For local business owner and BIA president Peter Jorgensen, being an entrepreneur is about passion, connection, and community. But New West businesses and their customers need help from politicians if they’re going to survive, he says. 

Owners of small businesses—the people and families behind the local stores, shops, cafés, restaurants, pubs, and services in New Westminster—face a lot of challenges in keeping their doors open. Managing overhead can be especially tough in the era of tariffs, high real estate prices, and economic uncertainty.

Peter Jorgensen co-owns and co-operates Origins Chocolate Bar with his partner Katey Wright, and is also president of the Downtown New Westminster Business Improvement Association (BIA), which represents over 650 owners and businesses. In this short Q&A he talks about one of the lesser-known difficulties facing entrepreneurs: commercial rent.  

Q: There are many challenges facing small business owners in New West and across Metro Vancouver. What is the particular issue with rent?

Rent is a big concern for small businesses like ours. At Origins, we’re halfway through a five-year lease, and our concern is how that negotiation is going to go around rent when the lease is up. 

We have a beautiful shop here, we invested a lot, and we wanted it to be a really beautiful space for the community and to come and hang out. It would be very difficult for us if our landlords decide they just want to get as much money out of us as possible, which in the Wild West of commercial real estate, they can do.

Q: What do you mean by “the Wild West”? 

Residential landlords can’t make a huge rent increase. Here in BC for 2026, for instance, the maximum a residential landlord can increase rent is 2.3 percent in one year. That’s provincial legislation. So if you’re paying say $2000 to rent your home, the maximum it can go up in a year is $46. 

But in commercial property there are no caps, no guardrails. You could be paying $4000 a month and then with a new lease it could get jacked up 10, 20 or 100 percent, which could mean thousands of dollars more per month. Big rent hikes like that can be a business killer.  

Q: So you’re saying you would hope to see some sort of legislation or regulation that would provide assurances or safety for small business owners? 

I think there should be. Just like with residential rent, I think there should be caps to how much a landlord can increase your rent year over year. We see entrepreneurs go out of business because their landlords jack up their lease at the end of their term, and they can't sustain that. It's actually one of the biggest reasons why businesses fold. 

Q: Is there any movement on getting this to change?  

A lot of this relates to the advocacy work that Tasha Henderson and Ruby Campbell of Community First have been doing. Tasha got a resolution passed at the Union of BC Municipalities calling on the province to create a regulation framework limiting commercial rent increases. And about a month ago, Tasha brought out Aaron Binder of the Better Way Alliance, who is doing advocacy work at the federal level to try and support changes for small businesses at municipal, provincial and federal levels. These are changes that are actually going to make a difference for viability and stability. 

We sat down with a bunch of small business owners up at Groove Cat Records and listened to some of the things that Aaron had to say, some of the initiatives that they're looking at. And, you know, there wasn't one of them that I didn’t like.

Q: And putting a cap on commercial rent hikes was one of them? 

Absolutely, and that is a provincial issue. We need to get that conversation happening beyond the city level, because in order to make changes a lot of the levers to pull in that are at that provincial level. So far, with the province, it seems no one wants to have that conversation around commercial rents, and that needs to change. 

There's also been a lot of talk around trying to make it more feasible for more small businesses to purchase their spaces. That would be really, really helpful to balance that out with what's available for lease. If you can own your property, then your overhead is going down year over year, and you're building an asset. But the federal programs that are available right now to purchase spaces, and that relate to the size of commercial spaces, are both obstacles to that. 

Q: I imagine this issue is not just a problem for business owners, but for consumers, affordability-wise, if commercial property owners can raise rents sky-high. 

Well, affordability is the hottest topic of the day, right? Because life is ridiculously expensive. If businesses are going to take on the additional cost of a big rent hike, the cost of that is going to be passed on to their customers. The ability for commercial landlords to jack up their rents without any boundaries on that, that’s not doing anything good for affordability for the average person. So the work that City Council, and Tasha and Ruby in particular, have been doing on this, is really, really vital, not just for businesses, but for everyone.