What must BC publish about housing target enforcement?
Two things. Section 15 of the Housing Supply Act requires the minister to publish every housing target order, directive and order in council on a government site, and section 16 requires an annual report describing all actions taken under Part 4, published by September 30 in the following fiscal year.
Enforcement under the Housing Supply Act is meant to be visible, and the Act says so twice.
Section 15 requires publication as soon as practicable. The minister must publish housing target orders, directives and orders in council on an authorized internet site, and the municipality that received one must publish it on a municipal site as well.1 So a directive is a public document in two places by design, not something a builder should have to request.
Section 16 goes further. For each fiscal year, the minister must publish an annual report describing all actions taken under Part 4, which is the compliance part of the Act, together with all orders made under section 12. The deadline is September 30 in the following fiscal year.1 The Province's fiscal year ends March 31, so the report covering April 2025 to March 2026 falls due on September 30, 2026.
What is actually published today
The Province maintains three things on its housing targets pages:2
- The housing target orders, grouped by intake, on a page last updated
August 29, 2025.4
- The municipal progress reports, grouped the same way, covering interim
and annual reporting periods for Groups 1 through 4.3 These are the reports municipalities file, not the report the minister owes.
- A news list of announcements, including the July 2025 directives to Oak
Bay and West Vancouver and the April 2026 order on Ambleside.2
That covers section 15 well. Orders and directives have been announced and the municipal reports are indexed and downloadable.
Where the compliance record actually is
Not on the housing targets pages. It is in the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs' Annual Service Plan Report, published each August through the budget process, and it is there in both years we checked.
The 2024/25 report records that "advisors were appointed to two municipalities in the first group that did not demonstrate satisfactory progress toward meeting year 1 targets."5 The 2025/26 report records that "directives were issued to Oak Bay and West Vancouver in July 2025 to support further progress toward meeting their targets" and that "North Saanich was appointed an advisor in January 2026."6
The 2025/26 report also supplies the number that no announcement gives, and it is the one worth having:
Over 34,700 net new homes have been completed across 30 housing target communities in their first year of reporting, with compliance action taken to support three municipalities to improve progress toward meeting their targets.6
Three out of thirty. Twenty-seven municipalities filed a first-year report and drew no action at all.
One qualification, and it is about labelling rather than substance. Neither report cites section 16, neither calls itself the Housing Supply Act annual report, and neither states a statutory basis for the description. So what is true is that the content section 16 requires appears in the Annual Service Plan Report. Whether the Ministry treats that report as its section 16 compliance is not something either document says.
Why it is worth knowing about
If you want to know how far provincial intervention has actually gone, rather than how far it could go, the section 16 report is the document that would tell you, in one place, for a whole year. Announcements tell you about the cases the Province chose to announce. A statutory report describing all actions taken is a different kind of record.
It also bears on whether the power in section 11(1)(b) to direct a municipality to issue or refuse a permit is likely to be used. Every directive publicly reported so far has targeted a bylaw or a plan, and the 2025/26 report shows why that may continue: the Ministry missed its own target for the number of municipalities under housing targets, reporting 40 against a target of 56 to 59, because "a fifth group of municipalities was not considered as compliance action for North Saanich, Oak Bay, and West Vancouver was prioritized."6 Pursuing three municipalities stopped the programme expanding to ten more. That is not a regime with spare capacity for individual permit files.
When the 2026/27 report publishes, this page will be re-checked and the verified date above will move with it.
One question per page. The first sentence is the answer. When a figure changes, the page changes and the verified date moves. All answers.