I don’t usually draw attention to litigation Beedie is involved in, but I have decided to provide insight into what has happened over the past five and a half years in our legal battle with the Vancouver School Board over Kingsgate Mall.
As you may know, the VSB owns the Kingsgate Mall property in Vancouver, and Beedie owns the lease. And I believe it’s important that the public knows the extent of the Vancouver School Board’s mishandling of this asset.
Beedie took over the 99-year lease from another company in 2005. Every ten years, the rent is negotiated or fixed by arbitration based on a predetermined formula. We are currently in our third ten-year renewal period under the lease, and at issue is the amount of rent payable for the current period. (We have five more renewal options taking our lease to 2071.)
When renewing our lease in 2017, we couldn’t come to an agreement with the school board over what the rent should be, so the dispute was sent to a hearing before an arbitration tribunal. In 2022, the tribunal ruled that the annual rent for Kingsgate Mall should increase significantly, from $760,000 a year, to $9.6 million a year.
The $9.6 million annual rent assumed land value based on high density residential. But under the current lease, Beedie is only permitted to use the property for a retail shopping centre.
In our 2022 arbitration proceedings, we argued that issue estoppel applied to the interpretation of the Kingsgate Mall lease. “Issue estoppel” is a legal principle that prevents parties from relitigating issues that have already been definitively resolved in previous court proceedings. This ensures judicial finality, lessens the burden on our court system and gives parties certainty moving forward.
We contended this issue had already been previously arbitrated and decided in 1999 in our favour, and therefore the decision should be the same because the parties, the lease, and the zoning bylaw were all the same. There had been no material change in circumstances.
Based upon that, we appealed the arbitration decision, and in December 2024, it was overturned by the B.C. Supreme Court, directing that our rent for the third renewal period be $1,650,000 per year. In finding in favour of Beedie, Justice Chan said that in her view, the decision of the 2022 arbitration tribunal was “unreasonable and incorrect.” She went on to say that the 2022 arbitration award did not fall within a range of “possible, acceptable outcomes that is justified, transparent, intelligible, and defensible.”
Kingsgate Mall currently generates approximately $4 million in rent annually from subtenants. Clearly paying the VSB $9.6 million a year is commercially unreasonable and an absurd result. But even though we had won the prior court hearings on this matter, the VSB appealed the decision to the B.C. Court of Appeal.
The decision on the appeal was released by the B.C. Court of Appeal today, and once again, it was in favour of Beedie.
You would think I would be thrilled with the outcome, and of course I am. However, it is deeply unfortunate that it required years of costly litigation with the Vancouver School Board to confirm what was obvious and correct. And that is why I feel compelled to speak out.
We reached out to the Vancouver School Board Chair, Victoria Jung, several times requesting to engage in discussions to find an equitable solution. Ultimately, our requests were ignored.
Then, at the end of September 2025 while we waited for a decision in the appeal, Beedie again extended an olive branch and asked if the VSB would agree to engage in mediation to see if a resolution was possible. The offer to mediate was intended to mitigate the potential risk for both parties (as we were both facing substantial risk) and hopefully put this issue to rest, once and for all.
After weeks of delay by the school board, it became clear the VSB was not willing to mediate. However, we kept trying, going so far as to make offers which would have been a huge win for the VSB, and for the students it serves. The school board didn’t even respond to our offers. Instead, the VSB chose to gamble with public funds and wait for a decision.
The VSB has had decades to rezone this property. Our rent would have increased in correlation. But instead of rezoning, the school board chose to spend time in costly litigation.
Not only have they spent millions on their own lawyers, now that the Court of Appeal has ruled in favour of Beedie, the VSB is now also responsible for our costs.
But most importantly, by engaging in endless litigation instead of redeveloping lands surplus to the VSB’s needs, they have missed out on one of the best residential markets in recent Vancouver history and lost an estimated $100 million in property value in the process.
It is important that politicians, elected by their constituents, be held accountable for their decisions. If this one property has been mishandled to such an extent, it begs the question as to how the Vancouver School Board is managing its entire $9.5 billion real estate portfolio. We can only hope it has been better than this.