Coquitlam tenants fight eviction for smoking on private deck
Some Metro Vancouver tenants were recently successful in getting the B.C. Supreme Court to cancel their eviction over smoking on their unit’s private deck.
The tenants have been living in a fourplex with three other units for the past eight years, but in 2021, the property was sold, and they got a new landlord.
They argued that the new landlord was racially discriminatory and tried multiple times to evict them to charge a higher rental rate for the unit. The landlord, however, claimed they had an issue with the tenants’ smoking and said it disturbed others.
On Sept. 16, 2023, the tenants were issued a one-month notice to vacate their home for causing a disturbance to others in the fourplex or their landlord.
The landlord said it was because one of the tenants was smoking on the property, and the Residential Tenancy Branch (RTB) upheld the eviction.
But the tenants asked the B.C. Supreme Court for a judicial review. The landlord argued that they were at risk of a bylaw fine because people are not allowed to smoke on common property in Coquitlam.
The tenants, however, argued that they weren’t violating any bylaw because they were smoking from a private deck, which was neither public nor common property.
The people who took issue with the smoking were the landlord’s in-laws, who temporarily occupied one of the units in the fourplex.
The judge looked at the correspondence between the landlord and tenants and found only a signed contract prohibiting smoking inside the building. There was no evidence the tenants smoked inside, only that they smoked on the private balcony.
In the end, the judge found there wasn’t a strong enough connection between the landlord’s reason for eviction — the risk of a fine — and the tenants’ actions of smoking on the private deck.
“I adopt the submission of the tenants that, given the original basis for the notice – i.e. the landlord’s exposure to a significant fine for the tenants’ alleged breach of the ‘bylaw’ – the reasons do not adequately set out or explain the legal test or standard of proof to be applied,” the judge wrote.
They set aside the notice to end tenancy and sent the matter back to the RTB to be looked at by a different arbitrator.