The City of Burnaby is investigating after a complaint was launched by a renter in an illegal suite who said she felt “ambushed” after a visit by five city inspectors earlier this week.
The woman and her mother both live in the garden-level suite and are immunocompromised. The NOW has agreed to keep their names private, but has reviewed documentation, including emails to and from the city, as well as video footage of the actual inspection taken from a kitchen surveillance camera that verify her story.
In the video, five masked city inspectors are shown entering the tiny suite as the woman and her mother watch them look at appliances and other items.
This would appear to violate the typical city inspection response, according to a Dec. 8, 2021 letter the woman received from Burnaby’s chief licence inspector in response to a previous complaint about city staff visiting her home.
“Normally, we would approach a residence with no more than two, and preferable only a single staff member,” the letter says.
One of the woman’s main complaints is that she warned the city before the inspection that she and her elderly mother are immunocompromised, but they still sent five people to her home.
“I will ensure you are held accountable for all of this, as this could have been prevented if you hadn’t sent an entire army in here,” the woman wrote in an email to the city.
The inspectors visited the home based on a complaint that it is an illegal suite. The woman said she didn’t know the suite wasn’t legal when they moved in, adding that the landlord didn’t tell her that there were other suites on the other side of the house. She has a pending complaint against the landlord filed with B.C.’s Residential Tenancy Branch.
“I get that the city had jobs to do, but the way they handled it was atrocious,” she told the NOW .
On Thursday morning, the woman received an email from the office of Burnaby Mayor Mike Hurley in response.
“On behalf of Mayor Hurley, he's sorry to hear that you and your mom are not well,” reads the email. “FYI, we are investigating this incident and a senior staff will be in touch with you soon so thank you for your patience.”
The woman also told the NOW that the landlord didn’t give her the required 24 hours of notice before inspectors arrived, nor did the landlord specify that it would be a city inspection. But she suspected that’s what it was and so she contacted the city to warn them about her and her mother’s health status.
The woman said there was a previous incident in November of 2021 in which multiple city inspectors arrived on her doorstep asking questions about her unit.
The woman told the NOW she has concerns that her and her mother would be forced to leave due to it being an illegal suite, but the chief licence inspector said in the Dec. 8 letter that the city works with landlords to achieve compliance and to minimize “negative” impacts on tenants.
