Province tables tighter short-term rental rules before the fall session
The registry gets teeth, the platforms get liability, and the resort-town exemptions get one more review.
VICTORIA — The short-term rental amendments tabled Thursday do three things, and the order matters: they connect the provincial registry to platform data on a nightly feed, they make the platforms — not just the hosts — liable for listings without a registration number, and they schedule the resort-community exemptions for a review that the ministry has twice previously scheduled and twice previously postponed.
The first two close the loop the original legislation left open. The registry has been able to see illegal listings since it launched; what it could not do was make them disappear without a complaint file and an enforcement officer. Platform liability inverts the workload: a listing without a valid number simply does not publish.
Early platform data suggests the stakes. In the communities where the principal-residence requirement already applies, listings are down by roughly a third since 2024 — and long-term rental vacancy, the number the policy exists to move, has crept up in eight of the eleven markets the ministry tracks. Causation is contested, correlation is not.
The exemption review is the political live wire. The resort municipalities argue their economies are the exemption; the mayors of the towns beside them argue their workforces are its cost. The review reports after the municipal elections, which both sides noticed before they finished reading the sentence.
