B.C. NDP finds Trump a convenient excuse for ditching its flawed programs​on March 20, 2025 at 10:51 pm

VICTORIA — The New Democrats this week abandoned a program to help homeowners develop secondary suites, less than a year after announcing it with much fanfare and a hefty $120 million in forgivable loans.

When Premier David Eby launched the secondary-suite incentive program at a home-building centre in the provincial capital last May 2, he boasted it would add “thousands of affordable rentals over three years.”

Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon, also in attendance that day, said it was just a beginning.

“This is a pilot,” he said. “We’re going to see how it rolls out and if it needs to be expanded, then I’ll be knocking on the minister of finance’s door.”

From the outset, industry sources doubted the New Democrats could accomplish the hoped-for 3,000 units over three years.

The government offer to cover 50 per cent of the cost of a home renovation with a forgivable loan of up to $40,000 came with strings attached. The biggest was that homeowners had to guarantee they would rent the finished place at below market rates for five years.

One Victoria builder estimated that construction of a self-contained suite in a typical home could cost well over $100,000 and maybe as much as $200,000.

It would leave the homeowner with a sizeable loan to pay off under the province’s below-market-rate rent cap of $1,400 a month, said Amity Construction’s Dusty Delain.

“Even after the five years when the government says well, you are forgiven that $40,000, the homeowner is out of pocket,” Delain told Cindy E. Harnett of the Victoria Times Colonist.

Also weighing in was the owner of an existing rental property. He said cost recovery would be further constrained by the NDP’s 3.5 per cent cap on annual rent increases.

“My property taxes went up almost eight per cent, my insurance premium went up almost 25 per cent, and trades and services companies are charging about 10 per cent more than last year,” he wrote. “Thanks for the offer, Premier Eby. I’ll pass.”

Other would-be applicants may have been discouraged by Home Suite Home, the NDP government’s cutely named 58-page guide on how to develop and manage secondary suites. The checklist alone ran to seven sobering pages.

Skepticism about the NDP’s chances of success were borne out this week when the government confessed that the takeup for the first year fell well short of the 1,000 target.

Only 200 units had qualified for the province’s loans with another 50 in the works.

On that note,  Kahlon announced further applications would be cut off on March 30, a mere 10 months after last year’s head-in-the-clouds launch by he and the premier.