Which Metro Vancouver city takes the longest to issue a building permit?

The honest version of this question has a caveat attached, because most of Metro Vancouver cannot be measured.

Among the municipalities that publish both dates:⁴

North Vancouver City has been slower than Vancouver in every year we can measure, and it is the only one of the three that was slower in 2024 than in 2021.¹ Port Moody is quick in most years; its 2024 spike rests on only 174 permits and should not be read as a trend.³

Why the list is this short

To measure approval time you need two dates on each permit: when the application arrived and when the permit issued. Surrey, New Westminster, Delta and Abbotsford publish only the issue date, so no approval time can be computed for them from public data, by us or by anyone else. Surrey does publish its own rolling average, on a clock that starts later than the application.

Maple Ridge publishes both dates but its median reads three to four days, with a third of records showing exactly one day between application and issue. That pattern looks like a recording convention rather than a planning department, so we left it out rather than report a figure we do not believe.⁴

What the ranking is worth

Treat it as a floor, not a league table. The slowest measurable city is not necessarily the slowest city. It is entirely possible that one of the four that publish nothing is slower than North Vancouver, and nothing in the public record would show it.

That is the more useful takeaway for a builder comparing municipalities: in much of Metro Vancouver, permit speed is not a published fact, and any table that gives every city a number is filling the gaps from somewhere other than open data.