The City of Vancouver has some pretty stringent requirements to get a Short-term Rental Licence ($109 a year) . They have an MoU with AirBnB to require that the Licence number is included in the listing. You can see the basis on which someone can get a licence
here.
You can only rent your own home, not anything else you own (those can be leased for 30 days or more, but not short-term). There are requirements for smoke alarms, a fire alarm, and either 45 minute fire seperation or a sprinkler system.
While there were initial problems with non-compliance after the new regualtions were introduced 5 years ago, in the first year 1,600 addresses had enforcement action, and in some cases court proceedings. My mid-2019 73% of short-term rentals were in compliance with the regulations, and 78% by 2020.
Here's the report on the 2020 program (when covid started impacting demand for short term rentals).
The 2021 report (the most recent currently available) showed 1,090 25% fewer short-term rentals, and 510 short-term rentals switched to long term rentals. Obviously covid will have had an impact, as well as the City's licencing system.
The existance of permanent AirBnB units reduces the potential rental market, which is already significantly stretched in many cities. Suggesting 'we should just build more units' is simplistic bs. We already have a rental shortage, and developers are building pretty much to their capacity - they certainly are in Greater Vancouver, and they appear to be in Canada. In the 2000s and the 2010s annual housing starts were 201,000 in each decade. In the past three years of the 2020s, it's been 250,000.
In Greater Vancouver the 2000s saw 15,360 average annual housing starts, the 2010s saw that increase to 21,655 and in the 2020s so far it's been 24,789.
There are tens of thousands approved units across the region that aren't (yet) being built, for a variety of reasons to do with financing, costs, labour shortages, inadequate sales, etc etc, but it's a myth to suggest it's because they're not being approved fast enough - it's because they can't be built faster.
Putting more rental units back into the market for longer term renters can only help the situation - even if it's only a few hundred, or a few thousand. And all of a sudden, there are five new hotels proposed across the city too.