Woman living in SUV for weeks amid B.C.'s backlog for resolving tenancy disputes

Tamara Robson says her life has turned into a “nightmare” since she and her daughter were forced from their Cloverdale home.

“We didn’t have jackets, we didn’t have anything,” Robson says. “I didn’t have my keys, my wallet for my car, nothing.”

Robson has been calling her SUV home for the past three weeks following a dispute with her landlord.

She had just moved into her new rental unit when she alleges the landlord forced them out of the home, leaving everything she owned on the driveway.

“We were just scrambling just to get our stuff,” she says. “I felt like I had everything ripped away from me, and there was nothing I could do about it.”

Despite having a signed lease, Robson says she felt helpless when RCMP arrived. She was told there was nothing police could do, and that she would have to bring the dispute to the Residential Tenancy Branch.

But the wait to have the RTB review her complaint could take up to four months. The province says it’s aware of the backlog, and is actively looking to fill four open arbitrator positions.

Officials say the RTB sees roughly 1,800 applications per month – up more than 300 from two years ago.

Robson’s complaint won’t be looked at until next year, as regular hearings are taking an average of four months to get through. Emergency hearings are taking one month.

The wait times are some of the longest Robert Patterson, a lawyer with the Tenant Advocate and Resource Center, says he’s ever seen.

“The point of the RTB is to be able to deliver more efficient justice or results than the court would do, but right now that efficiency isn’t there,” says Patterson.

“People are very frustrated,” he says. “If they’re thinking about, ‘Do I want to be in this unit waiting for months for a hearing to hope that the landlord does something, or do I have to find something to live in that’s actually habitable?’ – we shouldn’t be in a situation where tenants have to choose those things.”

Patterson says he believes more money is needed to expand the work of the Residential Tenancy Branch.

“We need to fund the Residential Tenancy Branch properly, give arbitrators the tools and capacity to make decisions,” he says.

“We also need to address the root. There is an eviction crisis that is interlayered and interwoven and we need to take important steps to change the laws we have around evictions.”

CTV News tried reaching the landlord multiple times but did not hear back.

Meanwhile, Robson says she’s been actively searching for a new place to call home.

“I’ve looked for different places, but they’re just so hard to find,” she says. “I’m just looking for a small one-bedroom place that will take me and my cats so that I can get a job, but even still it’s just so difficult to find.”

While she sits without a home, she’s also sitting without a job.

“My daycare has been running for 20 years, I didn’t even know what resources were available, I didn’t know where to go.”

As the forecast gets closer to winter weather, Robson says the pressure is on for her to find a new apartment. She says this time she’ll be screening future landlords more diligently before signing another lease.