor Robertson, national Minister of Housing and Infrastructure, who is also a former mayor of Vancouver. Copies of the letter have been sent to local Liberal-party MP Will Greaves, B.C. Minister of Housing Christine Boyle, and others. The critical financial situation of Orchard House lessees can be read about on this site’s page titled Capital Projects.
Ruling scheduled for October: The B.C. Supreme Court-level decision is to be issued mid-October for Orchard House lessees who in 2018 refused to pay Westsea’s litigation billings, and who were finally heard in court last November, fully seven years after they were sued. News of a recent precedent on this issue follows in the next item, and the Orchard House lawsuit details are laid out on the page Disputing WS’s Legal Billings.
Court in Vancouver rules that landlord litigation costs cannot be billed to lessees: A B.C. Supreme Court-level justice ruled on 9 September 2025 that lessor (landlord) litigation expenses to oppose some lessee tenants are NOT billable to all of the building’s lessees. Three lessees at the St. Pierre leasehold in Vancouver’s West End sued their landlord on various questions, with the issue of the landlord billing all of the building’s lessees its legal expenses to oppose the few of them becoming the key issue at trial. This ruling supports the position of a handful of Orchard House lessees who refused in 2018 to pay Westsea’s vast expense to oppose a lessee tenant who had challenged landlord Westsea Construction billing him his share of the building’s re-glazing project. Media have not yet reported on the Vancouver court ruling, nor has its effect on the Orchard House lawsuit yet been resolved. Details will be reported on this site’s page Disputing WS’s Legal Billings.
‘It’s none of your business how I spend your money’ once again sums up the refusal by lessor (landlord) Westsea Construction to make any financial or engineering information disclosure. The most recent case is the billing of $2.44 million to Orchard House lessees for a modernized fire alarm system, which can be read about here. An earlier example involves a lawyer-written demand for disclosure on behalf of a Vancouver lessee for information about spending, flatly rejected by Westsea Construction; read about it here. If this isn’t bad enough, we cannot even sue for disclosure because the company bills us its unlimited expenses to oppose us in court, which a few of us have been fighting legally since 2018; read about that here, and which is referenced above. This appalling situation can only be addressed by legislation requiring disclosure.
