For the first time, the BC Chamber of Commerce held their annual general meeting virtually and the Kamloops Chamber had some recommendations on the table.

Executive Director Acacia Pangilinan was on the NL Morning News and said they were looking for reform to the Residential Tenancy Act which she says has given renters an unfair advantage over landlords. “It’s had some unintended consequeces of trying to give more rights to tenants that’s really providing disinsentive for people wanting to put their rental properties up for rent.”

“So, we really felt like there could be some revision to the rental tenancy act to try and make it so our landlords have a bit more rights.”

She also would like to see things move a little quicker. “We’re trying to speed up the process so if a tenant hasn’t paid rent in three or four months, it’s quite a lengthy process for the landlord to try to get to the court system to try and have that tenant removed.”

“So. We’re trying to flag those issues a little bit sooner and try to speed the process up so that landlords can act on those right away.”

Pangilinan says the timelines have been too long and when the cases finally get to court, the landlords have been hit with large costs out of their own pocket.

The Kamloops Chamber also had some recommendations about introducing new taxes.

Pangilinan said they just want more transparency when they are introduced so business owners and the public can plan for it. “Well, people need to do proper planning with their businesses and budgeting and forecasting for their expenses and when new taxes are introduced, that people don’t necessarily have time to prepare for, it really eats away at the profitability of our company.”

“Once a new tax is introduced there’s so much time spent on try to rework it so it still makes more sense for business and for the public so we’re asking for that work to kind of be done before it reaches the public so that we can have a really holistic view of introducing new taxes and the impacts that they’re going to have.”

Pangilinan would like to see stakeholders involved in creating new business taxes so they can relay the possible impacts before those taxes become official.

Thirdly was the Land Trust Initiative. That would give incentives to organizations to donate land for afordable housing projects.