FIRST READING: B.C. turned a $56 million hotel into a low-barrier shelter. It's now an unliveable biohazard - National Post

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Copy URL Facebook Linked In X (Twitter) Loading account options Sign In Manage Account Close account menu Sign Out Former Howard Johnson hotel at 1176 Granville Street in Vancouver, BC Thursday, June 26, 2025. The hotel is now an SRO with a nightclub in the ground floor. It has been the scene of numerous fires. (Photo by Jason Payne/ PNG) By Tristin Hopper May 5, 2026 at 11:15 a.m. Last Updated: May 5, 2026 at 3:43 p.m. First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

Just six years after B.C. spent $56.5 million transforming a Vancouver hotel into a low-barrier homeless shelter, it has been revealed as an unsalvageable biohazard.

Luugat is the name given to a former Howard Johnson in Vancouver that in 2020 was repurposed into a 110-room full-service homeless shelter.

Pets and even on-site drug use was welcome. In fact, there was a vending machine onsite dispensing free needles, crack pipes and other drug paraphernalia.

“Luugat primarily caters to low-income individuals and operates with round-the-clock staff, ensuring that residents receive comprehensive support and care at all times,” reads the shelter’s still-active website. Residents were also promised free meals, free housekeeping and “timely maintenance.”

Now, with the Luugat being evacuated after years of constant fires and floods, the interior has been described as an unliveable nightmare of collapsed ceilings and hoarded garbage.

Last week, Global News obtained video showing one of the Luugat’s rooms stripped of furniture and piled with an estimated four feet of garbage, all of it soaked by an overflowing toilet. The video was shot by Allan Goodall, the owner of a nightclub on the building’s first floor who has regularly faced ceiling collapses from the rooms upstairs.

A bar owner in Vancouver said he’s fed up after his club was flooded again from an above SRO, and this time, he was shocked at what he found when he tracked the water.https://t.co/aBCyYTgbb6

“There (are) multiple rooms you can’t even go in, the roofs are caving in,” former resident Stewart Holcombe told the broadcaster. But when a camera crew asked to take a closer look at the state of the building, B.C. Housing denied the request, citing privacy concerns.

According to a tally compiled by Vancouver Sun, in its six years as a shelter, Luugat has been the subject of 906 emergency calls, including 334 alarms, 43 fires and 12 incidents identified as “rescue or hazard events.”

Holcombe estimated that the building was “destroyed” within a year-and-a-half after opening, and has remained in that state for a further 4.5 years.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t until November that the province announced the Luugat’s closure, along with two other nearby low-barrier shelters.

And Luugat is only one of an entire constellation of former hotels to have suffered the same fate.

It was one of nine hotels, located in both Victoria and Vancouver, that the Province of B.C. feverishly acquired in the opening months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As with Luugat, all were transformed into low-barrier shelters with no checks on who was coming in or out, and with drug use encouraged on site.

And in every case, the hotel conversions quickly became hubs of fires, floods, civic disorder and even organized crime.

Muncey Place, a former Comfort Inn in Victoria, was purchased by the province for $19.2 million. Just last May, Victoria Police raided the site and found one of the rooms doubling as a drug trafficking headquarters containing one kilogram of fentanyl, $40,000 in cash and a loaded 9 mm pistol.

The Patricia Hotel, purchased for $64.4 million in 2021, was the site of an officer-involved shooting just a year after opening. Police arrived to deal with an erratic man attacking other residents with a stick, and shot him when he charged them with a knife.

In recent years, some of the repurposed hotels also became scandalized by reports that workers were needing to wear respirators to avoid exposure to ever-present fentanyl smoke.

Last summer, B.C. acknowledged the issue by pledging a new plan to “address air-quality issues related to second-hand exposure to fentanyl.”

As per a 2022 B.C. audit, the whole hotel-acquisition project cost $221 million. With the nine hotels comprising 810 rooms in total, B.C. spent an average of $272,839 per room.

And those are just the acquisitions made under COVID. The figure doesn’t include hotel purchases made before and after, including a Vancouver hotel purchased for $14.2 million in 2021 that wasn’t covered by the audit for $221 million.

And it also doesn’t include hotels that the province leased for use by the homeless during the pandemic.

One of which, in a story similar to that of the Luugat, was swiftly damaged to the point of being uninhabitable.

The owners of a Ramada Hotel in Duncan, B.C.. are currently suing B.C. to recoup the costs of gutting the facility after it served just two years as a low-barrier shelter overseen by B.C. Housing.

All the while, B.C. cities are currently reporting a critical shortage of hotel rooms at peak times.

Just last year, hotel developer Stanley Dee said in an interview with Vancouver’s 1130 NewsRadio that he expected the city to encounter an accommodation “gong show” during the city’s hosting of nine games related to the 2026 World Cup.

Stay Free Alberta, the province’s leading booster for Alberta separatism, just submitted their petition to Elections Alberta calling for a secession referendum. Specifically, they want Albertans to answer a ballot reading “do you agree that the Province of Alberta should cease to be a part of Canada to become an independent state?” Stay Free Alberta reports 301,062 signatures total; well past the minimum threshold of 177,732, and about eight per cent of the 3.8 million adults in the province.

The word on the street is that prime minister Mark Carney will be officially naming the next Governor General on Tuesday.

The five-year term of the current GG, Mary Simon, comes to an end in July. And while governors general will occasionally be given a bonus year or two, Simon has already made clear that she’s done.

Although the pending announcement hasn’t gotten much buzz, Carney will effectively be picking his own boss, and thus potentially removing one of the last remaining checks on his power.

Just last month, Carney successfully completed his effort to construct a majority government out of floor-crossers, thus removing the check of having to answer to opposition parties.

And by recommending the next Governor General for King Charles III to appoint, Carney will effectively be responsible for appointing the one person who stands between him and near-total executive power.

No other G7 country does this. Everywhere else, the equivalent of governor general is either a hereditary monarch or an elected president.

But if the pending announcement is uncontroversial, it’s because every other prime minister has done it, and the governor general (whoever they are) doesn’t actually say “no” to the prime minister all that often. The last time was exactly 100 years ago, in fact.

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

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