Estair Van Wagner said the letter of the law was followed in Mark Plank’s high-profile eviction case, but not the “human rights element.”

Michael John Lo
Apr 2, 2026 4:30 AM

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The near-eviction of a 63-year-old Victoria renter due to missed rent-increase payments brings home the impact of treating housing “as a commodity instead of a home,” says a University of Victoria associate law professor.

Estair Van Wagner said the letter of the law was followed in Mark Plank’s high-profile eviction case, but not the “human rights element.”

“The process of eviction, whether or not it actually results ultimately in the loss of someone’s home, is really traumatizing,” she said in an interview. “We should be building a system where we avoid that at all costs.”

Plank was set to be evicted on Tuesday from his Cook Street Village apartment after he lost a Residential Tenancy Branch hearing that he did not attend.

The self-described computer illiterate had been sent a rental-increase notice, then an initial 10-day eviction notice, via email to an account he does not access without the help of others. His property manager started the eviction process the first month he failed to pay the $24 increase, though his rent payment at the original $828 rate was accepted.

Following advocacy from groups like Together Against Poverty Society and the Victoria Tenants Union, he was able to reach a last-minute agreement to stay in his home.

Van Wagner said many people in situations like Plank’s don’t have the knowledge or confidence to use existing legal protections to help their case. “People will leave at the first instance of being told that they’re evicted without exercising their rights,” she said.

Plank didn’t report the fact that his studio unit had leaky taps and a broken fridge out of fear of jeopardizing his housing, even though a landlord is required by law to fix those issues once they are made aware of them.

“We aren’t providing enough legal education and resources and advocacy to make sure that folks not only know their rights, but feel that they can exercise them,” Van Wagner said.

While the media can highlight cases of so-called “nightmare tenants,” there are more rental units that aren’t being kept to provincial standards than problem tenants, she said.

Ultimately, preventing evictions, particularly for seniors, those with disabilities and others who are vulnerable in society, is the best way to prevent the homelessness crisis in Victoria and elsewhere from getting worse, Van Wagner said.

“The infrastructure around dealing with homelessness is extraordinarily expensive, and it’s expensive both on a very practical level of emergency shelters and services … but also on the long-term health and mental-health impacts it has on folks,” she said.

Van Wagner said better funding of legal services like those offered by TAPS is a good first step.

TAPS lawyer Leila Geggie Hurst said demand for legal help with evictions is extraordinarily high in Victoria, noting her organization’s walk-in capacity for tenancy issues filled up within four minutes on Tuesday morning.

“There used to be a time in the distant past when if a tenant got an eviction notice, they were able to pretty quickly find housing and move elsewhere,” she said.

But now, tenants are more desperate and more willing to fight to stay in their housing because there are fewer affordable options, Geggie Hurst said, adding that the loss of housing often causes a “catastrophic spiral” in someone’s life.

Kaeley Wiseman, a professor at Vancouver Island University’s master of community planning program, said people often assume there’s a safety net for people who are living in aging, cheaper buildings and are displaced for various reasons.

“They assume that people like Mark [Plank] will then get picked up by the non-profit sector,” said Wiseman, who is also principal of Wiser Projects, a non-profit housing development consultancy.

But finding subsidized, non-market housing is getting more difficult “because this provincial budget has axed that safety net,” Wiseman.

Premier David Eby’s government retroactively clawed back hundreds of millions of dollars in the province’s Community Housing Fund in its latest budget, effectively stalling many affordable-housing projects across B.C., including on Vancouver Island, Wiseman said.

The funding crisis in the non-profit construction sector is likely to last for the next decade, and that’s not good when it takes eight to 10 years to build a publicly funded housing project in Canada, she said.

“You can imagine the competition for the units that we have built in the last 15 years … is going to be fierce.”

Wiseman said 15 per cent of housing available in Canada should be non-market, but the actual amount is only around three to four per cent.

“So by cutting all this stuff, Eby has undermined our entire province,” she said.

mjlo@timescolonist.com

Originally Published On Times Colonist Web Site