The British Columbia Supreme Court has resolved a long-running dispute over whether a structure on a Surrey property violates a city bylaw that prohibits shipping containers on residential lots.
Judge Geoffrey Gomery’s ruling was posted online Tuesday.
“This matter has been pending for a long time. It needs to be resolved,” the judge said in the decision, handed down in February.
The City of Surrey was seeking a court order directing the structure’s removal. The city first asked the owners, Praveen Kaur Koonar and Jaswinder Singh Koonar, to remove the structure by April 2022. After granting a series of extensions to the deadline for its removal, a petition was filed with the court in November 2023, the sentence says.
A municipal bylaw, the court heard, explicitly states that shipping containers are only permitted in industrial zones, with the exception of residential properties, only in cases where one is “necessary and incidental to ongoing construction and such construction is subject of a current and valid agreement”. construction permit.”
In court, the owners admitted that no construction had taken place on their property, but argued that they should be allowed to keep the structure because it was actually a “storage shed.”
Consequently, the central question Gomery had to answer was whether the structure itself was prohibited by statute.
“The structure we are concerned about is either a shipping container or it is not,” he wrote.
In making his decision, the judge described photographs of the structure.
“It looks like a shipping container. It has text on the side that includes the cautionary statement ‘nine foot six inch tall container.’ It has serial numbers, an indication of its cubic capacity, the weight of goods it can contain, etc., all of this corresponds to the appearance of the object as a transport container,” he wrote.
But he also noted that it has a door and windows, which the Koonars said made it unusable as a shipping container. Furthermore, they argued that it was a warehouse because it was used for storage and not for transporting goods.
Gomery disagreed.
“I think the petition is unsustainable. It would allow any shipping container to be placed on a property and cease to be a shipping container as soon as it was used for purposes other than the immediate shipment of goods and I can’t imagine that would be what the statute intends,” he wrote.
“Underlying the bylaw is the idea that shipping containers, by their appearance, not necessarily their use, are inconsistent with the residential character of homes in Surrey,” Gomery’s decision also said.
The city’s request for an injunction was granted and the owners were given 30 days to comply with the bylaw and remove the structure.
In a transcript of the courtroom exchange following the decision, Gomery explained to the Koonars what exactly the order means.
“The order doesn’t prevent you from having a storage shed, but you can’t have a storage shed that is a shipping container. It will have to be some other type of storage shed,” he said.
The Koonars were also ordered to pay the City of Surrey $1,000 in costs.