On Wednesday evening in her Mount Pleasant character home, 77-year-old Helen Hutton opened an email that would upend more than a decade of careful Airbnb hosting in Vancouver.

The message came from B.C.’s short-term rental registry: Hutton’s registration had been cancelled. By Thursday afternoon, her Airbnb listing was deactivated. Seventeen bookings from future guests disappeared in an instant.

“It said my registration number was being used across multiple listings and different addresses across the city,” she told Postmedia News on Friday.

Hutton says her experience exposed flaws in the province’s new short-term rental registry, which lacks safeguards to protect legitimate hosts from fraudulent use of their registration numbers and wrongful suspensions.

For more than a decade, the se

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