View Royal Hit 4% of Its Housing Target. Six Months Later, 263%.

In May 2025 the Province published a table showing the Town of View Royal had delivered four net new housing units against a first-year target of 99. Four per cent. It was the worst number in the group.⁶

Six months later View Royal filed its Year 1 report: 260 units. 263% of target. The best result of the ten.³⁵

Nothing had gone wrong in May and nothing was rescued in July. The two numbers measure the same target year, and both are correct. What happened in between is that some buildings finished.

On September 14, 2026, View Royal and nine other BC municipalities must put their Year 2 housing target progress reports to a council vote. We read all ten Year 1 reports, pulled the ten ministerial orders that set the targets, and went through the enforcement record. Three things are worth knowing before the reports land, and one of them is that most of what has been published about these municipalities so far has been measured over too short a period to mean anything.

Where the September 14 date comes from

Ten municipalities hold housing target orders effective August 1, 2024 and running to July 31, 2029: Colwood, the City of Langley, Mission, New Westminster, North Cowichan, North Saanich, Port Coquitlam, Prince George, View Royal and West Kelowna.²

Schedule C of each order sets the reporting clock. Port Coquitlam's reads:

"The City of Port Coquitlam must receive the progress report by resolution within 45 days of the end of the reporting period: … Reporting Period 2: August 1, 2025 – July 31, 2026"²

The orders print the rule but never print a date. Forty-five days after July 31, 2026 is September 14, 2026. The report then goes to the municipal website and to the Minister.¹

Do not fold Surrey or Kelowna into this. They sit in an earlier group running on a July 1 effective date, and their equivalent deadline was August 14.¹²

What the ten actually delivered

Every figure below is from the municipality's own signed report, cross-checked against the target in its ministerial order and against the Province's published summary. All three agree.²³⁵

Read the last two columns against the first three. At the halfway mark the group was at 61% of a full-year target — which, annualised, looks like a miss. It finished at 143%.

The ranking did not survive either. Not one of the ten finished in the position the interim table gave it. View Royal climbed eight places. New Westminster led at six months and finished fourth. Prince George was third and finished seventh. Of the two worst at the halfway mark, one was Port Coquitlam, which stayed near the bottom — and the other was View Royal, which finished first.

Six of the ten delivered more units in the second half-year than the first; three delivered fewer; North Saanich delivered exactly six units in each half. We have one year of data, so we cannot separate lumpiness from seasonality — February-to-July covers the occupancy season and August-to-January does not. Both effects point the same way, and either is enough to make a half-year number useless as a rate.

A six-month completion figure is not a trajectory. It is a count of which buildings happened to finish.

Why the counting rule matters more than it looks

The report form states the method plainly: net new units are "completions (occupancy permits issued) minus demolitions."⁴ Three consequences follow, and they are the reason a municipality's number can swing the way View Royal's did.

Your project counts on the day it is occupied, not the day it is approved. A permit issued in 2025 for a building occupied in 2027 does nothing for the 2026 report. Everything a council can control — rezoning, permitting, staffing — shows up in the numbers two to four years after the council does it. This is the gap between the two ways of measuring a city: we found that Vancouver halved its permit approval time while Calgary's backlog tripled, and none of that movement would show up in a housing target report for years.

Redevelopment scores negative first. Demolitions are subtracted in the period they occur; the replacement units are added years later. A municipality doing infill on occupied land books the loss immediately and the gain much later.

Legalising an existing suite earns nothing. The form is explicit: "Legalizing existing unpermitted secondary suites or other housing types does not count toward completions."⁴ Amnesty programs add housing to the record and nothing to the target.

One filing oddity worth flagging for anyone rebuilding these numbers: West Kelowna — still replacing homes lost in the 2023 McDougall Creek fire, and a useful check on how long a wildfire rebuild actually takes — entered its demolitions as −48 rather than 48. The net it reports, 331, is consistent with subtracting 48 from 379 completions, so the arithmetic is right and the sign is a form-entry artefact.³ We used the reported net.

The part that is easy to miss: the targets are cumulative

Each order sets five annual figures, and each is a cumulative total measured from August 1, 2024 — not a fresh annual quota.² Port Coquitlam's run: Year 1 343, Year 2 724, Year 3 1,161, Year 4 1,673, Year 5 2,279.

This cuts both ways, and it is the single most consequential feature of the scheme.

If you overshoot, the surplus carries. The City of Langley delivered 533 against a Year 1 target of 251, so its Year 2 cumulative target of 541 needed just eight more units across the whole of Year 2.

If you undershoot, the shortfall compounds. Here is what each of the ten needed during Year 2 — the period that ended July 31 — to stand on its cumulative line:

Port Coquitlam's nominal Year 2 increment is 381 units. Because it finished Year 1 short, the number it actually had to deliver was 533 — forty per cent above the increment, and 2.8 times what it produced in Year 1.

Across the eight municipalities sitting below their Year 2 line, the total owed was 1,881 net completions. Surpluses do not pool: each order binds one municipality, so View Royal's extra 56 units do nothing for Port Coquitlam. Netted across all ten the figure is 1,787, but no one is measured that way.

Whether any of them cleared it is precisely what the September 14 reports will say. They are not published yet, and on the evidence above the interim data cannot tell you.

What happens to a municipality that misses

This is the part builders tend to assume is decorative. It is not, and the record now runs long enough to see the whole ladder.

Under s. 6, the Minister may act only where a municipality both missed a target and "has not made satisfactory progress toward meeting" it.¹ The phrase carries the whole scheme and is never defined. It appears four times — ss. 5(b), 6(1)(b), 11(2)(b) and 12(2)(b) — and the definitions section does not touch it. No percentage, no test, no regulation-making power attached to it.¹ What counts as satisfactory is a ministerial judgment.

The observed record, rather than the statute, is the only guide:

Everything at or below 29% has drawn action. Nothing at or above 56% has. The band between is untested, and nothing in the Act says where the line sits.¹⁵⁶⁷⁸

That is not just true of these ten. The Ministry's own Annual Service Plan Report for 2025/26 puts the count across every municipality that had reported at the time at three: "compliance action taken to support three municipalities to improve progress toward meeting their targets."¹³ Oak Bay, West Vancouver and North Saanich are those three. Thirty municipalities had filed. Twenty-seven drew nothing.

What action looks like, in sequence and with dates:

1. The adviser. Under s. 8 an adviser may enter municipal offices and

inspect records, and s. 9 requires staff to assist "without delay."¹ North Saanich's began work January 19, 2026 and reported 19 recommendations on March 31.⁸⁹

1. The directive. Under s. 11 the Minister may require a municipality to

enact or amend a bylaw — or, in the words of s. 11(1)(b), to "issue or refuse to issue a permit."¹ Oak Bay and West Vancouver received directives on July 21, 2025 with a December 31, 2025 deadline. West Vancouver's three included adopting the Ambleside Centre Local Area Plan and increasing density at Park Royal–Taylor Way.⁷

1. The order. West Vancouver met none of the three by the deadline. On

April 7, 2026 the Province issued an order implementing the Ambleside plan itself, and put the other two directives on quarterly reporting running to December 2027.¹⁰

Seventeen months from a missed report to the Province rewriting a municipality's official community plan over its objection.

It is also worth noticing what enforcement costs the Province. The Ministry's performance measure for municipalities under housing targets set a 2025/26 target of 56 to 59; the actual was 40. The report gives the reason without much softening: a fifth group of municipalities "was not considered as compliance action for North Saanich, Oak Bay, and West Vancouver was prioritized."¹³ Pursuing three municipalities was enough to stop the programme expanding to ten more. Whatever else that says, it is not the behaviour of a regime with spare capacity to police individual permits.

Note what s. 11(1)(b) permits, because it is the provision that reaches individual files: the Minister can direct a municipality to issue a permit. Every directive has to be published — s. 15(1)(b) requires the Minister to post it, and s. 15(2) requires the municipality to post it too — and every directive publicly reported so far has been a bylaw, OCP or local-area-plan amendment. None has directed a permit.

We went looking for the fuller record, because s. 16 obliges the Minister to publish an annual report describing every action taken under the compliance part of the Act, by September 30 for the preceding fiscal year.¹ There is no document on the housing targets pages presenting itself as that report. The description is in the Ministry's Annual Service Plan Report instead — the 2024/25 edition records advisers appointed to two first-group municipalities that "did not demonstrate satisfactory progress", and the 2025/26 edition, published August 2026, records the Oak Bay and West Vancouver directives, the North Saanich adviser, and the three-municipality total.¹³ Neither report cites s. 16 or calls itself the Housing Supply Act annual report, so whether the Ministry treats this as discharging the duty is not something either document says. What it does mean is that the compliance record is public, it is in that report, and nothing in it is a permit direction.

What to do with this

If you build in one of the ten. The report going to your council on or before September 14 is a public document, usually on the agenda a week ahead. Where a target is missed, s. 4(2)(c) requires the report to set out "any actions that the specified municipality intends to take toward meeting the housing target within the 2-year period following the report."¹ That list is the municipality committing itself in writing, to the Minister, to a two-year work programme. It is worth reading for whether your file is on it — and worth a submission before the resolution rather than after.

Check that your completions were counted. The count is occupancy permits minus demolitions, assembled by municipal staff from their own systems. If your building was occupied inside the reporting window, it should be in Section 2.

Do not underwrite approval risk on a half-year number. That is the finding here. Anyone who read the May 2025 table as a ranking of which councils were functioning got View Royal, Colwood, West Kelowna and Port Coquitlam wrong.

If you are in North Saanich, the arithmetic is different in kind. Twelve units in Year 1 against a cumulative 128 by Year 2 is not a timing problem, and the Province said so directly: the district "does not have sufficient units in the development pipeline to meet future years' targets."⁸ It is the only one of the ten whose second half-year matched its first.

The next date on this calendar is October 15, 2026. Burnaby, Coquitlam, Richmond, the Township of Langley, Pitt Meadows, Langford, Courtenay, Penticton, Squamish and Vernon hold orders effective September 1, 2025, with their first full-year period closing August 31, 2026 — and the same 45 days to report.¹¹ Burnaby's Year 1 target is 1,536 net new units; Coquitlam's is 972.

Their six-month interim figures will be out well before then. On the evidence of the last cohort, those figures will be worth very little.

We have not spoken to any of the ten municipalities. Every number here comes from a published order, a filed report or a government release, each read directly and listed below. The Year 2 reports were not public at the time of writing; we will publish the results when they are.